It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.
The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.
'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?
Should we get pensioners back into work?
£20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.
Cut the triple lock entirely.
£20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.
NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.
50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).
Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.
Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.
I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
And means test the NHS for the wealthy
Define wealthy.
Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.
As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.
One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.
- 1p on income tax. - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes. - NI for everyone who works. - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death. - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate. - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities. - Freeze thresholds. - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move). - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it. - Abolish the triple lock. - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care. - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses. - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic. - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we. - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)
And so on.
There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS
As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable
I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
I think that many advocating this have no idea what the real costs of the NHS are, and how little most private insurance covers in the UK.
It is perfectly possible to spend £500,000 on a cancer patient. Or more. For even the quite wealthy, that is enough to lose their home. At a time when they may well have lost their job (being unable to work).
One thing I do wonder - if the NHS should send bills (marked paid) to people. To show them the cost of what they use. Spread the word, as it were.
I just about remember the days before the NHS when, on occasion, people would ask the pharmacist (my mother) how much their medicine was going to be. To be fair, in those it wasn't anywhere near as much as it could be now, although of course I then had little idea of the value of money. As an adult I worked in and around the NHS all my life and I really hate the idea of charging people for it's services and I take the same view about education; good quality and free for all. However obviously such services have to be paid for. If it means a couple of pence on income tax so be it. I'm a bit more cautious about an increase in petrol prices; it's OK in the city but out here in the sticks people need to drive to work. The days of small towns and villages where everyone worked in the local mill, down the local mine or in the fields within walking distance are long gone. Council tax, based on house values is another which needs revising and I'm all for a major review with an increase in the number of bands. I'd renationalise public utility companies, especially if their management is as crap as Thames Water. Compensation? Go whistle!
“REPORT: Church attendance among Gen Z has quadrupled in the UK, reversing the trend of declining Christian affiliation.
Gen Zers, many of whom didn’t even grow up in the church, say Christianity is providing them with answers they can’t find anywhere else.
“In 2018, just 4% of 18–24-year-olds said that they attended church at least monthly. Today, says The Quiet Revival, this has risen to 16% with young men increasing from 4% to 21%, and young women from 3 to 12%,” Bible Society reported.”
This is the great hope. There can be no true cultural revival of the West without rediscovering our magnificent religious tradition
It's not necessarily going to be the church you think it is. My daughter and her girlfriend are now regular church attendees, and my daughter had a ticking off from the [female] vicar, when she revolted and rung the Sanctus (?) bell during a service when the hierarchy had decided to do away with them. Apparently she's broken canon law.
It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.
The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.
'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?
Should we get pensioners back into work?
£20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.
Cut the triple lock entirely.
£20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.
NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.
50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).
Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.
Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.
I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
And means test the NHS for the wealthy
Define wealthy.
Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.
As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.
One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.
- 1p on income tax. - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes. - NI for everyone who works. - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death. - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate. - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities. - Freeze thresholds. - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move). - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it. - Abolish the triple lock. - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care. - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses. - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic. - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we. - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)
And so on.
There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS
As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable
I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.
The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
Why are you all so pitifully desperate for nihilistic atheism to triumph?
It is really bizarre. Like you want everyone to share your own Godless unhappiness
On the contrary, many countries where people take their religion most seriously are mired in conflict and both social division and economic crisis, while there is a strong correlation between those that are the least religious and both national happiness and prosperity.
The US used to be a notable exception - relatively religious but prosperous and peaceful. But look where they're heading now, in part driven along by excess religiosity
Au contraire, I think America went wrong when the American left abandoned Christianity and went for woke and culture wars. The right has merely reacted
In other news I have accepted a new job for a British startup at C-Level, I start in September and I'm very excited at the prospect. There are only ~30 people at the company, I'll be the second person in at exec level. I've obviously taken a pretty drastic pay cut to do this from my finance and fintech days but for the first time in ages I'm really looking forwards to going back to work.
I think it will be about 11 months off in total spent with the family, which is the best year I've had since the year my then girlfriend (now wife) and I went travelling together for six months and got married a few months after we got back. If you can afford to take the time off, I'd highly recommend doing a year(ish) long career break and just spending the time with family and not worrying about work stuff. I'm obviously very lucky that I have earned well in my previous roles and that my wife also has a high income so I do recognise that not everyone would be able to do it.
One FBI guy's experience of the 'new' FBI under Trump:
"I recount those events more in sorrow than in anger. I love my country and our Constitution with a fervor that mere language will not allow me to articulate, and it pains me that my profession will no longer entail being their servant. As you know, my wife and I are expecting our first child this summer, and this decision will entail no small degree of hardship for us. But as our organization began to decay, I made a vow that I would comport myself in a manner that would allow me to look my son in the eye as I raised him."
Why are you all so pitifully desperate for nihilistic atheism to triumph?
It is really bizarre. Like you want everyone to share your own Godless unhappiness
On the contrary, many countries where people take their religion most seriously are mired in conflict and both social division and economic crisis, while there is a strong correlation between those that are the least religious and both national happiness and prosperity.
The US used to be a notable exception - relatively religious but prosperous and peaceful. But look where they're heading now, in part driven along by excess religiosity
Au contraire, I think America went wrong when the American left abandoned Christianity and went for woke and culture wars. The right has merely reacted
That really is reinterpreting events to fit your predetermined conclusion. As usual.
In other news I have accepted a new job for a British startup at C-Level, I start in September and I'm very excited at the prospect. There are only ~30 people at the company, I'll be the second person in at exec level. I've obviously taken a pretty drastic pay cut to do this from my finance and fintech days but for the first time in ages I'm really looking forwards to going back to work.
I think it will be about 11 months off in total spent with the family, which is the best year I've had since the year my then girlfriend (now wife) and I went travelling together for six months and got married a few months after we got back. If you can afford to take the time off, I'd highly recommend doing a year(ish) long career break and just spending the time with family and not worrying about work stuff. I'm obviously very lucky that I have earned well in my previous roles and that my wife also has a high income so I do recognise that not everyone would be able to do it.
The very best of luck with the new job. Sounds like a challenge, which is always welcome.
It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.
The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.
'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?
Should we get pensioners back into work?
£20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.
Cut the triple lock entirely.
£20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.
NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.
50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).
Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.
Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.
I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
And means test the NHS for the wealthy
Define wealthy.
Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.
As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.
One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.
- 1p on income tax. - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes. - NI for everyone who works. - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death. - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate. - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities. - Freeze thresholds. - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move). - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it. - Abolish the triple lock. - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care. - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses. - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic. - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we. - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)
And so on.
There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS
As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable
I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.
The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
Well indeed, though I'm not sure how much effect it would have. Insurance doesn't really cover the chronic diseases and conditions that use so much NHS resource. Again it's how we answer that 80/20 question. 20% of people are taking up 80% of NHS resources, how do we reduce that number so that they become less frequent healthcare consumers. Are there gains we can get from the 80% that use 20% of resource? Probably, but I'd suggest we optimise the other part first as there will be a lot of low hanging fruit in process automation and preventative care.
It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.
The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.
'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?
Should we get pensioners back into work?
£20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.
Cut the triple lock entirely.
£20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.
NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.
50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).
Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.
Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.
I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
And means test the NHS for the wealthy
Define wealthy.
Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.
As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.
One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.
- 1p on income tax. - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes. - NI for everyone who works. - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death. - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate. - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities. - Freeze thresholds. - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move). - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it. - Abolish the triple lock. - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care. - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses. - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic. - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we. - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)
And so on.
There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS
As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable
I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.
The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
Generally the choke point is the same pool of consultants and specialists that you have to see, before (and often during) getting private treatment that also give a proportion of their time to the NHS, with the private patients essentially paying to jump the queue. If there was incentive for a significant batch of people to switch to private, either private waiting times would increase dramatically, or consultants would do more private work and less NHS, making the NHS position worse.
The governments approach of using the over capacity in the private sector to deal with the NHS backlog is the more sensible one. Continuing what the Tories were doing before.
In other news I have accepted a new job for a British startup at C-Level, I start in September and I'm very excited at the prospect. There are only ~30 people at the company, I'll be the second person in at exec level. I've obviously taken a pretty drastic pay cut to do this from my finance and fintech days but for the first time in ages I'm really looking forwards to going back to work.
I think it will be about 11 months off in total spent with the family, which is the best year I've had since the year my then girlfriend (now wife) and I went travelling together for six months and got married a few months after we got back. If you can afford to take the time off, I'd highly recommend doing a year(ish) long career break and just spending the time with family and not worrying about work stuff. I'm obviously very lucky that I have earned well in my previous roles and that my wife also has a high income so I do recognise that not everyone would be able to do it.
It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.
The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.
'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?
Should we get pensioners back into work?
£20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.
Cut the triple lock entirely.
£20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.
NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.
50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).
Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.
Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.
I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
And means test the NHS for the wealthy
Define wealthy.
Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.
As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.
One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.
- 1p on income tax. - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes. - NI for everyone who works. - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death. - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate. - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities. - Freeze thresholds. - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move). - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it. - Abolish the triple lock. - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care. - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses. - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic. - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we. - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)
And so on.
There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS
As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable
I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.
The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
Well indeed, though I'm not sure how much effect it would have. Insurance doesn't really cover the chronic diseases and conditions that use so much NHS resource. Again it's how we answer that 80/20 question. 20% of people are taking up 80% of NHS resources, how do we reduce that number so that they become less frequent healthcare consumers. Are there gains we can get from the 80% that use 20% of resource? Probably, but I'd suggest we optimise the other part first as there will be a lot of low hanging fruit in process automation and preventative care.
Research into chronic diseases helps, but a lot of conditions are associated with ageing, and there doesn't seem much one can do about that! In my own case, if I'd carried on smoking, which I gave up on becoming a father, I might well be dead now and the costs of keeping me alive consequently reduced.
Last thread was a hoot, cannot wait to hear more from "THE FALCON" when he awakens from his stupour.
And verily, See that His Sublime Grace LEONDAMUS, Lord Paramount of Camden, Warden of the Primrose Hill Borders, Commander of the Mighty Herd, He Who Rides The Unbridled Thunder, Surveyor of the PB Wastes and Whisperer to Kings, the Master known as Al-Saqr to the Desert Arabs, as Shahin to the Dusky Persians, and as THE FALCON to us all…
is awake. And maybe having a coffee
If you need a sidekick, I'm always happy to play The Tit
You do yourself down. Try calling yourself "The Merlin". Our smallest hawk. But damn it, good enough to power the Spitfire...
Also the Bolton Paul Defiant; armament pointing backwards, disastrous in the daytime once the enemy knew what was up and reduced to lurking in the night hoping to bag a prize. And a load of useless to mediocre Faireys.
Merlin engines also powered America's best fighter, the Mustang, which gave the allies aerial superiority then supremacy over Europe. The Mustang's original engines had been no good but the Merlin fixed that. One of the key features of the war was allied cooperation and cross-fertilisation in arms development and manufacture. The axis powers never had that.
The Allison V-1710 was actually more powerful than the Merlin. Up to 15,000 feet Mustangs equipped with it were actually a bit faster.
Above 15k, the issue was the supercharger. The design of the Mustang hadn’t included a turbocharger, mostly for cost/simplicity reasons. The USAF preferred turbochargers for high altitude work.
So the Alison was left with a single stage supercharger in the Mustang. Hence the change to the Merlin with a two stage supercharger.
IIRC the RAF used Alison engines Mustangs until the end of the war, for low level ground attack.
The engineering development of performance piston engines during WWII, with the available technology of the 40s, was actually pretty amazing.
Combined with the fuel. By the end of the war, fuel had become so specialised that it was very difficult for the Germans to run captured aircraft on their fuel. The Allies had less problems, but still couldn’t run German aircraft at full power for all but the briefest times.
The 150 octane (and higher) were witches brews that only vaguely resembled “petrol”.
I used to consider jet engines as incredibly complex. And they are. But in WW2, they were actually simpler in many ways than the contemporary piston engines. Take the Rolls Royce Crecy - and incredibly complex and promising two-strike engine that started development in 1941, and which was cancelled in 1946 without being flown.
Note the turbocharged version featured a half scale version of Whittle's jet engine.
Building 3-4000hp piston engines at useful weights is an incredibly expensive development process. With a high rate of failure.
The moment the piston engine died was when Rolls engineers realised that the prototype Whittle engine was already putting out more hp/lb than the latest Merlin.
The US racing specifies piston engines. And they're still using Merlins.
And a few Griffons.
But no R-4360 or Sabres - which would be an insane cost to run.
Anyway this week there will be the first part of Sir Wyn Williams Post Office Report - on the impact on SPMs and compensation.
It will (likely) say that the human impact was awful and made worse by the conduct of the PO and others over many years. Compensation is due, is too slow and the government needs to get a move on because the current situation is disgraceful. 350 of the ca. 900 SPMs affected have died without getting compensation and the return of the money fraudulently taken from them.
The government will welcome the report, say how terrible it all is and then continue doing the square root of fuck all.
This is how all governments since at least Aberfan have operated. Potemkin justice.
What I find fascinating is the systemic resistance.
A government with a substantial majority and the support of the opposition parties had to pass a reverse bill of attainder, declaring the SPOs innocent. Because the judicial system wouldn't.
Arbitrary justice. But on the side of innocence.
Doesn't that disturb people?
The whole thing is disturbing, not least the repeated dragging of heels in righting the wrongs when the wrongs are acknowledged.
On your specific point, I think one of the issues there is that the courts are forbidden by statute law to doubt the fidelity of computer evidence, and so they would not be able to quash convictions that were made on that basis. And, of course, Parliament presumably doesn't want to open the can of worms that would ensue by repealing that law (unless I missed its repeal).
It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.
The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.
'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?
Should we get pensioners back into work?
£20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.
Cut the triple lock entirely.
£20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.
NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.
50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).
Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.
Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.
I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
And means test the NHS for the wealthy
Define wealthy.
Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.
As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.
One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.
- 1p on income tax. - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes. - NI for everyone who works. - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death. - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate. - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities. - Freeze thresholds. - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move). - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it. - Abolish the triple lock. - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care. - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses. - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic. - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we. - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)
And so on.
There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS
As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable
I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.
The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
Generally the choke point is the same pool of consultants and specialists that you have to see, before (and often during) getting private treatment that also give a proportion of their time to the NHS, with the private patients essentially paying to jump the queue. If there was incentive for a significant batch of people to switch to private, either private waiting times would increase dramatically, or consultants would do more private work and less NHS, making the NHS position worse.
The governments approach of using the over capacity in the private sector to deal with the NHS backlog is the more sensible one. Continuing what the Tories were doing before.
The absurd rationing of testing continues.
I know more and more people who pay private facilities to get MRIs etc. XRays seem to be easier in the NHS system.
It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.
The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.
'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?
Should we get pensioners back into work?
£20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.
Cut the triple lock entirely.
£20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.
NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.
50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).
Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.
Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.
I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
And means test the NHS for the wealthy
Define wealthy.
Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.
As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.
One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.
- 1p on income tax. - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes. - NI for everyone who works. - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death. - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate. - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities. - Freeze thresholds. - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move). - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it. - Abolish the triple lock. - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care. - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses. - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic. - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we. - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)
And so on.
There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS
As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable
I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.
The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
Generally the choke point is the same pool of consultants and specialists that you have to see, before (and often during) getting private treatment that also give a proportion of their time to the NHS, with the private patients essentially paying to jump the queue. If there was incentive for a significant batch of people to switch to private, either private waiting times would increase dramatically, or consultants would do more private work and less NHS, making the NHS position worse.
The governments approach of using the over capacity in the private sector to deal with the NHS backlog is the more sensible one. Continuing what the Tories were doing before.
Decades ago my wife saw a gynaecologist privately but the same gynaecologist operated on her under the NHS
Similarly I had the same experience with a bilateral hernia
Why are you all so pitifully desperate for nihilistic atheism to triumph?
It is really bizarre. Like you want everyone to share your own Godless unhappiness
On the contrary, many countries where people take their religion most seriously are mired in conflict and both social division and economic crisis, while there is a strong correlation between those that are the least religious and both national happiness and prosperity.
The US used to be a notable exception - relatively religious but prosperous and peaceful. But look where they're heading now, in part driven along by excess religiosity
Au contraire, I think America went wrong when the American left abandoned Christianity and went for woke and culture wars. The right has merely reacted
That really is reinterpreting events to fit your predetermined conclusion. As usual.
Leon is saying that billion dollar corruption, and assault on both constitution and rule of law are because the Democrats were too woke ?
It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.
The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.
'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?
Should we get pensioners back into work?
£20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.
Cut the triple lock entirely.
£20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.
NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.
50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).
Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.
Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.
I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
And means test the NHS for the wealthy
Define wealthy.
Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.
As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.
One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.
- 1p on income tax. - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes. - NI for everyone who works. - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death. - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate. - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities. - Freeze thresholds. - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move). - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it. - Abolish the triple lock. - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care. - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses. - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic. - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we. - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)
And so on.
There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS
As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable
I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.
The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
Generally the choke point is the same pool of consultants and specialists that you have to see, before (and often during) getting private treatment that also give a proportion of their time to the NHS, with the private patients essentially paying to jump the queue. If there was incentive for a significant batch of people to switch to private, either private waiting times would increase dramatically, or consultants would do more private work and less NHS, making the NHS position worse.
The governments approach of using the over capacity in the private sector to deal with the NHS backlog is the more sensible one. Continuing what the Tories were doing before.
Decades ago my wife saw a gynaecologist privately but the same gynaecologist operated on her under the NHS
Similarly I had the same experience with a bilateral hernia
And that was the stupidity with Reform's private health proposals. Private health consultants are NHS consultants doing extra work for more money.
It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.
The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.
'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?
Should we get pensioners back into work?
£20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.
Cut the triple lock entirely.
£20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.
NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.
50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).
Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.
Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.
I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
And means test the NHS for the wealthy
Define wealthy.
Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.
As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.
One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.
- 1p on income tax. - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes. - NI for everyone who works. - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death. - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate. - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities. - Freeze thresholds. - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move). - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it. - Abolish the triple lock. - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care. - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses. - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic. - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we. - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)
And so on.
There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS
As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable
I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.
The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
Generally the choke point is the same pool of consultants and specialists that you have to see, before (and often during) getting private treatment that also give a proportion of their time to the NHS, with the private patients essentially paying to jump the queue. If there was incentive for a significant batch of people to switch to private, either private waiting times would increase dramatically, or consultants would do more private work and less NHS, making the NHS position worse.
The governments approach of using the over capacity in the private sector to deal with the NHS backlog is the more sensible one. Continuing what the Tories were doing before.
The absurd rationing of testing continues.
I know more and more people who pay private facilities to get MRIs etc. XRays seem to be easier in the NHS system.
Early detection of problems is cheaper.
My daughter paid for a private CT scan 4 months ago as Wales NHS wait time was too long
He'll likely do the same again next month. I think he just enjoys the exercise of arbitrary power; there's no real strategy (or sensible way to negotiate with him).
It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.
The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.
'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?
Should we get pensioners back into work?
£20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.
Cut the triple lock entirely.
£20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.
NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.
50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).
Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.
Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.
I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
And means test the NHS for the wealthy
Define wealthy.
Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.
As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.
One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.
- 1p on income tax. - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes. - NI for everyone who works. - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death. - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate. - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities. - Freeze thresholds. - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move). - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it. - Abolish the triple lock. - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care. - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses. - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic. - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we. - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)
And so on.
There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS
As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable
I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.
The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
Well indeed, though I'm not sure how much effect it would have. Insurance doesn't really cover the chronic diseases and conditions that use so much NHS resource. Again it's how we answer that 80/20 question. 20% of people are taking up 80% of NHS resources, how do we reduce that number so that they become less frequent healthcare consumers. Are there gains we can get from the 80% that use 20% of resource? Probably, but I'd suggest we optimise the other part first as there will be a lot of low hanging fruit in process automation and preventative care.
Research into chronic diseases helps, but a lot of conditions are associated with ageing, and there doesn't seem much one can do about that! In my own case, if I'd carried on smoking, which I gave up on becoming a father, I might well be dead now and the costs of keeping me alive consequently reduced.
And that's what I mean by investing in reducing the resource demand from that 20% if people. There's plenty of preventative care we can do (knee and other joint scans during people's 60s/70s when operations are more likely to succeed rather than 10 years in a wheelchair after a blowout for someone in their 80s who can't be operated on, for example) and home automation, robot assistance to reduce the amount of home care older people require from healthcare professionals.
I don't really think there's much choice, there needs to be a way of reducing demand because it is currently an open ended unlimited demand if we continue as we currently are.
Why are you all so pitifully desperate for nihilistic atheism to triumph?
It is really bizarre. Like you want everyone to share your own Godless unhappiness
On the contrary, many countries where people take their religion most seriously are mired in conflict and both social division and economic crisis, while there is a strong correlation between those that are the least religious and both national happiness and prosperity.
The US used to be a notable exception - relatively religious but prosperous and peaceful. But look where they're heading now, in part driven along by excess religiosity
If you're right then it was a big mistake for us to import the US woke religion.
What is it like “going to work”? What is this whole “going to work” thingy?
I will now never experience it. Oh well
With your addictive personality, you could get into gambling? That might take you down a path that ends with getting a proper job.
You’re lucky, of course, to have avoided it, but it does make your life experience and your anecdotes, and hence your judgement, way off when it comes to relating to politics and the experience of the voting masses.
Why are you all so pitifully desperate for nihilistic atheism to triumph?
It is really bizarre. Like you want everyone to share your own Godless unhappiness
On the contrary, many countries where people take their religion most seriously are mired in conflict and both social division and economic crisis, while there is a strong correlation between those that are the least religious and both national happiness and prosperity.
The US used to be a notable exception - relatively religious but prosperous and peaceful. But look where they're heading now, in part driven along by excess religiosity
If you're right then it was a big mistake for us to import the US woke religion.
Nah, we're importing the US religions of racism, sexism and intolerance.
Russian billionaire Strukov detained by FSB trying to flee Russia on private jet.
FSB detained Konstantin Strukov, head of gold giant Yuzhuralzoloto (largest privately-held gold mining company in Russia) and deputy of the Chelyabinsk regional parliament, while he attempted to flee Russia to Turkey. https://x.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1941611733535293540
It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.
The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.
'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?
Should we get pensioners back into work?
£20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.
Cut the triple lock entirely.
£20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.
NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.
50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).
Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.
Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.
I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
And means test the NHS for the wealthy
Define wealthy.
Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.
As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.
One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.
- 1p on income tax. - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes. - NI for everyone who works. - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death. - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate. - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities. - Freeze thresholds. - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move). - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it. - Abolish the triple lock. - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care. - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses. - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic. - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we. - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)
And so on.
There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS
As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable
I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.
The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
Generally the choke point is the same pool of consultants and specialists that you have to see, before (and often during) getting private treatment that also give a proportion of their time to the NHS, with the private patients essentially paying to jump the queue. If there was incentive for a significant batch of people to switch to private, either private waiting times would increase dramatically, or consultants would do more private work and less NHS, making the NHS position worse.
The governments approach of using the over capacity in the private sector to deal with the NHS backlog is the more sensible one. Continuing what the Tories were doing before.
The absurd rationing of testing continues.
I know more and more people who pay private facilities to get MRIs etc. XRays seem to be easier in the NHS system.
Early detection of problems is cheaper.
Indeed, my dad just had this issue (hence my suggestion in the previous comment). He has had a knee problem for about 15 years, it's suddenly got a lot worse so he went to see the doctor. Long story short, after about 6 months of hearing nothing back from the NHS on getting a scan he went private and got a scan done - they said his right knee is basically completely deteriorated and he needs surgery.
He wanted to make sure that this was necessary so he arranged finally got an appointment with the NHS specialist a few months down the road who looked at the scan and said words to the effect of "we wouldn't recommend surgery at this stage because the degradation doesn't meet our requirements for it, basically you can still walk around for up to a mile or so before it starts really hurting". He then asked if he could go private would that advice change and the specialist said "yes, get this done ASAP because it will seriously improve your life quality and in 10 years when this gets to the point where the NHS will consider it degraded enough to operate you may not be eligible due to age and poor likelihood of recovery". It's a completely mental situation. They're knowingly saying no/delaying huge life improving surgery to people knowing that 10 years down the road it will cause huge issues for these people, well at least for those people who can't afford to go private.
This is the kind of stuff that I really think is low hanging fruit for the NHS, cheap preventative care today reduces our future liability by huge amounts and that's where I would be looking for gains. They may not show immediately but in 2-3 years there would be a noticeable drop in resource demand.
It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.
The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.
'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?
Should we get pensioners back into work?
£20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.
Cut the triple lock entirely.
£20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.
NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.
50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).
Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.
Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.
I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
And means test the NHS for the wealthy
Define wealthy.
Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.
As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.
One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.
- 1p on income tax. - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes. - NI for everyone who works. - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death. - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate. - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities. - Freeze thresholds. - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move). - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it. - Abolish the triple lock. - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care. - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses. - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic. - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we. - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)
And so on.
There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS
As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable
I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.
The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
Well indeed, though I'm not sure how much effect it would have. Insurance doesn't really cover the chronic diseases and conditions that use so much NHS resource. Again it's how we answer that 80/20 question. 20% of people are taking up 80% of NHS resources, how do we reduce that number so that they become less frequent healthcare consumers. Are there gains we can get from the 80% that use 20% of resource? Probably, but I'd suggest we optimise the other part first as there will be a lot of low hanging fruit in process automation and preventative care.
Research into chronic diseases helps, but a lot of conditions are associated with ageing, and there doesn't seem much one can do about that! In my own case, if I'd carried on smoking, which I gave up on becoming a father, I might well be dead now and the costs of keeping me alive consequently reduced.
The shift from smoking to vaping may have some unintended consequences in that line. I've never had a single puff in my life, yet since the people upstairs changed from cigarettes to vape a few years ago, the secondary vaping has destroyed my senses of smell and taste and is gradually working its way into my lungs. Better for their healths but not for mine. Heyho.
It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.
The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.
'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?
Should we get pensioners back into work?
£20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.
Cut the triple lock entirely.
£20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.
NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.
50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).
Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.
Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.
I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
And means test the NHS for the wealthy
Define wealthy.
Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.
As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.
One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.
- 1p on income tax. - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes. - NI for everyone who works. - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death. - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate. - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities. - Freeze thresholds. - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move). - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it. - Abolish the triple lock. - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care. - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses. - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic. - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we. - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)
And so on.
There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS
As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable
I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.
The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
Generally the choke point is the same pool of consultants and specialists that you have to see, before (and often during) getting private treatment that also give a proportion of their time to the NHS, with the private patients essentially paying to jump the queue. If there was incentive for a significant batch of people to switch to private, either private waiting times would increase dramatically, or consultants would do more private work and less NHS, making the NHS position worse.
The governments approach of using the over capacity in the private sector to deal with the NHS backlog is the more sensible one. Continuing what the Tories were doing before.
The absurd rationing of testing continues.
I know more and more people who pay private facilities to get MRIs etc. XRays seem to be easier in the NHS system.
Early detection of problems is cheaper.
My daughter paid for a private CT scan 4 months ago as Wales NHS wait time was too long
There are more and more facilities for scanning and testing, run by non-NHS staff. Having used them, they are quite cheap and run on maximising throughput.
Why are you all so pitifully desperate for nihilistic atheism to triumph?
It is really bizarre. Like you want everyone to share your own Godless unhappiness
On the contrary, many countries where people take their religion most seriously are mired in conflict and both social division and economic crisis, while there is a strong correlation between those that are the least religious and both national happiness and prosperity.
The US used to be a notable exception - relatively religious but prosperous and peaceful. But look where they're heading now, in part driven along by excess religiosity
If you're right then it was a big mistake for us to import the US woke religion.
Nah, we're importing the US religions of racism, sexism and intolerance.
None of which really constitute a belief system in the same way that wokeness does.
Why are you all so pitifully desperate for nihilistic atheism to triumph?
It is really bizarre. Like you want everyone to share your own Godless unhappiness
On the contrary, many countries where people take their religion most seriously are mired in conflict and both social division and economic crisis, while there is a strong correlation between those that are the least religious and both national happiness and prosperity.
The US used to be a notable exception - relatively religious but prosperous and peaceful. But look where they're heading now, in part driven along by excess religiosity
If you're right then it was a big mistake for us to import the US woke religion.
Nah, we're importing the US religions of racism, sexism and intolerance.
None of which really constitute a belief system in the same way that wokeness does.
I’m not sure aspiring to be Leon’s mini-me is going to get you very far. There’s really only space for one twat in the village.
Why are you all so pitifully desperate for nihilistic atheism to triumph?
It is really bizarre. Like you want everyone to share your own Godless unhappiness
On the contrary, many countries where people take their religion most seriously are mired in conflict and both social division and economic crisis, while there is a strong correlation between those that are the least religious and both national happiness and prosperity.
The US used to be a notable exception - relatively religious but prosperous and peaceful. But look where they're heading now, in part driven along by excess religiosity
If you're right then it was a big mistake for us to import the US woke religion.
Nah, we're importing the US religions of racism, sexism and intolerance.
None of which really constitute a belief system in the same way that wokeness does.
I assume Fox and Friends is unavailable in St Petersburg.
It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.
The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.
'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?
Should we get pensioners back into work?
£20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.
Cut the triple lock entirely.
£20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.
NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.
50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).
Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.
Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.
I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
And means test the NHS for the wealthy
Define wealthy.
Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.
As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.
One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.
- 1p on income tax. - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes. - NI for everyone who works. - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death. - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate. - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities. - Freeze thresholds. - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move). - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it. - Abolish the triple lock. - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care. - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses. - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic. - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we. - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)
And so on.
There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS
As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable
I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.
The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
Generally the choke point is the same pool of consultants and specialists that you have to see, before (and often during) getting private treatment that also give a proportion of their time to the NHS, with the private patients essentially paying to jump the queue. If there was incentive for a significant batch of people to switch to private, either private waiting times would increase dramatically, or consultants would do more private work and less NHS, making the NHS position worse.
The governments approach of using the over capacity in the private sector to deal with the NHS backlog is the more sensible one. Continuing what the Tories were doing before.
The absurd rationing of testing continues.
I know more and more people who pay private facilities to get MRIs etc. XRays seem to be easier in the NHS system.
Early detection of problems is cheaper.
Indeed, my dad just had this issue (hence my suggestion in the previous comment). He has had a knee problem for about 15 years, it's suddenly got a lot worse so he went to see the doctor. Long story short, after about 6 months of hearing nothing back from the NHS on getting a scan he went private and got a scan done - they said his right knee is basically completely deteriorated and he needs surgery.
He wanted to make sure that this was necessary so he arranged finally got an appointment with the NHS specialist a few months down the road who looked at the scan and said words to the effect of "we wouldn't recommend surgery at this stage because the degradation doesn't meet our requirements for it, basically you can still walk around for up to a mile or so before it starts really hurting". He then asked if he could go private would that advice change and the specialist said "yes, get this done ASAP because it will seriously improve your life quality and in 10 years when this gets to the point where the NHS will consider it degraded enough to operate you may not be eligible due to age and poor likelihood of recovery". It's a completely mental situation. They're knowingly saying no/delaying huge life improving surgery to people knowing that 10 years down the road it will cause huge issues for these people, well at least for those people who can't afford to go private.
This is the kind of stuff that I really think is low hanging fruit for the NHS, cheap preventative care today reduces our future liability by huge amounts and that's where I would be looking for gains. They may not show immediately but in 2-3 years there would be a noticeable drop in resource demand.
Very often such rules were set years ago - knee replacement used to be expensive, major ops with high risk of problems. Now, not so much.
Even MRIs are treated as if them cost zillions and require using the ziggurat on R'lyeh.
The younger you are for an op, the better.
And imagine the probable outcome of lower mobility - increasing weight and less exercise. What could that possibly lead to?
Here is the picture of the Canadian and American flags I promised you: (My apologies for the quality; on the 1st, the breezes kept tossing the flags around, and on the 4th, I had to get to the festivities.
Here is the picture of the Canadian and American flags I promised you: (My apologies for the quality; on the 1st, the breezes kept tossing the flags around, and on the 4th, I had to get to the festivities.
Nice to see, but just one person pissing in the wind when set against the hate that US policy has unleashed between two previously very friendly neighbours.
It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.
The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.
'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?
Should we get pensioners back into work?
£20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.
Cut the triple lock entirely.
£20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.
NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.
50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).
Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.
Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.
I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
And means test the NHS for the wealthy
Define wealthy.
Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.
As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.
One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.
- 1p on income tax. - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes. - NI for everyone who works. - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death. - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate. - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities. - Freeze thresholds. - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move). - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it. - Abolish the triple lock. - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care. - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses. - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic. - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we. - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)
And so on.
There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS
As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable
I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.
The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
Generally the choke point is the same pool of consultants and specialists that you have to see, before (and often during) getting private treatment that also give a proportion of their time to the NHS, with the private patients essentially paying to jump the queue. If there was incentive for a significant batch of people to switch to private, either private waiting times would increase dramatically, or consultants would do more private work and less NHS, making the NHS position worse.
The governments approach of using the over capacity in the private sector to deal with the NHS backlog is the more sensible one. Continuing what the Tories were doing before.
The absurd rationing of testing continues.
I know more and more people who pay private facilities to get MRIs etc. XRays seem to be easier in the NHS system.
Early detection of problems is cheaper.
Indeed, my dad just had this issue (hence my suggestion in the previous comment). He has had a knee problem for about 15 years, it's suddenly got a lot worse so he went to see the doctor. Long story short, after about 6 months of hearing nothing back from the NHS on getting a scan he went private and got a scan done - they said his right knee is basically completely deteriorated and he needs surgery.
He wanted to make sure that this was necessary so he arranged finally got an appointment with the NHS specialist a few months down the road who looked at the scan and said words to the effect of "we wouldn't recommend surgery at this stage because the degradation doesn't meet our requirements for it, basically you can still walk around for up to a mile or so before it starts really hurting". He then asked if he could go private would that advice change and the specialist said "yes, get this done ASAP because it will seriously improve your life quality and in 10 years when this gets to the point where the NHS will consider it degraded enough to operate you may not be eligible due to age and poor likelihood of recovery". It's a completely mental situation. They're knowingly saying no/delaying huge life improving surgery to people knowing that 10 years down the road it will cause huge issues for these people, well at least for those people who can't afford to go private.
This is the kind of stuff that I really think is low hanging fruit for the NHS, cheap preventative care today reduces our future liability by huge amounts and that's where I would be looking for gains. They may not show immediately but in 2-3 years there would be a noticeable drop in resource demand.
Very often such rules were set years ago - knee replacement used to be expensive, major ops with high risk of problems. Now, not so much.
Even MRIs are treated as if them cost zillions and require using the ziggurat on R'lyeh.
The younger you are for an op, the better.
And imagine the probable outcome of lower mobility - increasing weight and less exercise. What could that possibly lead to?
It's one of those bits where we really should be asking WTF are you rationing this.
And I know knee operations are not without risk - my mum had one and it went perfectly fine until one day 7 weeks later it wasn't but as you say it's £x spent now to avoid spending £x+y later..
It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.
The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.
'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?
Should we get pensioners back into work?
£20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.
Cut the triple lock entirely.
£20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.
NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.
50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).
Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.
Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.
I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
And means test the NHS for the wealthy
Define wealthy.
Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.
As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.
One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.
- 1p on income tax. - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes. - NI for everyone who works. - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death. - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate. - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities. - Freeze thresholds. - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move). - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it. - Abolish the triple lock. - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care. - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses. - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic. - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we. - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)
And so on.
There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS
As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable
I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.
The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
Generally the choke point is the same pool of consultants and specialists that you have to see, before (and often during) getting private treatment that also give a proportion of their time to the NHS, with the private patients essentially paying to jump the queue. If there was incentive for a significant batch of people to switch to private, either private waiting times would increase dramatically, or consultants would do more private work and less NHS, making the NHS position worse.
The governments approach of using the over capacity in the private sector to deal with the NHS backlog is the more sensible one. Continuing what the Tories were doing before.
The absurd rationing of testing continues.
I know more and more people who pay private facilities to get MRIs etc. XRays seem to be easier in the NHS system.
Early detection of problems is cheaper.
Indeed, my dad just had this issue (hence my suggestion in the previous comment). He has had a knee problem for about 15 years, it's suddenly got a lot worse so he went to see the doctor. Long story short, after about 6 months of hearing nothing back from the NHS on getting a scan he went private and got a scan done - they said his right knee is basically completely deteriorated and he needs surgery.
He wanted to make sure that this was necessary so he arranged finally got an appointment with the NHS specialist a few months down the road who looked at the scan and said words to the effect of "we wouldn't recommend surgery at this stage because the degradation doesn't meet our requirements for it, basically you can still walk around for up to a mile or so before it starts really hurting". He then asked if he could go private would that advice change and the specialist said "yes, get this done ASAP because it will seriously improve your life quality and in 10 years when this gets to the point where the NHS will consider it degraded enough to operate you may not be eligible due to age and poor likelihood of recovery". It's a completely mental situation. They're knowingly saying no/delaying huge life improving surgery to people knowing that 10 years down the road it will cause huge issues for these people, well at least for those people who can't afford to go private.
This is the kind of stuff that I really think is low hanging fruit for the NHS, cheap preventative care today reduces our future liability by huge amounts and that's where I would be looking for gains. They may not show immediately but in 2-3 years there would be a noticeable drop in resource demand.
Our youngest had an ingrown toenail a couple of years ago. After going through the initial stages of treatment with our NHS GP (which consisted understandably of “give it a couple of weeks to see if it sorts itself out”) the GP referred him to get it looked at by a specialist. By the time the letter from the specialist dept had arrived to tell us we had been booked for an initial appointment another four months later we had already given up on the NHS & taken him to a private specialist who had diagnosed it as needing surgery & carried that surgery out that week - removing an impressively large chunk of toenail that had grown off sideways into the depths of his big toe in the process!
The specialist said the likely time from initial diagnostic appointment to actual surgery on the NHS was between 9-12 months in his experience.
The NHS is just broken for ordinary people it seems. If you fit into one of the “pathways” (cancer, stroke, heart disease) then you get treated in a timely fashion (most of the time), but those are mostly the diseases of old people. For the young, the NHS is a failure that pretends to treat them & then keeps them dangling with the hope of treatment that might manifest itself sometime, maybe.
We need to get back to the idea that the NHS sees getting working age people back into work as quickly as reasonably possible a priority.
It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.
The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.
'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?
Should we get pensioners back into work?
£20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.
Cut the triple lock entirely.
£20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.
NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.
50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).
Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.
Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.
I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
And means test the NHS for the wealthy
Define wealthy.
Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.
As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.
One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.
- 1p on income tax. - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes. - NI for everyone who works. - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death. - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate. - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities. - Freeze thresholds. - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move). - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it. - Abolish the triple lock. - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care. - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses. - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic. - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we. - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)
And so on.
There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS
As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable
I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.
The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
Generally the choke point is the same pool of consultants and specialists that you have to see, before (and often during) getting private treatment that also give a proportion of their time to the NHS, with the private patients essentially paying to jump the queue. If there was incentive for a significant batch of people to switch to private, either private waiting times would increase dramatically, or consultants would do more private work and less NHS, making the NHS position worse.
The governments approach of using the over capacity in the private sector to deal with the NHS backlog is the more sensible one. Continuing what the Tories were doing before.
The absurd rationing of testing continues.
I know more and more people who pay private facilities to get MRIs etc. XRays seem to be easier in the NHS system.
Early detection of problems is cheaper.
My daughter paid for a private CT scan 4 months ago as Wales NHS wait time was too long
There are more and more facilities for scanning and testing, run by non-NHS staff. Having used them, they are quite cheap and run on maximising throughput.
It confirmed she had no issues, so it saved the NHS money and gave her quick piece of mind [and us]
Why are you all so pitifully desperate for nihilistic atheism to triumph?
It is really bizarre. Like you want everyone to share your own Godless unhappiness
On the contrary, many countries where people take their religion most seriously are mired in conflict and both social division and economic crisis, while there is a strong correlation between those that are the least religious and both national happiness and prosperity.
The US used to be a notable exception - relatively religious but prosperous and peaceful. But look where they're heading now, in part driven along by excess religiosity
If you're right then it was a big mistake for us to import the US woke religion.
Nah, we're importing the US religions of racism, sexism and intolerance.
None of which really constitute a belief system in the same way that wokeness does.
It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.
The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.
'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?
Should we get pensioners back into work?
£20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.
Cut the triple lock entirely.
£20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.
NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.
50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).
Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.
Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.
I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
And means test the NHS for the wealthy
Define wealthy.
Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.
As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.
One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.
- 1p on income tax. - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes. - NI for everyone who works. - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death. - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate. - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities. - Freeze thresholds. - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move). - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it. - Abolish the triple lock. - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care. - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses. - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic. - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we. - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)
And so on.
There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS
As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable
I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.
The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
Generally the choke point is the same pool of consultants and specialists that you have to see, before (and often during) getting private treatment that also give a proportion of their time to the NHS, with the private patients essentially paying to jump the queue. If there was incentive for a significant batch of people to switch to private, either private waiting times would increase dramatically, or consultants would do more private work and less NHS, making the NHS position worse.
The governments approach of using the over capacity in the private sector to deal with the NHS backlog is the more sensible one. Continuing what the Tories were doing before.
The absurd rationing of testing continues.
I know more and more people who pay private facilities to get MRIs etc. XRays seem to be easier in the NHS system.
Early detection of problems is cheaper.
Indeed, my dad just had this issue (hence my suggestion in the previous comment). He has had a knee problem for about 15 years, it's suddenly got a lot worse so he went to see the doctor. Long story short, after about 6 months of hearing nothing back from the NHS on getting a scan he went private and got a scan done - they said his right knee is basically completely deteriorated and he needs surgery.
He wanted to make sure that this was necessary so he arranged finally got an appointment with the NHS specialist a few months down the road who looked at the scan and said words to the effect of "we wouldn't recommend surgery at this stage because the degradation doesn't meet our requirements for it, basically you can still walk around for up to a mile or so before it starts really hurting". He then asked if he could go private would that advice change and the specialist said "yes, get this done ASAP because it will seriously improve your life quality and in 10 years when this gets to the point where the NHS will consider it degraded enough to operate you may not be eligible due to age and poor likelihood of recovery". It's a completely mental situation. They're knowingly saying no/delaying huge life improving surgery to people knowing that 10 years down the road it will cause huge issues for these people, well at least for those people who can't afford to go private.
This is the kind of stuff that I really think is low hanging fruit for the NHS, cheap preventative care today reduces our future liability by huge amounts and that's where I would be looking for gains. They may not show immediately but in 2-3 years there would be a noticeable drop in resource demand.
Very often such rules were set years ago - knee replacement used to be expensive, major ops with high risk of problems. Now, not so much.
Even MRIs are treated as if them cost zillions and require using the ziggurat on R'lyeh.
The younger you are for an op, the better.
And imagine the probable outcome of lower mobility - increasing weight and less exercise. What could that possibly lead to?
I was under the impression that replacement knees/hips were prone to wear out after 10 years or so and could only be replaced once, so it was better to wait a bit. Don’t do it at 50, then redo it at 60 only to be fecked at 70. I think it’s improved a bit. My dad went private for a knee and a hip, to the tune of £15K each. Not cheap, but worth it. One assumes a cost to the NHS of less, albeit with a longer wait.
Why are you all so pitifully desperate for nihilistic atheism to triumph?
It is really bizarre. Like you want everyone to share your own Godless unhappiness
On the contrary, many countries where people take their religion most seriously are mired in conflict and both social division and economic crisis, while there is a strong correlation between those that are the least religious and both national happiness and prosperity.
The US used to be a notable exception - relatively religious but prosperous and peaceful. But look where they're heading now, in part driven along by excess religiosity
If you're right then it was a big mistake for us to import the US woke religion.
Nah, we're importing the US religions of racism, sexism and intolerance.
None of which really constitute a belief system in the same way that wokeness does.
What is wokeness?
The moment immediately after I stir from my siesta.
One FBI guy's experience of the 'new' FBI under Trump:
"I recount those events more in sorrow than in anger. I love my country and our Constitution with a fervor that mere language will not allow me to articulate, and it pains me that my profession will no longer entail being their servant. As you know, my wife and I are expecting our first child this summer, and this decision will entail no small degree of hardship for us. But as our organization began to decay, I made a vow that I would comport myself in a manner that would allow me to look my son in the eye as I raised him."
Strange how panicked & alarmed PB is, by the mere possibility Christianity might see a revival
Also very telling
Anecdotally, I see some truth in this. At my daughter’s uni (St Andrew’s) “going to church” is oddly fashionable. The same way taking smack was cool in my time
Don't see much panic or alarm here- that's mainly you being trollier than thou, again.
It would be lovely if church attendance were increasing. I wouldn't have to teach Sunday School quite so often. But it's not showing in the wear on paths to church. Polling errors (they do happen, I hear) are way more likely as an explanation.
Why don’t you actually read the YouGov report instead of airily dismissing it. Isn’t that tantamount to a felony on PB?
Since you ask...
I heard about it months ago, the report came out in April and caused a bit of a stir in church circles at the time. Very shortly afterwards, church people noticed that the outcomes of the survey didn't match other, better, measures of people in specific churches. In the CofE, that includes every churchwarden in every church counting people turning up Sunday services across a month.
I'm sure that YouGov and the Bible Society did the best, most faithful work they could, but it really looks like something has gone wrong with the sampling or modelling.
Well, you did ask.
Well they didn’t read it very well because the report expressly says much of this rise is in small random Pentecostal churches etc. NOT CofE
From the blog I linked to earlier,
Between them, these two denominations [CofE and RCC] have reportedly grown their regular attendance by almost 1.5m people, out of the total reported growth of 2.1m, or over 70% of the total growth. But Church attendance data simply does not back that up.
It looks like a polling fail. They happen. In the same way that actual election results don't match polling. And for avoidance of doubt, I'm all for growth in belief. But that includes trying to bear as truthful witness as I can.
20% is of males 18-24 attending church once or more a month doesn't really pass the sniff test. Bear in mind about a quarter of that age group are Muslim, Hindus or Sikh etc. It would mean over a quarter of the rest attending once or more a month. I just don't see that at my Church, or for that matter at the African Pentocostal Church, Methodists and Catholic Churches nearby.
It may well be what they said on the survey, but not the reality. A bit like "Evangelical Christians" in the USA that never actually go to a service more to do with cultural identity.
IanB2 - There are other signs, including this one: When the Toronto Blue Jays came to play the Seattle Mariners, local businesses offered discounts to Canadians. One common discount was letting Canadians pay in Canadian currency.
It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.
The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.
'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?
Should we get pensioners back into work?
£20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.
Cut the triple lock entirely.
£20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.
NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.
50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).
Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.
Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.
I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
And means test the NHS for the wealthy
Define wealthy.
Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.
As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.
One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.
- 1p on income tax. - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes. - NI for everyone who works. - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death. - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate. - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities. - Freeze thresholds. - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move). - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it. - Abolish the triple lock. - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care. - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses. - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic. - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we. - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)
And so on.
There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS
As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable
I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.
The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
Generally the choke point is the same pool of consultants and specialists that you have to see, before (and often during) getting private treatment that also give a proportion of their time to the NHS, with the private patients essentially paying to jump the queue. If there was incentive for a significant batch of people to switch to private, either private waiting times would increase dramatically, or consultants would do more private work and less NHS, making the NHS position worse.
The governments approach of using the over capacity in the private sector to deal with the NHS backlog is the more sensible one. Continuing what the Tories were doing before.
The absurd rationing of testing continues.
I know more and more people who pay private facilities to get MRIs etc. XRays seem to be easier in the NHS system.
Early detection of problems is cheaper.
Indeed, my dad just had this issue (hence my suggestion in the previous comment). He has had a knee problem for about 15 years, it's suddenly got a lot worse so he went to see the doctor. Long story short, after about 6 months of hearing nothing back from the NHS on getting a scan he went private and got a scan done - they said his right knee is basically completely deteriorated and he needs surgery.
He wanted to make sure that this was necessary so he arranged finally got an appointment with the NHS specialist a few months down the road who looked at the scan and said words to the effect of "we wouldn't recommend surgery at this stage because the degradation doesn't meet our requirements for it, basically you can still walk around for up to a mile or so before it starts really hurting". He then asked if he could go private would that advice change and the specialist said "yes, get this done ASAP because it will seriously improve your life quality and in 10 years when this gets to the point where the NHS will consider it degraded enough to operate you may not be eligible due to age and poor likelihood of recovery". It's a completely mental situation. They're knowingly saying no/delaying huge life improving surgery to people knowing that 10 years down the road it will cause huge issues for these people, well at least for those people who can't afford to go private.
This is the kind of stuff that I really think is low hanging fruit for the NHS, cheap preventative care today reduces our future liability by huge amounts and that's where I would be looking for gains. They may not show immediately but in 2-3 years there would be a noticeable drop in resource demand.
Our youngest had an ingrown toenail a couple of years ago. After going through the initial stages of treatment with our NHS GP (which consisted understandably of “give it a couple of weeks to see if it sorts itself out”) the GP referred him to get it looked at by a specialist. By the time the letter from the specialist dept had arrived to tell us we had been booked for an initial appointment another four months later we had already given up on the NHS & taken him to a private specialist who had diagnosed it as needing surgery & carried that surgery out that week - removing an impressively large chunk of toenail that had grown off sideways into the depths of his big toe in the process!
The specialist said the likely time from initial diagnostic appointment to actual surgery on the NHS was between 9-12 months in his experience.
The NHS is just broken for ordinary people it seems. If you fit into one of the “pathways” (cancer, stroke, heart disease) then you get treated in a timely fashion (most of the time), but those are mostly the diseases of old people. For the young, the NHS is a failure that pretends to treat them & then keeps them dangling with the hope of treatment that might manifest itself sometime, maybe.
We need to get back to the idea that the NHS sees getting working age people back into work as quickly as reasonably possible a priority.
We looked at this quite closely in terms of private health care for our staff at the Faculty. The staff got private health care as a part of their package of employment. It wasn't cheap and when things got tough in the period during Covid we looked at it. The conclusion was that although it was not cheap having staff off sick waiting for NHS treatment would cost us even more and it was good value.
When you get to that point the NHS is simply not delivering for working people, unless you fit into one of the categories that they care about, basically women's cancers. And it employs over 1.5m people and costs almost a third of all public expenditure. Something has gone very seriously wrong.
It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.
The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.
'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?
Should we get pensioners back into work?
£20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.
Cut the triple lock entirely.
£20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.
NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.
50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).
Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.
Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.
I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
And means test the NHS for the wealthy
Define wealthy.
Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.
As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.
One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.
- 1p on income tax. - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes. - NI for everyone who works. - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death. - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate. - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities. - Freeze thresholds. - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move). - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it. - Abolish the triple lock. - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care. - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses. - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic. - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we. - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)
And so on.
There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS
As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable
I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.
The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
Generally the choke point is the same pool of consultants and specialists that you have to see, before (and often during) getting private treatment that also give a proportion of their time to the NHS, with the private patients essentially paying to jump the queue. If there was incentive for a significant batch of people to switch to private, either private waiting times would increase dramatically, or consultants would do more private work and less NHS, making the NHS position worse.
The governments approach of using the over capacity in the private sector to deal with the NHS backlog is the more sensible one. Continuing what the Tories were doing before.
The absurd rationing of testing continues.
I know more and more people who pay private facilities to get MRIs etc. XRays seem to be easier in the NHS system.
Early detection of problems is cheaper.
Indeed, my dad just had this issue (hence my suggestion in the previous comment). He has had a knee problem for about 15 years, it's suddenly got a lot worse so he went to see the doctor. Long story short, after about 6 months of hearing nothing back from the NHS on getting a scan he went private and got a scan done - they said his right knee is basically completely deteriorated and he needs surgery.
He wanted to make sure that this was necessary so he arranged finally got an appointment with the NHS specialist a few months down the road who looked at the scan and said words to the effect of "we wouldn't recommend surgery at this stage because the degradation doesn't meet our requirements for it, basically you can still walk around for up to a mile or so before it starts really hurting". He then asked if he could go private would that advice change and the specialist said "yes, get this done ASAP because it will seriously improve your life quality and in 10 years when this gets to the point where the NHS will consider it degraded enough to operate you may not be eligible due to age and poor likelihood of recovery". It's a completely mental situation. They're knowingly saying no/delaying huge life improving surgery to people knowing that 10 years down the road it will cause huge issues for these people, well at least for those people who can't afford to go private.
This is the kind of stuff that I really think is low hanging fruit for the NHS, cheap preventative care today reduces our future liability by huge amounts and that's where I would be looking for gains. They may not show immediately but in 2-3 years there would be a noticeable drop in resource demand.
Very often such rules were set years ago - knee replacement used to be expensive, major ops with high risk of problems. Now, not so much.
Even MRIs are treated as if them cost zillions and require using the ziggurat on R'lyeh.
The younger you are for an op, the better.
And imagine the probable outcome of lower mobility - increasing weight and less exercise. What could that possibly lead to?
I was under the impression that replacement knees/hips were prone to wear out after 10 years or so and could only be replaced once, so it was better to wait a bit. Don’t do it at 50, then redo it at 60 only to be fecked at 70. I think it’s improved a bit. My dad went private for a knee and a hip, to the tune of £15K each. Not cheap, but worth it. One assumes a cost to the NHS of less, albeit with a longer wait.
That was part of the consideration - the other part was that joint replacements were considered more durable if done at an age where people weren’t going to stress-test them by doing things that are particularly energetic or acrobatic.
In other news I have accepted a new job for a British startup at C-Level, I start in September and I'm very excited at the prospect. There are only ~30 people at the company, I'll be the second person in at exec level. I've obviously taken a pretty drastic pay cut to do this from my finance and fintech days but for the first time in ages I'm really looking forwards to going back to work.
I think it will be about 11 months off in total spent with the family, which is the best year I've had since the year my then girlfriend (now wife) and I went travelling together for six months and got married a few months after we got back. If you can afford to take the time off, I'd highly recommend doing a year(ish) long career break and just spending the time with family and not worrying about work stuff. I'm obviously very lucky that I have earned well in my previous roles and that my wife also has a high income so I do recognise that not everyone would be able to do it.
Congrats. Always a good idea to take your chances while young.
IanB2 - There are other signs, including this one: When the Toronto Blue Jays came to play the Seattle Mariners, local businesses offered discounts to Canadians. One common discount was letting Canadians pay in Canadian currency.
I sense that ordinary Americans are keen to be friendly to Canadians - presumably out of some mix of guilt, embarrassment, and economic self-interest, whereas ordinary Canadians remain (mostly) offended and keen to keep their distance from the US?
It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.
The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.
'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?
Should we get pensioners back into work?
£20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.
Cut the triple lock entirely.
£20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.
NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.
50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).
Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.
Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.
I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
And means test the NHS for the wealthy
Define wealthy.
Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.
As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.
One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.
- 1p on income tax. - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes. - NI for everyone who works. - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death. - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate. - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities. - Freeze thresholds. - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move). - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it. - Abolish the triple lock. - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care. - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses. - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic. - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we. - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)
And so on.
There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
One reason that I am opposed to the assisted dying stuff is that I have met several people in healthcare who were against the continued existence of others, who they deemed "a waste of resources".
I could see them telling a blind person who wanted a ramp to her door - "Have you considered killing yourself". Yes, very easily.
There was an instance of exactly that with a paralympic athlete in Canada.
It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.
The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.
'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?
Should we get pensioners back into work?
£20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.
Cut the triple lock entirely.
£20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.
NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.
50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).
Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.
Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.
I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
And means test the NHS for the wealthy
Define wealthy.
Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.
As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.
One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.
- 1p on income tax. - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes. - NI for everyone who works. - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death. - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate. - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities. - Freeze thresholds. - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move). - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it. - Abolish the triple lock. - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care. - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses. - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic. - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we. - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)
And so on.
There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS
As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable
I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.
The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
Generally the choke point is the same pool of consultants and specialists that you have to see, before (and often during) getting private treatment that also give a proportion of their time to the NHS, with the private patients essentially paying to jump the queue. If there was incentive for a significant batch of people to switch to private, either private waiting times would increase dramatically, or consultants would do more private work and less NHS, making the NHS position worse.
The governments approach of using the over capacity in the private sector to deal with the NHS backlog is the more sensible one. Continuing what the Tories were doing before.
The absurd rationing of testing continues.
I know more and more people who pay private facilities to get MRIs etc. XRays seem to be easier in the NHS system.
Early detection of problems is cheaper.
Indeed, my dad just had this issue (hence my suggestion in the previous comment). He has had a knee problem for about 15 years, it's suddenly got a lot worse so he went to see the doctor. Long story short, after about 6 months of hearing nothing back from the NHS on getting a scan he went private and got a scan done - they said his right knee is basically completely deteriorated and he needs surgery.
He wanted to make sure that this was necessary so he arranged finally got an appointment with the NHS specialist a few months down the road who looked at the scan and said words to the effect of "we wouldn't recommend surgery at this stage because the degradation doesn't meet our requirements for it, basically you can still walk around for up to a mile or so before it starts really hurting". He then asked if he could go private would that advice change and the specialist said "yes, get this done ASAP because it will seriously improve your life quality and in 10 years when this gets to the point where the NHS will consider it degraded enough to operate you may not be eligible due to age and poor likelihood of recovery". It's a completely mental situation. They're knowingly saying no/delaying huge life improving surgery to people knowing that 10 years down the road it will cause huge issues for these people, well at least for those people who can't afford to go private.
This is the kind of stuff that I really think is low hanging fruit for the NHS, cheap preventative care today reduces our future liability by huge amounts and that's where I would be looking for gains. They may not show immediately but in 2-3 years there would be a noticeable drop in resource demand.
Our youngest had an ingrown toenail a couple of years ago. After going through the initial stages of treatment with our NHS GP (which consisted understandably of “give it a couple of weeks to see if it sorts itself out”) the GP referred him to get it looked at by a specialist. By the time the letter from the specialist dept had arrived to tell us we had been booked for an initial appointment another four months later we had already given up on the NHS & taken him to a private specialist who had diagnosed it as needing surgery & carried that surgery out that week - removing an impressively large chunk of toenail that had grown off sideways into the depths of his big toe in the process!
The specialist said the likely time from initial diagnostic appointment to actual surgery on the NHS was between 9-12 months in his experience.
The NHS is just broken for ordinary people it seems. If you fit into one of the “pathways” (cancer, stroke, heart disease) then you get treated in a timely fashion (most of the time), but those are mostly the diseases of old people. For the young, the NHS is a failure that pretends to treat them & then keeps them dangling with the hope of treatment that might manifest itself sometime, maybe.
We need to get back to the idea that the NHS sees getting working age people back into work as quickly as reasonably possible a priority.
We looked at this quite closely in terms of private health care for our staff at the Faculty. The staff got private health care as a part of their package of employment. It wasn't cheap and when things got tough in the period during Covid we looked at it. The conclusion was that although it was not cheap having staff off sick waiting for NHS treatment would cost us even more and it was good value.
When you get to that point the NHS is simply not delivering for working people, unless you fit into one of the categories that they care about, basically women's cancers. And it employs over 1.5m people and costs almost a third of all public expenditure. Something has gone very seriously wrong.
The reason why private companies often offer (for free) private health care to staff is exactly this - it saves the company money to get testing and treatment done early. Some things - like knee replacements - are paid for. But in the main, it's private testing leading to NHS treatment. With aftercare (physio etc) handled privately.
That sounds a highly dubious statistic. And I doubt that we have any precise measures for GDP in 1830 anyway.
In the 19th century, the Americans had no problem in putting buffalo to the point of extinction and the passenger pigeon - flocks of which took more than 10 hours to fly pass - actually to extinction. I'm sure they had no qualms cutting down a tree for firewood.
It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.
The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.
'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?
Should we get pensioners back into work?
£20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.
Cut the triple lock entirely.
£20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.
NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.
50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).
Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.
Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.
I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
And means test the NHS for the wealthy
Define wealthy.
Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.
As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.
One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.
- 1p on income tax. - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes. - NI for everyone who works. - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death. - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate. - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities. - Freeze thresholds. - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move). - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it. - Abolish the triple lock. - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care. - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses. - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic. - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we. - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)
And so on.
There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
One reason that I am opposed to the assisted dying stuff is that I have met several people in healthcare who were against the continued existence of others, who they deemed "a waste of resources".
I could see them telling a blind person who wanted a ramp to her door - "Have you considered killing yourself". Yes, very easily.
There was an instance of exactly that with a paralympic athlete in Canada.
A year from GE 2024 our MRP in @thetimes with @cazjwheeler finds Reform winners from Labour’s early stumbles. Tories/Lib Dems fight for third ➡️ REF UK 290 (+285) 🌹 LAB 126 (- 285) 🌳 CON 81 (-40) 🔶 LIB DEM 73 (+1) 🌍 GREEN 7 (+3) 🟡 SNP 42 (+33) 🟩 Plaid 4 (-) ⬜️ OTH 8 (+2)
To be honest, the More In Common MRP before the GE last year was Labour 430, Conservatives 126, LDs 52 so make of this (and that) what you will.
Like most other pollsters, MiC missed out local swings and changes so this MRP needs to have some salt (and popcorn) added for digestion.
I struggle with Labour on 126 simply because Labour haven't been below 200 in any election since 1945 and the concentrated nature of their vote makes me think they'll always have a solid number of seats in London, Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds, Newcastle and elsewhere.
The Conservatives might draw some comfort from being slightly ahead of the LDs but again I'd question that on what might be both an actual 2.5% swing from Con to LD but also Reform tearing further chunks out of the Conservative vote but we'll see.
Badenoch is going to be facing some awkward questions as the election approaches if the numbers are as they are - would she support a minority Reform administration and what would be the nature of that support? As the LDs discovered, once you nump, you're likely to lose more supporters than you gain.
Most 2010 LD voters preferred a Labour led government to a Conservative led government, most current Conservative voters prefer a Refom led government to a Labour led government so a different context.
Badenoch would also likely only give confidence and supply to Reform rather than form a full coalition with them as Clegg did with the Tories
It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.
The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.
'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?
Should we get pensioners back into work?
£20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.
Cut the triple lock entirely.
£20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.
NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.
50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).
Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.
Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.
I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
And means test the NHS for the wealthy
Define wealthy.
Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.
As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.
One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.
- 1p on income tax. - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes. - NI for everyone who works. - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death. - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate. - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities. - Freeze thresholds. - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move). - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it. - Abolish the triple lock. - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care. - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses. - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic. - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we. - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)
And so on.
There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS
As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable
I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.
The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
Generally the choke point is the same pool of consultants and specialists that you have to see, before (and often during) getting private treatment that also give a proportion of their time to the NHS, with the private patients essentially paying to jump the queue. If there was incentive for a significant batch of people to switch to private, either private waiting times would increase dramatically, or consultants would do more private work and less NHS, making the NHS position worse.
The governments approach of using the over capacity in the private sector to deal with the NHS backlog is the more sensible one. Continuing what the Tories were doing before.
The absurd rationing of testing continues.
I know more and more people who pay private facilities to get MRIs etc. XRays seem to be easier in the NHS system.
Early detection of problems is cheaper.
Indeed, my dad just had this issue (hence my suggestion in the previous comment). He has had a knee problem for about 15 years, it's suddenly got a lot worse so he went to see the doctor. Long story short, after about 6 months of hearing nothing back from the NHS on getting a scan he went private and got a scan done - they said his right knee is basically completely deteriorated and he needs surgery.
He wanted to make sure that this was necessary so he arranged finally got an appointment with the NHS specialist a few months down the road who looked at the scan and said words to the effect of "we wouldn't recommend surgery at this stage because the degradation doesn't meet our requirements for it, basically you can still walk around for up to a mile or so before it starts really hurting". He then asked if he could go private would that advice change and the specialist said "yes, get this done ASAP because it will seriously improve your life quality and in 10 years when this gets to the point where the NHS will consider it degraded enough to operate you may not be eligible due to age and poor likelihood of recovery". It's a completely mental situation. They're knowingly saying no/delaying huge life improving surgery to people knowing that 10 years down the road it will cause huge issues for these people, well at least for those people who can't afford to go private.
This is the kind of stuff that I really think is low hanging fruit for the NHS, cheap preventative care today reduces our future liability by huge amounts and that's where I would be looking for gains. They may not show immediately but in 2-3 years there would be a noticeable drop in resource demand.
Our youngest had an ingrown toenail a couple of years ago. After going through the initial stages of treatment with our NHS GP (which consisted understandably of “give it a couple of weeks to see if it sorts itself out”) the GP referred him to get it looked at by a specialist. By the time the letter from the specialist dept had arrived to tell us we had been booked for an initial appointment another four months later we had already given up on the NHS & taken him to a private specialist who had diagnosed it as needing surgery & carried that surgery out that week - removing an impressively large chunk of toenail that had grown off sideways into the depths of his big toe in the process!
The specialist said the likely time from initial diagnostic appointment to actual surgery on the NHS was between 9-12 months in his experience.
The NHS is just broken for ordinary people it seems. If you fit into one of the “pathways” (cancer, stroke, heart disease) then you get treated in a timely fashion (most of the time), but those are mostly the diseases of old people. For the young, the NHS is a failure that pretends to treat them & then keeps them dangling with the hope of treatment that might manifest itself sometime, maybe.
We need to get back to the idea that the NHS sees getting working age people back into work as quickly as reasonably possible a priority.
I know of people waiting over two years to get access to CAMHS in Edinburgh.
Once we start defining the ultra wealthy in a way that avoids 'ordinary' people, you end up with a small number of people who can easily find ways to avoid significant increases in tax on their wealth.
Shifting some tax from income to wealth (read: income tax to property or tax) makes sense, especially if combined with scrapping stamp duty, but that isn't a silver bullet. What it does do is help put downward pressure on property prices as people don't live in big houses they don't need (or need to pay significant tax for the luxury to do so). Socialist states like the USA do this a lot more.
In terms of increasing income tax or other revenue raising of workers, I mean fine if needed (albeit it's already high). But my quid quo pro would be massive increase in house building approvals wherever there is demand; plus the above introduction of proper annual property taxes on market value. We can't keep piling on workers and letting asset owners get off easy.
Once we start defining the ultra wealthy in a way that avoids 'ordinary' people, you end up with a small number of people who can easily find ways to avoid significant increases in tax on their wealth.
Shifting some tax from income to wealth (read: income tax to property or tax) makes sense, especially if combined with scrapping stamp duty, but that isn't a silver bullet. What it does do is help put downward pressure on property prices as people don't live in big houses they don't need (or need to pay significant tax for the luxury to do so). Socialist states like the USA do this a lot more.
In terms of increasing income tax or other revenue raising of workers, I mean fine if needed (albeit it's already high). But my quid quo pro would be massive increase in house building approvals wherever there is demand; plus the above introduction of proper annual property taxes on market value. We can't keep piling on workers and letting asset owners get off easy.
True, and it would be both more sensible and equitable to introduce some sort of land or property or wealth tax and levy it on everyone, such that all made a contribution with the size being related to one’s wealth. But the politics will direct toward drawing some sort of arbitrary line at £X million, such that all those below it are unaffected, which, except for the electoral consequences, will be the worst possible way to go about it.
It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.
The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.
'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?
Should we get pensioners back into work?
£20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.
Cut the triple lock entirely.
£20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.
NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.
50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).
Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.
Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.
I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
And means test the NHS for the wealthy
Define wealthy.
Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.
As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.
One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.
- 1p on income tax. - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes. - NI for everyone who works. - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death. - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate. - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities. - Freeze thresholds. - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move). - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it. - Abolish the triple lock. - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care. - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses. - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic. - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we. - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)
And so on.
There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS
As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable
I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.
The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
Generally the choke point is the same pool of consultants and specialists that you have to see, before (and often during) getting private treatment that also give a proportion of their time to the NHS, with the private patients essentially paying to jump the queue. If there was incentive for a significant batch of people to switch to private, either private waiting times would increase dramatically, or consultants would do more private work and less NHS, making the NHS position worse.
The governments approach of using the over capacity in the private sector to deal with the NHS backlog is the more sensible one. Continuing what the Tories were doing before.
The absurd rationing of testing continues.
I know more and more people who pay private facilities to get MRIs etc. XRays seem to be easier in the NHS system.
Early detection of problems is cheaper.
Indeed, my dad just had this issue (hence my suggestion in the previous comment). He has had a knee problem for about 15 years, it's suddenly got a lot worse so he went to see the doctor. Long story short, after about 6 months of hearing nothing back from the NHS on getting a scan he went private and got a scan done - they said his right knee is basically completely deteriorated and he needs surgery.
He wanted to make sure that this was necessary so he arranged finally got an appointment with the NHS specialist a few months down the road who looked at the scan and said words to the effect of "we wouldn't recommend surgery at this stage because the degradation doesn't meet our requirements for it, basically you can still walk around for up to a mile or so before it starts really hurting". He then asked if he could go private would that advice change and the specialist said "yes, get this done ASAP because it will seriously improve your life quality and in 10 years when this gets to the point where the NHS will consider it degraded enough to operate you may not be eligible due to age and poor likelihood of recovery". It's a completely mental situation. They're knowingly saying no/delaying huge life improving surgery to people knowing that 10 years down the road it will cause huge issues for these people, well at least for those people who can't afford to go private.
This is the kind of stuff that I really think is low hanging fruit for the NHS, cheap preventative care today reduces our future liability by huge amounts and that's where I would be looking for gains. They may not show immediately but in 2-3 years there would be a noticeable drop in resource demand.
Our youngest had an ingrown toenail a couple of years ago. After going through the initial stages of treatment with our NHS GP (which consisted understandably of “give it a couple of weeks to see if it sorts itself out”) the GP referred him to get it looked at by a specialist. By the time the letter from the specialist dept had arrived to tell us we had been booked for an initial appointment another four months later we had already given up on the NHS & taken him to a private specialist who had diagnosed it as needing surgery & carried that surgery out that week - removing an impressively large chunk of toenail that had grown off sideways into the depths of his big toe in the process!
The specialist said the likely time from initial diagnostic appointment to actual surgery on the NHS was between 9-12 months in his experience.
The NHS is just broken for ordinary people it seems. If you fit into one of the “pathways” (cancer, stroke, heart disease) then you get treated in a timely fashion (most of the time), but those are mostly the diseases of old people. For the young, the NHS is a failure that pretends to treat them & then keeps them dangling with the hope of treatment that might manifest itself sometime, maybe.
We need to get back to the idea that the NHS sees getting working age people back into work as quickly as reasonably possible a priority.
I know of people waiting over two years to get access to CAMHS in Edinburgh.
Wasn't there research that said the most pro-Trump demographic was people who identified as regular churchgoers who rarely went to church?
If the polling Leon has found identifies a growth of such identity, or Potemkin, Christians in Britain, then it could be very politically significant.
Yes, that might well be the case. They would probably greatly benefit from studying and absorbing the Sermon on the Mount etc, but that isn't the bit they are interested in.
It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.
The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.
'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?
Should we get pensioners back into work?
£20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.
Cut the triple lock entirely.
£20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.
NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.
50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).
Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.
Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.
I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
And means test the NHS for the wealthy
Define wealthy.
Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.
As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.
One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.
- 1p on income tax. - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes. - NI for everyone who works. - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death. - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate. - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities. - Freeze thresholds. - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move). - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it. - Abolish the triple lock. - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care. - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses. - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic. - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we. - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)
And so on.
There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS
As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable
I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.
The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
Generally the choke point is the same pool of consultants and specialists that you have to see, before (and often during) getting private treatment that also give a proportion of their time to the NHS, with the private patients essentially paying to jump the queue. If there was incentive for a significant batch of people to switch to private, either private waiting times would increase dramatically, or consultants would do more private work and less NHS, making the NHS position worse.
The governments approach of using the over capacity in the private sector to deal with the NHS backlog is the more sensible one. Continuing what the Tories were doing before.
The absurd rationing of testing continues.
I know more and more people who pay private facilities to get MRIs etc. XRays seem to be easier in the NHS system.
Early detection of problems is cheaper.
Indeed, my dad just had this issue (hence my suggestion in the previous comment). He has had a knee problem for about 15 years, it's suddenly got a lot worse so he went to see the doctor. Long story short, after about 6 months of hearing nothing back from the NHS on getting a scan he went private and got a scan done - they said his right knee is basically completely deteriorated and he needs surgery.
He wanted to make sure that this was necessary so he arranged finally got an appointment with the NHS specialist a few months down the road who looked at the scan and said words to the effect of "we wouldn't recommend surgery at this stage because the degradation doesn't meet our requirements for it, basically you can still walk around for up to a mile or so before it starts really hurting". He then asked if he could go private would that advice change and the specialist said "yes, get this done ASAP because it will seriously improve your life quality and in 10 years when this gets to the point where the NHS will consider it degraded enough to operate you may not be eligible due to age and poor likelihood of recovery". It's a completely mental situation. They're knowingly saying no/delaying huge life improving surgery to people knowing that 10 years down the road it will cause huge issues for these people, well at least for those people who can't afford to go private.
This is the kind of stuff that I really think is low hanging fruit for the NHS, cheap preventative care today reduces our future liability by huge amounts and that's where I would be looking for gains. They may not show immediately but in 2-3 years there would be a noticeable drop in resource demand.
Our youngest had an ingrown toenail a couple of years ago. After going through the initial stages of treatment with our NHS GP (which consisted understandably of “give it a couple of weeks to see if it sorts itself out”) the GP referred him to get it looked at by a specialist. By the time the letter from the specialist dept had arrived to tell us we had been booked for an initial appointment another four months later we had already given up on the NHS & taken him to a private specialist who had diagnosed it as needing surgery & carried that surgery out that week - removing an impressively large chunk of toenail that had grown off sideways into the depths of his big toe in the process!
The specialist said the likely time from initial diagnostic appointment to actual surgery on the NHS was between 9-12 months in his experience.
The NHS is just broken for ordinary people it seems. If you fit into one of the “pathways” (cancer, stroke, heart disease) then you get treated in a timely fashion (most of the time), but those are mostly the diseases of old people. For the young, the NHS is a failure that pretends to treat them & then keeps them dangling with the hope of treatment that might manifest itself sometime, maybe.
We need to get back to the idea that the NHS sees getting working age people back into work as quickly as reasonably possible a priority.
I know of people waiting over two years to get access to CAMHS in Edinburgh.
And we wonder why PIP for youngsters with mental health issues is on the rise.
It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.
The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.
'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?
Should we get pensioners back into work?
£20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.
Cut the triple lock entirely.
£20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.
NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.
50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).
Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.
Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.
I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
And means test the NHS for the wealthy
Define wealthy.
Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.
As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.
One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.
- 1p on income tax. - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes. - NI for everyone who works. - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death. - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate. - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities. - Freeze thresholds. - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move). - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it. - Abolish the triple lock. - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care. - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses. - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic. - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we. - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)
And so on.
There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS
As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable
I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.
The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
Generally the choke point is the same pool of consultants and specialists that you have to see, before (and often during) getting private treatment that also give a proportion of their time to the NHS, with the private patients essentially paying to jump the queue. If there was incentive for a significant batch of people to switch to private, either private waiting times would increase dramatically, or consultants would do more private work and less NHS, making the NHS position worse.
The governments approach of using the over capacity in the private sector to deal with the NHS backlog is the more sensible one. Continuing what the Tories were doing before.
The absurd rationing of testing continues.
I know more and more people who pay private facilities to get MRIs etc. XRays seem to be easier in the NHS system.
Early detection of problems is cheaper.
Indeed, my dad just had this issue (hence my suggestion in the previous comment). He has had a knee problem for about 15 years, it's suddenly got a lot worse so he went to see the doctor. Long story short, after about 6 months of hearing nothing back from the NHS on getting a scan he went private and got a scan done - they said his right knee is basically completely deteriorated and he needs surgery.
He wanted to make sure that this was necessary so he arranged finally got an appointment with the NHS specialist a few months down the road who looked at the scan and said words to the effect of "we wouldn't recommend surgery at this stage because the degradation doesn't meet our requirements for it, basically you can still walk around for up to a mile or so before it starts really hurting". He then asked if he could go private would that advice change and the specialist said "yes, get this done ASAP because it will seriously improve your life quality and in 10 years when this gets to the point where the NHS will consider it degraded enough to operate you may not be eligible due to age and poor likelihood of recovery". It's a completely mental situation. They're knowingly saying no/delaying huge life improving surgery to people knowing that 10 years down the road it will cause huge issues for these people, well at least for those people who can't afford to go private.
This is the kind of stuff that I really think is low hanging fruit for the NHS, cheap preventative care today reduces our future liability by huge amounts and that's where I would be looking for gains. They may not show immediately but in 2-3 years there would be a noticeable drop in resource demand.
Our youngest had an ingrown toenail a couple of years ago. After going through the initial stages of treatment with our NHS GP (which consisted understandably of “give it a couple of weeks to see if it sorts itself out”) the GP referred him to get it looked at by a specialist. By the time the letter from the specialist dept had arrived to tell us we had been booked for an initial appointment another four months later we had already given up on the NHS & taken him to a private specialist who had diagnosed it as needing surgery & carried that surgery out that week - removing an impressively large chunk of toenail that had grown off sideways into the depths of his big toe in the process!
The specialist said the likely time from initial diagnostic appointment to actual surgery on the NHS was between 9-12 months in his experience.
The NHS is just broken for ordinary people it seems. If you fit into one of the “pathways” (cancer, stroke, heart disease) then you get treated in a timely fashion (most of the time), but those are mostly the diseases of old people. For the young, the NHS is a failure that pretends to treat them & then keeps them dangling with the hope of treatment that might manifest itself sometime, maybe.
We need to get back to the idea that the NHS sees getting working age people back into work as quickly as reasonably possible a priority.
I know of people waiting over two years to get access to CAMHS in Edinburgh.
Two years is quick, for most.
The rape case I did last week involved a young woman whose legal guardian claimed had a mental age of 6. She was in residential care but had freedom of movement. She was raped and enormously distressed. Medical evidence said, remarkably, that she understood enough about sex to consent or withhold her consent.
Her guardian contacted Social work the night it happened who did ...nothing. When the guardian got back from her holiday she took her to the police but it was too late to get medical support for the claim. The man was convicted by the evidence of the distress and what was said to the guardian hours after the assault. It was close, a majority verdict.
The lack of care of such an obviously vulnerable young woman frankly made me incandescent. So many jobsworths are paid to look after people and just don't give a damn. This case involved an indigenous Scot but it demonstrated all so clearly how the victims we are not supposed to talk about get taken advantage of.
We are spending a fortune on these services. We are not getting results.
It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.
The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.
'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?
Should we get pensioners back into work?
£20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.
Cut the triple lock entirely.
£20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.
NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.
50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).
Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.
Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.
I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
And means test the NHS for the wealthy
Define wealthy.
Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.
As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.
One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.
- 1p on income tax. - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes. - NI for everyone who works. - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death. - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate. - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities. - Freeze thresholds. - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move). - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it. - Abolish the triple lock. - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care. - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses. - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic. - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we. - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)
And so on.
There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS
As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable
I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.
The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
Generally the choke point is the same pool of consultants and specialists that you have to see, before (and often during) getting private treatment that also give a proportion of their time to the NHS, with the private patients essentially paying to jump the queue. If there was incentive for a significant batch of people to switch to private, either private waiting times would increase dramatically, or consultants would do more private work and less NHS, making the NHS position worse.
The governments approach of using the over capacity in the private sector to deal with the NHS backlog is the more sensible one. Continuing what the Tories were doing before.
The absurd rationing of testing continues.
I know more and more people who pay private facilities to get MRIs etc. XRays seem to be easier in the NHS system.
Early detection of problems is cheaper.
Indeed, my dad just had this issue (hence my suggestion in the previous comment). He has had a knee problem for about 15 years, it's suddenly got a lot worse so he went to see the doctor. Long story short, after about 6 months of hearing nothing back from the NHS on getting a scan he went private and got a scan done - they said his right knee is basically completely deteriorated and he needs surgery.
He wanted to make sure that this was necessary so he arranged finally got an appointment with the NHS specialist a few months down the road who looked at the scan and said words to the effect of "we wouldn't recommend surgery at this stage because the degradation doesn't meet our requirements for it, basically you can still walk around for up to a mile or so before it starts really hurting". He then asked if he could go private would that advice change and the specialist said "yes, get this done ASAP because it will seriously improve your life quality and in 10 years when this gets to the point where the NHS will consider it degraded enough to operate you may not be eligible due to age and poor likelihood of recovery". It's a completely mental situation. They're knowingly saying no/delaying huge life improving surgery to people knowing that 10 years down the road it will cause huge issues for these people, well at least for those people who can't afford to go private.
This is the kind of stuff that I really think is low hanging fruit for the NHS, cheap preventative care today reduces our future liability by huge amounts and that's where I would be looking for gains. They may not show immediately but in 2-3 years there would be a noticeable drop in resource demand.
Our youngest had an ingrown toenail a couple of years ago. After going through the initial stages of treatment with our NHS GP (which consisted understandably of “give it a couple of weeks to see if it sorts itself out”) the GP referred him to get it looked at by a specialist. By the time the letter from the specialist dept had arrived to tell us we had been booked for an initial appointment another four months later we had already given up on the NHS & taken him to a private specialist who had diagnosed it as needing surgery & carried that surgery out that week - removing an impressively large chunk of toenail that had grown off sideways into the depths of his big toe in the process!
The specialist said the likely time from initial diagnostic appointment to actual surgery on the NHS was between 9-12 months in his experience.
The NHS is just broken for ordinary people it seems. If you fit into one of the “pathways” (cancer, stroke, heart disease) then you get treated in a timely fashion (most of the time), but those are mostly the diseases of old people. For the young, the NHS is a failure that pretends to treat them & then keeps them dangling with the hope of treatment that might manifest itself sometime, maybe.
We need to get back to the idea that the NHS sees getting working age people back into work as quickly as reasonably possible a priority.
I know of people waiting over two years to get access to CAMHS in Edinburgh.
And we wonder why PIP for youngsters with mental health issues is on the rise.
Because they're mentally weak and chronically on social media. Take away the phones and social media and the mental health problems go away.
Wasn't there research that said the most pro-Trump demographic was people who identified as regular churchgoers who rarely went to church?
If the polling Leon has found identifies a growth of such identity, or Potemkin, Christians in Britain, then it could be very politically significant.
That's certainly one way to square the circle, though an alarming one if it is what's going on. We don't have the same televangelist culture in the UK as in the US, and that's a very good thing. The massive downside of broadcast religion is that it tends to sidestep the difficult "who, exactly, is my neighbour, and who isn't?" question.
And that leads fairly smoothly to the consequences we are currently seeing Stateside.
(Much more likely is that using polling to identify small percentages is blooming difficult. And that calculating a change by subtracting one blurry number from another is a mug's game.)
A promotional piece in the Telegraph this morning for Laila Cunningham who defected from the Conservatives to Reform on Westminster Council. Perhaps the Telegraph think she would be a better London Mayoral candidate for Reform than Ant Middleton - she probably would.
The big question remains whether Sadiq Khan will stand again - if he chooses not to, the Labour canddiate could well be Mete Coban but we're a very long way from that at the moment.
Wasn't there research that said the most pro-Trump demographic was people who identified as regular churchgoers who rarely went to church?
If the polling Leon has found identifies a growth of such identity, or Potemkin, Christians in Britain, then it could be very politically significant.
That's certainly one way to square the circle, though an alarming one if it is what's going on. We don't have the same televangelist culture in the UK as in the US, and that's a very good thing. The massive downside of broadcast religion is that it tends to sidestep the difficult "who, exactly, is my neighbour, and who isn't?" question.
And that leads fairly smoothly to the consequences we are currently seeing Stateside.
(Much more likely is that using polling to identify small percentages is blooming difficult. And that calculating a change by subtracting one blurry number from another is a mug's game.)
The previous question will have been whether people identify as religious or not, and if so which religion. When they next get asked how often they participate/attend, it’s completely obvious that some people will exaggerate and some people will lie.
A promotional piece in the Telegraph this morning for Laila Cunningham who defected from the Conservatives to Reform on Westminster Council. Perhaps the Telegraph think she would be a better London Mayoral candidate for Reform than Ant Middleton - she probably would.
The big question remains whether Sadiq Khan will stand again - if he chooses not to, the Labour canddiate could well be Mete Coban but we're a very long way from that at the moment.
I think Reform have disavowed Middletons candidacy due to his Tommy R support
It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.
The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.
'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?
Should we get pensioners back into work?
£20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.
Cut the triple lock entirely.
£20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.
NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.
50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).
Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.
Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.
I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
And means test the NHS for the wealthy
Define wealthy.
Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.
As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.
One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.
- 1p on income tax. - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes. - NI for everyone who works. - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death. - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate. - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities. - Freeze thresholds. - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move). - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it. - Abolish the triple lock. - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care. - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses. - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic. - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we. - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)
And so on.
There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS
As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable
I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.
The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
Generally the choke point is the same pool of consultants and specialists that you have to see, before (and often during) getting private treatment that also give a proportion of their time to the NHS, with the private patients essentially paying to jump the queue. If there was incentive for a significant batch of people to switch to private, either private waiting times would increase dramatically, or consultants would do more private work and less NHS, making the NHS position worse.
The governments approach of using the over capacity in the private sector to deal with the NHS backlog is the more sensible one. Continuing what the Tories were doing before.
The absurd rationing of testing continues.
I know more and more people who pay private facilities to get MRIs etc. XRays seem to be easier in the NHS system.
Early detection of problems is cheaper.
Indeed, my dad just had this issue (hence my suggestion in the previous comment). He has had a knee problem for about 15 years, it's suddenly got a lot worse so he went to see the doctor. Long story short, after about 6 months of hearing nothing back from the NHS on getting a scan he went private and got a scan done - they said his right knee is basically completely deteriorated and he needs surgery.
He wanted to make sure that this was necessary so he arranged finally got an appointment with the NHS specialist a few months down the road who looked at the scan and said words to the effect of "we wouldn't recommend surgery at this stage because the degradation doesn't meet our requirements for it, basically you can still walk around for up to a mile or so before it starts really hurting". He then asked if he could go private would that advice change and the specialist said "yes, get this done ASAP because it will seriously improve your life quality and in 10 years when this gets to the point where the NHS will consider it degraded enough to operate you may not be eligible due to age and poor likelihood of recovery". It's a completely mental situation. They're knowingly saying no/delaying huge life improving surgery to people knowing that 10 years down the road it will cause huge issues for these people, well at least for those people who can't afford to go private.
This is the kind of stuff that I really think is low hanging fruit for the NHS, cheap preventative care today reduces our future liability by huge amounts and that's where I would be looking for gains. They may not show immediately but in 2-3 years there would be a noticeable drop in resource demand.
Our youngest had an ingrown toenail a couple of years ago. After going through the initial stages of treatment with our NHS GP (which consisted understandably of “give it a couple of weeks to see if it sorts itself out”) the GP referred him to get it looked at by a specialist. By the time the letter from the specialist dept had arrived to tell us we had been booked for an initial appointment another four months later we had already given up on the NHS & taken him to a private specialist who had diagnosed it as needing surgery & carried that surgery out that week - removing an impressively large chunk of toenail that had grown off sideways into the depths of his big toe in the process!
The specialist said the likely time from initial diagnostic appointment to actual surgery on the NHS was between 9-12 months in his experience.
The NHS is just broken for ordinary people it seems. If you fit into one of the “pathways” (cancer, stroke, heart disease) then you get treated in a timely fashion (most of the time), but those are mostly the diseases of old people. For the young, the NHS is a failure that pretends to treat them & then keeps them dangling with the hope of treatment that might manifest itself sometime, maybe.
We need to get back to the idea that the NHS sees getting working age people back into work as quickly as reasonably possible a priority.
I know of people waiting over two years to get access to CAMHS in Edinburgh.
And we wonder why PIP for youngsters with mental health issues is on the rise.
Because they're mentally weak and chronically on social media. Take away the phones and social media and the mental health problems go away.
Fine- build a framework where that can happen, like we do for stopping smoking. Probably relatively cheap and high payoff.
(That won't happen, largely for the same Triumph of Janet reasons that stop most useful things happening in Britain. The people who vote and who have time to kick up a fuss are older and NIMBY-inclined, so the state tends to bow to their immediate demands because they Have Paid Their Taxes All Their Life. So anything that might help younger, working age people isn't a priority.)
It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.
The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.
'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?
Should we get pensioners back into work?
£20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.
Cut the triple lock entirely.
£20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.
NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.
50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).
Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.
Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.
I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
And means test the NHS for the wealthy
Define wealthy.
Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.
As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.
One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.
- 1p on income tax. - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes. - NI for everyone who works. - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death. - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate. - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities. - Freeze thresholds. - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move). - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it. - Abolish the triple lock. - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care. - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses. - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic. - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we. - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)
And so on.
There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS
As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable
I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.
The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
Wasn't there research that said the most pro-Trump demographic was people who identified as regular churchgoers who rarely went to church?
If the polling Leon has found identifies a growth of such identity, or Potemkin, Christians in Britain, then it could be very politically significant.
That's certainly one way to square the circle, though an alarming one if it is what's going on. We don't have the same televangelist culture in the UK as in the US, and that's a very good thing. The massive downside of broadcast religion is that it tends to sidestep the difficult "who, exactly, is my neighbour, and who isn't?" question.
And that leads fairly smoothly to the consequences we are currently seeing Stateside.
(Much more likely is that using polling to identify small percentages is blooming difficult. And that calculating a change by subtracting one blurry number from another is a mug's game.)
The previous question will have been whether people identify as religious or not, and if so which religion. When they next get asked how often they participate/attend, it’s completely obvious that some people will exaggerate and some people will lie.
Was that not how the previous surgery in 2014 asked the question too? It's the change that's more interesting than the absolute number.
Wasn't there research that said the most pro-Trump demographic was people who identified as regular churchgoers who rarely went to church?
If the polling Leon has found identifies a growth of such identity, or Potemkin, Christians in Britain, then it could be very politically significant.
That's certainly one way to square the circle, though an alarming one if it is what's going on. We don't have the same televangelist culture in the UK as in the US, and that's a very good thing. The massive downside of broadcast religion is that it tends to sidestep the difficult "who, exactly, is my neighbour, and who isn't?" question.
And that leads fairly smoothly to the consequences we are currently seeing Stateside.
(Much more likely is that using polling to identify small percentages is blooming difficult. And that calculating a change by subtracting one blurry number from another is a mug's game.)
If it is at least part of what's going on then it will be because English-language social media is dominated by Americans.
It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.
The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.
'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?
Should we get pensioners back into work?
£20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.
Cut the triple lock entirely.
£20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.
NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.
50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).
Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.
Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.
I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
And means test the NHS for the wealthy
Define wealthy.
Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.
As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.
One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.
- 1p on income tax. - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes. - NI for everyone who works. - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death. - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate. - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities. - Freeze thresholds. - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move). - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it. - Abolish the triple lock. - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care. - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses. - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic. - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we. - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)
And so on.
There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS
As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable
I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.
The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
Generally the choke point is the same pool of consultants and specialists that you have to see, before (and often during) getting private treatment that also give a proportion of their time to the NHS, with the private patients essentially paying to jump the queue. If there was incentive for a significant batch of people to switch to private, either private waiting times would increase dramatically, or consultants would do more private work and less NHS, making the NHS position worse.
The governments approach of using the over capacity in the private sector to deal with the NHS backlog is the more sensible one. Continuing what the Tories were doing before.
The absurd rationing of testing continues.
I know more and more people who pay private facilities to get MRIs etc. XRays seem to be easier in the NHS system.
Early detection of problems is cheaper.
Indeed, my dad just had this issue (hence my suggestion in the previous comment). He has had a knee problem for about 15 years, it's suddenly got a lot worse so he went to see the doctor. Long story short, after about 6 months of hearing nothing back from the NHS on getting a scan he went private and got a scan done - they said his right knee is basically completely deteriorated and he needs surgery.
He wanted to make sure that this was necessary so he arranged finally got an appointment with the NHS specialist a few months down the road who looked at the scan and said words to the effect of "we wouldn't recommend surgery at this stage because the degradation doesn't meet our requirements for it, basically you can still walk around for up to a mile or so before it starts really hurting". He then asked if he could go private would that advice change and the specialist said "yes, get this done ASAP because it will seriously improve your life quality and in 10 years when this gets to the point where the NHS will consider it degraded enough to operate you may not be eligible due to age and poor likelihood of recovery". It's a completely mental situation. They're knowingly saying no/delaying huge life improving surgery to people knowing that 10 years down the road it will cause huge issues for these people, well at least for those people who can't afford to go private.
This is the kind of stuff that I really think is low hanging fruit for the NHS, cheap preventative care today reduces our future liability by huge amounts and that's where I would be looking for gains. They may not show immediately but in 2-3 years there would be a noticeable drop in resource demand.
Our youngest had an ingrown toenail a couple of years ago. After going through the initial stages of treatment with our NHS GP (which consisted understandably of “give it a couple of weeks to see if it sorts itself out”) the GP referred him to get it looked at by a specialist. By the time the letter from the specialist dept had arrived to tell us we had been booked for an initial appointment another four months later we had already given up on the NHS & taken him to a private specialist who had diagnosed it as needing surgery & carried that surgery out that week - removing an impressively large chunk of toenail that had grown off sideways into the depths of his big toe in the process!
The specialist said the likely time from initial diagnostic appointment to actual surgery on the NHS was between 9-12 months in his experience.
The NHS is just broken for ordinary people it seems. If you fit into one of the “pathways” (cancer, stroke, heart disease) then you get treated in a timely fashion (most of the time), but those are mostly the diseases of old people. For the young, the NHS is a failure that pretends to treat them & then keeps them dangling with the hope of treatment that might manifest itself sometime, maybe.
We need to get back to the idea that the NHS sees getting working age people back into work as quickly as reasonably possible a priority.
I know of people waiting over two years to get access to CAMHS in Edinburgh.
Two years is quick, for most.
The rape case I did last week involved a young woman whose legal guardian claimed had a mental age of 6. She was in residential care but had freedom of movement. She was raped and enormously distressed. Medical evidence said, remarkably, that she understood enough about sex to consent or withhold her consent.
Her guardian contacted Social work the night it happened who did ...nothing. When the guardian got back from her holiday she took her to the police but it was too late to get medical support for the claim. The man was convicted by the evidence of the distress and what was said to the guardian hours after the assault. It was close, a majority verdict.
The lack of care of such an obviously vulnerable young woman frankly made me incandescent. So many jobsworths are paid to look after people and just don't give a damn. This case involved an indigenous Scot but it demonstrated all so clearly how the victims we are not supposed to talk about get taken advantage of.
We are spending a fortune on these services. We are not getting results.
Don't get me started on social services and their view of clients having mental capacity to make various types of decison.
It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.
The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.
'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?
Should we get pensioners back into work?
£20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.
Cut the triple lock entirely.
£20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.
NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.
50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).
Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.
Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.
I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
And means test the NHS for the wealthy
Define wealthy.
Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.
As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.
One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.
- 1p on income tax. - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes. - NI for everyone who works. - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death. - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate. - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities. - Freeze thresholds. - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move). - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it. - Abolish the triple lock. - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care. - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses. - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic. - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we. - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)
And so on.
There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS
As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable
I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.
The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
Generally the choke point is the same pool of consultants and specialists that you have to see, before (and often during) getting private treatment that also give a proportion of their time to the NHS, with the private patients essentially paying to jump the queue. If there was incentive for a significant batch of people to switch to private, either private waiting times would increase dramatically, or consultants would do more private work and less NHS, making the NHS position worse.
The governments approach of using the over capacity in the private sector to deal with the NHS backlog is the more sensible one. Continuing what the Tories were doing before.
The absurd rationing of testing continues.
I know more and more people who pay private facilities to get MRIs etc. XRays seem to be easier in the NHS system.
Early detection of problems is cheaper.
Indeed, my dad just had this issue (hence my suggestion in the previous comment). He has had a knee problem for about 15 years, it's suddenly got a lot worse so he went to see the doctor. Long story short, after about 6 months of hearing nothing back from the NHS on getting a scan he went private and got a scan done - they said his right knee is basically completely deteriorated and he needs surgery.
He wanted to make sure that this was necessary so he arranged finally got an appointment with the NHS specialist a few months down the road who looked at the scan and said words to the effect of "we wouldn't recommend surgery at this stage because the degradation doesn't meet our requirements for it, basically you can still walk around for up to a mile or so before it starts really hurting". He then asked if he could go private would that advice change and the specialist said "yes, get this done ASAP because it will seriously improve your life quality and in 10 years when this gets to the point where the NHS will consider it degraded enough to operate you may not be eligible due to age and poor likelihood of recovery". It's a completely mental situation. They're knowingly saying no/delaying huge life improving surgery to people knowing that 10 years down the road it will cause huge issues for these people, well at least for those people who can't afford to go private.
This is the kind of stuff that I really think is low hanging fruit for the NHS, cheap preventative care today reduces our future liability by huge amounts and that's where I would be looking for gains. They may not show immediately but in 2-3 years there would be a noticeable drop in resource demand.
Very often such rules were set years ago - knee replacement used to be expensive, major ops with high risk of problems. Now, not so much.
Even MRIs are treated as if them cost zillions and require using the ziggurat on R'lyeh.
The younger you are for an op, the better.
And imagine the probable outcome of lower mobility - increasing weight and less exercise. What could that possibly lead to?
I was under the impression that replacement knees/hips were prone to wear out after 10 years or so and could only be replaced once, so it was better to wait a bit. Don’t do it at 50, then redo it at 60 only to be fecked at 70. I think it’s improved a bit. My dad went private for a knee and a hip, to the tune of £15K each. Not cheap, but worth it. One assumes a cost to the NHS of less, albeit with a longer wait.
That was part of the consideration - the other part was that joint replacements were considered more durable if done at an age where people weren’t going to stress-test them by doing things that are particularly energetic or acrobatic.
On the other hand, if a dodgy knee prevents a younger person from working, maybe it needs doing.
It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.
The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.
'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?
Should we get pensioners back into work?
£20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.
Cut the triple lock entirely.
£20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.
NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.
50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).
Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.
Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.
I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
And means test the NHS for the wealthy
Define wealthy.
Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.
As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.
One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.
- 1p on income tax. - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes. - NI for everyone who works. - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death. - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate. - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities. - Freeze thresholds. - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move). - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it. - Abolish the triple lock. - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care. - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses. - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic. - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we. - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)
And so on.
There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS
As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable
I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.
The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
Generally the choke point is the same pool of consultants and specialists that you have to see, before (and often during) getting private treatment that also give a proportion of their time to the NHS, with the private patients essentially paying to jump the queue. If there was incentive for a significant batch of people to switch to private, either private waiting times would increase dramatically, or consultants would do more private work and less NHS, making the NHS position worse.
The governments approach of using the over capacity in the private sector to deal with the NHS backlog is the more sensible one. Continuing what the Tories were doing before.
The absurd rationing of testing continues.
I know more and more people who pay private facilities to get MRIs etc. XRays seem to be easier in the NHS system.
Early detection of problems is cheaper.
Indeed, my dad just had this issue (hence my suggestion in the previous comment). He has had a knee problem for about 15 years, it's suddenly got a lot worse so he went to see the doctor. Long story short, after about 6 months of hearing nothing back from the NHS on getting a scan he went private and got a scan done - they said his right knee is basically completely deteriorated and he needs surgery.
He wanted to make sure that this was necessary so he arranged finally got an appointment with the NHS specialist a few months down the road who looked at the scan and said words to the effect of "we wouldn't recommend surgery at this stage because the degradation doesn't meet our requirements for it, basically you can still walk around for up to a mile or so before it starts really hurting". He then asked if he could go private would that advice change and the specialist said "yes, get this done ASAP because it will seriously improve your life quality and in 10 years when this gets to the point where the NHS will consider it degraded enough to operate you may not be eligible due to age and poor likelihood of recovery". It's a completely mental situation. They're knowingly saying no/delaying huge life improving surgery to people knowing that 10 years down the road it will cause huge issues for these people, well at least for those people who can't afford to go private.
This is the kind of stuff that I really think is low hanging fruit for the NHS, cheap preventative care today reduces our future liability by huge amounts and that's where I would be looking for gains. They may not show immediately but in 2-3 years there would be a noticeable drop in resource demand.
Our youngest had an ingrown toenail a couple of years ago. After going through the initial stages of treatment with our NHS GP (which consisted understandably of “give it a couple of weeks to see if it sorts itself out”) the GP referred him to get it looked at by a specialist. By the time the letter from the specialist dept had arrived to tell us we had been booked for an initial appointment another four months later we had already given up on the NHS & taken him to a private specialist who had diagnosed it as needing surgery & carried that surgery out that week - removing an impressively large chunk of toenail that had grown off sideways into the depths of his big toe in the process!
The specialist said the likely time from initial diagnostic appointment to actual surgery on the NHS was between 9-12 months in his experience.
The NHS is just broken for ordinary people it seems. If you fit into one of the “pathways” (cancer, stroke, heart disease) then you get treated in a timely fashion (most of the time), but those are mostly the diseases of old people. For the young, the NHS is a failure that pretends to treat them & then keeps them dangling with the hope of treatment that might manifest itself sometime, maybe.
We need to get back to the idea that the NHS sees getting working age people back into work as quickly as reasonably possible a priority.
I know of people waiting over two years to get access to CAMHS in Edinburgh.
Two years is quick, for most.
The rape case I did last week involved a young woman whose legal guardian claimed had a mental age of 6. She was in residential care but had freedom of movement. She was raped and enormously distressed. Medical evidence said, remarkably, that she understood enough about sex to consent or withhold her consent.
Her guardian contacted Social work the night it happened who did ...nothing. When the guardian got back from her holiday she took her to the police but it was too late to get medical support for the claim. The man was convicted by the evidence of the distress and what was said to the guardian hours after the assault. It was close, a majority verdict.
The lack of care of such an obviously vulnerable young woman frankly made me incandescent. So many jobsworths are paid to look after people and just don't give a damn. This case involved an indigenous Scot but it demonstrated all so clearly how the victims we are not supposed to talk about get taken advantage of.
We are spending a fortune on these services. We are not getting results.
I can’t be angry anymore. Anger at a certain, inventive result is pointless.
It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.
The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.
'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?
Should we get pensioners back into work?
£20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.
Cut the triple lock entirely.
£20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.
NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.
50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).
Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.
Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.
I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
And means test the NHS for the wealthy
Define wealthy.
Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.
As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.
One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.
- 1p on income tax. - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes. - NI for everyone who works. - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death. - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate. - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities. - Freeze thresholds. - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move). - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it. - Abolish the triple lock. - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care. - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses. - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic. - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we. - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)
And so on.
There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS
As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable
I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.
The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
Generally the choke point is the same pool of consultants and specialists that you have to see, before (and often during) getting private treatment that also give a proportion of their time to the NHS, with the private patients essentially paying to jump the queue. If there was incentive for a significant batch of people to switch to private, either private waiting times would increase dramatically, or consultants would do more private work and less NHS, making the NHS position worse.
The governments approach of using the over capacity in the private sector to deal with the NHS backlog is the more sensible one. Continuing what the Tories were doing before.
The absurd rationing of testing continues.
I know more and more people who pay private facilities to get MRIs etc. XRays seem to be easier in the NHS system.
Early detection of problems is cheaper.
Indeed, my dad just had this issue (hence my suggestion in the previous comment). He has had a knee problem for about 15 years, it's suddenly got a lot worse so he went to see the doctor. Long story short, after about 6 months of hearing nothing back from the NHS on getting a scan he went private and got a scan done - they said his right knee is basically completely deteriorated and he needs surgery.
He wanted to make sure that this was necessary so he arranged finally got an appointment with the NHS specialist a few months down the road who looked at the scan and said words to the effect of "we wouldn't recommend surgery at this stage because the degradation doesn't meet our requirements for it, basically you can still walk around for up to a mile or so before it starts really hurting". He then asked if he could go private would that advice change and the specialist said "yes, get this done ASAP because it will seriously improve your life quality and in 10 years when this gets to the point where the NHS will consider it degraded enough to operate you may not be eligible due to age and poor likelihood of recovery". It's a completely mental situation. They're knowingly saying no/delaying huge life improving surgery to people knowing that 10 years down the road it will cause huge issues for these people, well at least for those people who can't afford to go private.
This is the kind of stuff that I really think is low hanging fruit for the NHS, cheap preventative care today reduces our future liability by huge amounts and that's where I would be looking for gains. They may not show immediately but in 2-3 years there would be a noticeable drop in resource demand.
Our youngest had an ingrown toenail a couple of years ago. After going through the initial stages of treatment with our NHS GP (which consisted understandably of “give it a couple of weeks to see if it sorts itself out”) the GP referred him to get it looked at by a specialist. By the time the letter from the specialist dept had arrived to tell us we had been booked for an initial appointment another four months later we had already given up on the NHS & taken him to a private specialist who had diagnosed it as needing surgery & carried that surgery out that week - removing an impressively large chunk of toenail that had grown off sideways into the depths of his big toe in the process!
The specialist said the likely time from initial diagnostic appointment to actual surgery on the NHS was between 9-12 months in his experience.
The NHS is just broken for ordinary people it seems. If you fit into one of the “pathways” (cancer, stroke, heart disease) then you get treated in a timely fashion (most of the time), but those are mostly the diseases of old people. For the young, the NHS is a failure that pretends to treat them & then keeps them dangling with the hope of treatment that might manifest itself sometime, maybe.
We need to get back to the idea that the NHS sees getting working age people back into work as quickly as reasonably possible a priority.
I know of people waiting over two years to get access to CAMHS in Edinburgh.
And we wonder why PIP for youngsters with mental health issues is on the rise.
Because they're mentally weak and chronically on social media. Take away the phones and social media and the mental health problems go away.
Fine- build a framework where that can happen, like we do for stopping smoking. Probably relatively cheap and high payoff.
(That won't happen, largely for the same Triumph of Janet reasons that stop most useful things happening in Britain. The people who vote and who have time to kick up a fuss are older and NIMBY-inclined, so the state tends to bow to their immediate demands because they Have Paid Their Taxes All Their Life. So anything that might help younger, working age people isn't a priority.)
Can we make social media sites plaster "May cause anxiety and depression" all over the front page and a wider campaign?
For some generations it's about "quitting" social (as I have done, if you exclude about 10 people who can see my runs on Strava). For younger children it's about ensuring they don't get addicted in the first place. I'm hoping for my children's sake (5 and 2) that the widespread push back is such that the social pressure to be on it can be avoided.
A promotional piece in the Telegraph this morning for Laila Cunningham who defected from the Conservatives to Reform on Westminster Council. Perhaps the Telegraph think she would be a better London Mayoral candidate for Reform than Ant Middleton - she probably would.
The big question remains whether Sadiq Khan will stand again - if he chooses not to, the Labour canddiate could well be Mete Coban but we're a very long way from that at the moment.
I think Reform have disavowed Middletons candidacy due to his Tommy R support
Still being quoted on the betting markets - no price yet for Cunningham who could yet be the Reform candidate.
We'll know in the locals next year the extent to which Reform has strong popular support across London. The Fulham Town by election didn't augur well but I've no idea how much (if any) effort Reform put in.
There's a by election on July 24th in the Bromley Common & Holwood Ward of Bromley Council which might be more informative. The vote split in 2022 was : Conservative 47%, Labour 30%, LD 16%, Green 6% so Reform have to win this from a standing start.
It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.
The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.
'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?
Should we get pensioners back into work?
£20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.
Cut the triple lock entirely.
£20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.
NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.
50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).
Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.
Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.
I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
And means test the NHS for the wealthy
Define wealthy.
Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.
As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.
One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.
- 1p on income tax. - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes. - NI for everyone who works. - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death. - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate. - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities. - Freeze thresholds. - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move). - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it. - Abolish the triple lock. - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care. - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses. - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic. - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we. - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)
And so on.
There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS
As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable
I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.
The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
Generally the choke point is the same pool of consultants and specialists that you have to see, before (and often during) getting private treatment that also give a proportion of their time to the NHS, with the private patients essentially paying to jump the queue. If there was incentive for a significant batch of people to switch to private, either private waiting times would increase dramatically, or consultants would do more private work and less NHS, making the NHS position worse.
The governments approach of using the over capacity in the private sector to deal with the NHS backlog is the more sensible one. Continuing what the Tories were doing before.
The absurd rationing of testing continues.
I know more and more people who pay private facilities to get MRIs etc. XRays seem to be easier in the NHS system.
Early detection of problems is cheaper.
Indeed, my dad just had this issue (hence my suggestion in the previous comment). He has had a knee problem for about 15 years, it's suddenly got a lot worse so he went to see the doctor. Long story short, after about 6 months of hearing nothing back from the NHS on getting a scan he went private and got a scan done - they said his right knee is basically completely deteriorated and he needs surgery.
He wanted to make sure that this was necessary so he arranged finally got an appointment with the NHS specialist a few months down the road who looked at the scan and said words to the effect of "we wouldn't recommend surgery at this stage because the degradation doesn't meet our requirements for it, basically you can still walk around for up to a mile or so before it starts really hurting". He then asked if he could go private would that advice change and the specialist said "yes, get this done ASAP because it will seriously improve your life quality and in 10 years when this gets to the point where the NHS will consider it degraded enough to operate you may not be eligible due to age and poor likelihood of recovery". It's a completely mental situation. They're knowingly saying no/delaying huge life improving surgery to people knowing that 10 years down the road it will cause huge issues for these people, well at least for those people who can't afford to go private.
This is the kind of stuff that I really think is low hanging fruit for the NHS, cheap preventative care today reduces our future liability by huge amounts and that's where I would be looking for gains. They may not show immediately but in 2-3 years there would be a noticeable drop in resource demand.
Our youngest had an ingrown toenail a couple of years ago. After going through the initial stages of treatment with our NHS GP (which consisted understandably of “give it a couple of weeks to see if it sorts itself out”) the GP referred him to get it looked at by a specialist. By the time the letter from the specialist dept had arrived to tell us we had been booked for an initial appointment another four months later we had already given up on the NHS & taken him to a private specialist who had diagnosed it as needing surgery & carried that surgery out that week - removing an impressively large chunk of toenail that had grown off sideways into the depths of his big toe in the process!
The specialist said the likely time from initial diagnostic appointment to actual surgery on the NHS was between 9-12 months in his experience.
The NHS is just broken for ordinary people it seems. If you fit into one of the “pathways” (cancer, stroke, heart disease) then you get treated in a timely fashion (most of the time), but those are mostly the diseases of old people. For the young, the NHS is a failure that pretends to treat them & then keeps them dangling with the hope of treatment that might manifest itself sometime, maybe.
We need to get back to the idea that the NHS sees getting working age people back into work as quickly as reasonably possible a priority.
I know of people waiting over two years to get access to CAMHS in Edinburgh.
Two years is quick, for most.
The rape case I did last week involved a young woman whose legal guardian claimed had a mental age of 6. She was in residential care but had freedom of movement. She was raped and enormously distressed. Medical evidence said, remarkably, that she understood enough about sex to consent or withhold her consent.
Her guardian contacted Social work the night it happened who did ...nothing. When the guardian got back from her holiday she took her to the police but it was too late to get medical support for the claim. The man was convicted by the evidence of the distress and what was said to the guardian hours after the assault. It was close, a majority verdict.
The lack of care of such an obviously vulnerable young woman frankly made me incandescent. So many jobsworths are paid to look after people and just don't give a damn. This case involved an indigenous Scot but it demonstrated all so clearly how the victims we are not supposed to talk about get taken advantage of.
We are spending a fortune on these services. We are not getting results.
That's absolutely shocking and glad the jury came back with the correct decision, even by majority verdict. These are the kinds of cases why people like me suggest that burning it all down and starting again can't be worse than what we have now. People are being failed by the state at an alarming rate, whether that's cases like these which are absolutely awful, the NHS in lots of areas, the police are failing the public at large on crime, the judiciary are failing the public in deportations, politicians are failing us on all fronts.
The UK is getting closer and closer to becoming a failed state so maybe some tough medicine is what the state needs, not more of the same.
Comments
As an adult I worked in and around the NHS all my life and I really hate the idea of charging people for it's services and I take the same view about education; good quality and free for all.
However obviously such services have to be paid for. If it means a couple of pence on income tax so be it. I'm a bit more cautious about an increase in petrol prices; it's OK in the city but out here in the sticks people need to drive to work. The days of small towns and villages where everyone worked in the local mill, down the local mine or in the fields within walking distance are long gone.
Council tax, based on house values is another which needs revising and I'm all for a major review with an increase in the number of bands.
I'd renationalise public utility companies, especially if their management is as crap as Thames Water. Compensation? Go whistle!
I think it will be about 11 months off in total spent with the family, which is the best year I've had since the year my then girlfriend (now wife) and I went travelling together for six months and got married a few months after we got back. If you can afford to take the time off, I'd highly recommend doing a year(ish) long career break and just spending the time with family and not worrying about work stuff. I'm obviously very lucky that I have earned well in my previous roles and that my wife also has a high income so I do recognise that not everyone would be able to do it.
https://www.tiktok.com/@altheajames278/video/7522981761911901462
Verstappen getting mugged by Piastri was just as good.
The governments approach of using the over capacity in the private sector to deal with the NHS backlog is the more sensible one. Continuing what the Tories were doing before.
In my own case, if I'd carried on smoking, which I gave up on becoming a father, I might well be dead now and the costs of keeping me alive consequently reduced.
But no R-4360 or Sabres - which would be an insane cost to run.
I will now never experience it. Oh well
https://x.com/kobeissiletter/status/1941853148760461665?s=61
On your specific point, I think one of the issues there is that the courts are forbidden by statute law to doubt the fidelity of computer evidence, and so they would not be able to quash convictions that were made on that basis. And, of course, Parliament presumably doesn't want to open the can of worms that would ensue by repealing that law (unless I missed its repeal).
I know more and more people who pay private facilities to get MRIs etc. XRays seem to be easier in the NHS system.
Early detection of problems is cheaper.
Similarly I had the same experience with a bilateral hernia
That's not even provocative; just nonsense.
I think he just enjoys the exercise of arbitrary power; there's no real strategy (or sensible way to negotiate with him).
I don't really think there's much choice, there needs to be a way of reducing demand because it is currently an open ended unlimited demand if we continue as we currently are.
https://x.com/dkthomp/status/1941894499141115992?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
You’re lucky, of course, to have avoided it, but it does make your life experience and your anecdotes, and hence your judgement, way off when it comes to relating to politics and the experience of the voting masses.
FSB detained Konstantin Strukov, head of gold giant Yuzhuralzoloto (largest privately-held gold mining company in Russia) and deputy of the Chelyabinsk regional parliament, while he attempted to flee Russia to Turkey.
https://x.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1941611733535293540
He wanted to make sure that this was necessary so he arranged finally got an appointment with the NHS specialist a few months down the road who looked at the scan and said words to the effect of "we wouldn't recommend surgery at this stage because the degradation doesn't meet our requirements for it, basically you can still walk around for up to a mile or so before it starts really hurting". He then asked if he could go private would that advice change and the specialist said "yes, get this done ASAP because it will seriously improve your life quality and in 10 years when this gets to the point where the NHS will consider it degraded enough to operate you may not be eligible due to age and poor likelihood of recovery". It's a completely mental situation. They're knowingly saying no/delaying huge life improving surgery to people knowing that 10 years down the road it will cause huge issues for these people, well at least for those people who can't afford to go private.
This is the kind of stuff that I really think is low hanging fruit for the NHS, cheap preventative care today reduces our future liability by huge amounts and that's where I would be looking for gains. They may not show immediately but in 2-3 years there would be a noticeable drop in resource demand.
ET correct auto correct
And doesn't require fossil fuel imports.
Economics alone explain why renewables are growing so fast in China.
A big 25GWh BESS tender with the bulk of the volume bid (offers, actually) at US$60/kWh. Interesting price. Cheap mix. HUGE size.
$60/kWh is not just battery. It comes with all the trimmings and the install.
https://x.com/bauhiniacapital/status/1940691606224752694
Even MRIs are treated as if them cost zillions and require using the ziggurat on R'lyeh.
The younger you are for an op, the better.
And imagine the probable outcome of lower mobility - increasing weight and less exercise. What could that possibly lead to?
And I know knee operations are not without risk - my mum had one and it went perfectly fine until one day 7 weeks later it wasn't but as you say it's £x spent now to avoid spending £x+y later..
The specialist said the likely time from initial diagnostic appointment to actual surgery on the NHS was between 9-12 months in his experience.
The NHS is just broken for ordinary people it seems. If you fit into one of the “pathways” (cancer, stroke, heart disease) then you get treated in a timely fashion (most of the time), but those are mostly the diseases of old people. For the young, the NHS is a failure that pretends to treat them & then keeps them dangling with the hope of treatment that might manifest itself sometime, maybe.
We need to get back to the idea that the NHS sees getting working age people back into work as quickly as reasonably possible a priority.
My dad went private for a knee and a hip, to the tune of £15K each. Not cheap, but worth it. One assumes a cost to the NHS of less, albeit with a longer wait.
And I doubt that we have any precise measures for GDP in 1830 anyway.
If the polling Leon has found identifies a growth of such identity, or Potemkin, Christians in Britain, then it could be very politically significant.
It may well be what they said on the survey, but not the reality. A bit like "Evangelical Christians" in the USA that never actually go to a service more to do with cultural identity.
When you get to that point the NHS is simply not delivering for working people, unless you fit into one of the categories that they care about, basically women's cancers. And it employs over 1.5m people and costs almost a third of all public expenditure. Something has gone very seriously wrong.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/article/paralympian-trying-to-get-wheelchair-ramp-says-veterans-affairs-employee-offered-her-assisted-dying/
If all the medics were philosopher kings from Plato, maaaaaybe.
But there are too many who aren't.
Let them form a minority administration.
Shifting some tax from income to wealth (read: income tax to property or tax) makes sense, especially if combined with scrapping stamp duty, but that isn't a silver bullet. What it does do is help put downward pressure on property prices as people don't live in big houses they don't need (or need to pay significant tax for the luxury to do so). Socialist states like the USA do this a lot more.
In terms of increasing income tax or other revenue raising of workers, I mean fine if needed (albeit it's already high). But my quid quo pro would be massive increase in house building approvals wherever there is demand; plus the above introduction of proper annual property taxes on market value. We can't keep piling on workers and letting asset owners get off easy.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_phu4cvXHYA
Her guardian contacted Social work the night it happened who did ...nothing. When the guardian got back from her holiday she took her to the police but it was too late to get medical support for the claim. The man was convicted by the evidence of the distress and what was said to the guardian hours after the assault. It was close, a majority verdict.
The lack of care of such an obviously vulnerable young woman frankly made me incandescent. So many jobsworths are paid to look after people and just don't give a damn. This case involved an indigenous Scot but it demonstrated all so clearly how the victims we are not supposed to talk about get taken advantage of.
We are spending a fortune on these services. We are not getting results.
And that leads fairly smoothly to the consequences we are currently seeing Stateside.
(Much more likely is that using polling to identify small percentages is blooming difficult. And that calculating a change by subtracting one blurry number from another is a mug's game.)
A promotional piece in the Telegraph this morning for Laila Cunningham who defected from the Conservatives to Reform on Westminster Council. Perhaps the Telegraph think she would be a better London Mayoral candidate for Reform than Ant Middleton - she probably would.
The big question remains whether Sadiq Khan will stand again - if he chooses not to, the Labour canddiate could well be Mete Coban but we're a very long way from that at the moment.
(That won't happen, largely for the same Triumph of Janet reasons that stop most useful things happening in Britain. The people who vote and who have time to kick up a fuss are older and NIMBY-inclined, so the state tends to bow to their immediate demands because they Have Paid Their Taxes All Their Life. So anything that might help younger, working age people isn't a priority.)
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GOVPUB-T-c5aeafee378406091cfeedd20670b243/pdf/GOVPUB-T-c5aeafee378406091cfeedd20670b243.pdf
I'm struggling to find the enormous precept for firewood.
Instead, I feel a bland calmness. Expressed thus
For some generations it's about "quitting" social (as I have done, if you exclude about 10 people who can see my runs on Strava). For younger children it's about ensuring they don't get addicted in the first place. I'm hoping for my children's sake (5 and 2) that the widespread push back is such that the social pressure to be on it can be avoided.
We'll know in the locals next year the extent to which Reform has strong popular support across London. The Fulham Town by election didn't augur well but I've no idea how much (if any) effort Reform put in.
There's a by election on July 24th in the Bromley Common & Holwood Ward of Bromley Council which might be more informative. The vote split in 2022 was : Conservative 47%, Labour 30%, LD 16%, Green 6% so Reform have to win this from a standing start.
That's absolutely shocking and glad the jury came back with the correct decision, even by majority verdict. These are the kinds of cases why people like me suggest that burning it all down and starting again can't be worse than what we have now. People are being failed by the state at an alarming rate, whether that's cases like these which are absolutely awful, the NHS in lots of areas, the police are failing the public at large on crime, the judiciary are failing the public in deportations, politicians are failing us on all fronts.
The UK is getting closer and closer to becoming a failed state so maybe some tough medicine is what the state needs, not more of the same.