The Telegraph is concerned by the rising threat posed by Islamist prisoners, and so is everyone's favourite social media star:-
Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, said: “Extremists and career criminals now operate with near impunity inside some of this country’s highest-security prisons.
“That is a complete failure of leadership – and a dangerous abdication of one of the state’s core duties: maintaining order behind bars.
“When Islamist terrorists and organised crime figures are left to forge alliances, we aren’t just witnessing a security lapse – we’re watching a national threat incubate in plain sight. This cannot be allowed to continue.”
There is also a helpful graph to demonstrate this rising threat but can anyone spot an anomaly the Telegraph and Rob J have both missed?
The Telegraph is concerned by the rising threat posed by Islamist prisoners, and so is everyone's favourite social media star:-
Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, said: “Extremists and career criminals now operate with near impunity inside some of this country’s highest-security prisons.
“That is a complete failure of leadership – and a dangerous abdication of one of the state’s core duties: maintaining order behind bars.
“When Islamist terrorists and organised crime figures are left to forge alliances, we aren’t just witnessing a security lapse – we’re watching a national threat incubate in plain sight. This cannot be allowed to continue.”
There is also a helpful graph to demonstrate this rising threat but can anyone spot an anomaly the Telegraph and Rob J have both missed?
There are only 500 Jewish prisoners though, so a few random incidents could have bumped those numbers up.
The graph says 23.1 assaults per 100 prisoners. If there are 500 Jewish prisoners, then that should be 115.5 assaults. Let's call it 115. This is probably Poisson distributed, so on that basis, we can calculate a 95% confidence interval of 95-138 events. That translates back to 19.0-27.6 assaults per 100 prisoners. The lower end of that confidence interval is still higher than the figure reported for Muslim prisoners, but the confidence intervals for the two groups probably overlap.
Good stuff. I'd still be interested to know how many of the assaults by Jewish inmates were committed by the most violent ten individuals, and how that distribution compared to the other categories.
Assuming the presented figures are for a single year, it would also be interesting to look at the variation over the last five years.
Tax? Well if we're not imposing a tax on all foreigners living abroad or a tax on thingy (you know, THNGY!!!) then we need to go after the daddy - Council Tax.
This one is fairly straight forward - what we have now is utterly absurd. Valuations decades into the past with no band that covers the actual values of so many houses? Madness.
Arguing that we must keep the status quo is cowardice. People don't like or understand council tax anyway, so replacing it shouldn't be that controversial.
Two principles: we need to fund local government effectively, and property is far harder to move out of tax than cash or other assets. So a Land Value Tax to replace Council Tax. Based on actual land value today, not eons ago. Some places are quite expensive, others less so. Won't be as popular in Godalming as is will be in Grimsby.
I also believe that almost all of a local council's budget should be levied via council tax - there should be no role for central government. If that means council taxes rise/fall then so be it.
Or flip it the other way - all tax should be raised centrally and handed out to local authorities by central government to meet local needs.
Not for me - I hate the idea of someone in London deciding what the local needs are in Wiltshire. See the arguments for devolution. The issues arise when the national government can choose to reward or punish local government (often because of the colour of the rosette).
Tax? Well if we're not imposing a tax on all foreigners living abroad or a tax on thingy (you know, THNGY!!!) then we need to go after the daddy - Council Tax.
This one is fairly straight forward - what we have now is utterly absurd. Valuations decades into the past with no band that covers the actual values of so many houses? Madness.
Arguing that we must keep the status quo is cowardice. People don't like or understand council tax anyway, so replacing it shouldn't be that controversial.
Two principles: we need to fund local government effectively, and property is far harder to move out of tax than cash or other assets. So a Land Value Tax to replace Council Tax. Based on actual land value today, not eons ago. Some places are quite expensive, others less so. Won't be as popular in Godalming as is will be in Grimsby.
I also believe that almost all of a local council's budget should be levied via council tax - there should be no role for central government. If that means council taxes rise/fall then so be it.
I would agree with the last point if they moved social care from local to National, like with the NHS. I also wonder now what the point of local funding for schools is for. Just centralise it.
Hypothetically if the Attorney General over here, as the chief legal adviser to the government, said they had some evidence "on their desk" and then a few months later their department said "no such evidence exists", wouldn't that normally be grounds for resignation, dismissal, and maybe even proceedings against them?
It seems a bit odd to me that such a senior law officer can make such misleading statements and get away with it.
Tax? Well if we're not imposing a tax on all foreigners living abroad or a tax on thingy (you know, THNGY!!!) then we need to go after the daddy - Council Tax.
This one is fairly straight forward - what we have now is utterly absurd. Valuations decades into the past with no band that covers the actual values of so many houses? Madness.
Arguing that we must keep the status quo is cowardice. People don't like or understand council tax anyway, so replacing it shouldn't be that controversial.
Two principles: we need to fund local government effectively, and property is far harder to move out of tax than cash or other assets. So a Land Value Tax to replace Council Tax. Based on actual land value today, not eons ago. Some places are quite expensive, others less so. Won't be as popular in Godalming as is will be in Grimsby.
I also believe that almost all of a local council's budget should be levied via council tax - there should be no role for central government. If that means council taxes rise/fall then so be it.
Or flip it the other way - all tax should be raised centrally and handed out to local authorities by central government to meet local needs.
Both would work if the country was a homogenous entity in which all areas had the same needs, the same kind of people and the same kind of housing.
Unfortunately, it doesn't.
Newham is not Surrey, Liverpool is not Cornwall. The amount each area needs and the ability of that area to meet that need from its own resources (council tax, parking fines, housing licences etc) would be so varied as to be ridiculous so the central Government "grant" helps equalise it.
If that grant were to be apportioned by an independent non-political body it would help but if it's dished out by the Government then some areas will always be "favoured" and you can guess which depending on which party is in power centrally and locally.
You could probably fund most of local Government locally IF you took the funding for social care and perhaps housing away and funded it directly through some national scheme such as a National Care Agency or a National Housing Agency.
The Telegraph is concerned by the rising threat posed by Islamist prisoners, and so is everyone's favourite social media star:-
Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, said: “Extremists and career criminals now operate with near impunity inside some of this country’s highest-security prisons.
“That is a complete failure of leadership – and a dangerous abdication of one of the state’s core duties: maintaining order behind bars.
“When Islamist terrorists and organised crime figures are left to forge alliances, we aren’t just witnessing a security lapse – we’re watching a national threat incubate in plain sight. This cannot be allowed to continue.”
There is also a helpful graph to demonstrate this rising threat but can anyone spot an anomaly the Telegraph and Rob J have both missed?
There are only 500 Jewish prisoners though, so a few random incidents could have bumped those numbers up.
The graph says 23.1 assaults per 100 prisoners. If there are 500 Jewish prisoners, then that should be 115.5 assaults. Let's call it 115. This is probably Poisson distributed, so on that basis, we can calculate a 95% confidence interval of 95-138 events. That translates back to 19.0-27.6 assaults per 100 prisoners. The lower end of that confidence interval is still higher than the figure reported for Muslim prisoners, but the confidence intervals for the two groups probably overlap.
Good stuff. I'd still be interested to know how many of the assaults by Jewish inmates were committed by the most violent ten individuals, and how that distribution compared to the other categories.
Assuming the presented figures are for a single year, it would also be interesting to look at the variation over the last five years.
Indeed, surely the measure should be violent prisoners per 1000, not number of incidents as that will not account for outlier violence from one or two ultra violent types.
The Telegraph is concerned by the rising threat posed by Islamist prisoners, and so is everyone's favourite social media star:-
Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, said: “Extremists and career criminals now operate with near impunity inside some of this country’s highest-security prisons.
“That is a complete failure of leadership – and a dangerous abdication of one of the state’s core duties: maintaining order behind bars.
“When Islamist terrorists and organised crime figures are left to forge alliances, we aren’t just witnessing a security lapse – we’re watching a national threat incubate in plain sight. This cannot be allowed to continue.”
There is also a helpful graph to demonstrate this rising threat but can anyone spot an anomaly the Telegraph and Rob J have both missed?
But it's been known for decades that prisons are what you'd come up with if you wanted a university for criminals. Obviously the courses on offer are going to reflect the people who are sent to live there.
But maybe there's hope - with the trend away from jailing dangerous people towards jailing hurty words people, maybe society will become less violent in a century or so.
On housing and development, it's worth pointing out the biggest obstacle to development isn't "NIMBY-ism" (whatever that means), it's the actual cost of construction.
In London, there's the Section 106 payment, the Community Infrastructure Levy and the Carbon Off-Set Tax to name but three. Developers look at sites and you and I might ask why they aren't being developed - the answer isn't to blame the LDs (far too easy and wrong) but to blame successive Governments for hiking construction costs.
That's before we get into supply chain capacity issues, shortages of specialist trades etc, etc. If you are serious about building houses, then get your children to be bricklayers, sparks or chippies and create a meaningful National Apprentice Scheme and encourage (or cajole) private sector companies to employ these apprentices.
Developers want to develop and they want to work WITH local communities to provide developments which work for everyone but they have to at least be able to break even on a site and what's stopping them are the costs.
Hypothetically if the Attorney General over here, as the chief legal adviser to the government, said they had some evidence "on their desk" and then a few months later their department said "no such evidence exists", wouldn't that normally be grounds for resignation, dismissal, and maybe even proceedings against them?
It seems a bit odd to me that such a senior law officer can make such misleading statements and get away with it.
Every senior official in the Trump administration lies continuously.
Right now there is no penalty for doing so.
I am not as confident as they appear to be that it will remain so in perpetuity...
Just caught up with the IFS proposal for VAT on food.
Where on earth do we dig these lunatics up, and why do we give them any airtime at all? Why are they not doing something on their own intellectual level like cleaning out a stables?
If they are serious, I would remind them that Balfour had a majority comparable to Starmer's, but proposed taxes on food - much more modest ones - destroyed his government and very nearly his entire political movement.
I completely missed this. They arent proposing bringing all food under VAT surely??
Yep - it's that time this decade when the idea gets trotted out - alongside the response of you do know that's an incredibly regressive change because poor people spend more of their income on food than rich people..
I still wonder whether it would work to have a second level of VAT on “luxury goods” where it doesn’t affect the lowest paid levels but it’s on purely discretionary spending on things that really are not necessary just desirable.
For example, you could set a level of a price of car and then add on a luxury vat on purchase of cars over that amount, say £50k. Now there is absolutely no “need” to spend more than £50k on a car and is purely a choice made for reasons.
If you cannot afford to pay the extra rate of luxury vat on your over 50k car then you should probably be questioning whether you should be in the market for a £50k car in the first place as a proportion of your wealth/disposable.
Again this could be rolled out on multiple goods - watches over £200, handbags over £200, clothing over £200 (apart from specialist workwear/sports kit).
There are huge sums spent on “unnecessary” goods in the UK, often that people are buying on the never-never where either the extra tax is rolled into their repayments or it makes people think a bit first.
I can’t think of anyone who is going to be buying a Mercedes G65 who is going to not buy it because there is an extra £20k in tax on it, if you have to squeeze every penny you have to buy it under current VAT then just don’t buy it.
I’m sure someone will point out why this won’t work though.
One of the principal reasons for our sluggish growth in recent years is asset rich (generally older) people not spending enough money.
Savings rates are through the roof and private debt is the lowest for decades.
We need those OAPs buying as much tat as possible (so long as it’s eco friendly tat). And that includes foreign made goods and foreign holidays, because a large chunk of the associated economic activity and profit arises here.
I rarely spend anything other than on day-to-day expenses but quite a bit of my income goes to helping my wider family survive now. My savings are there to pay for such care as I may need as incapacity arrives (if it does).
By your approach, I'd buy loads of tat to go into charity shops or landfill and then rely on tax-payers to fund my incapacitated years (or to fund my medical death, if my opinions aren't respected).
So the critics need to suggest solutions instead of being like Labour MPs who are being the problem rather than the solution.
My top three tax increases would be:
1. Merge income tax and national insurance (thereby increasing tax on pensioner income). 2. Restrict tax relief on pension contributions to the basic rate (given how wealthy some pensioners are it's arguable that higher rate taxpayers are saving too much for their retirement). 3. Replace council tax and stamp duty with a proportional property tax, land value tax, or similar tax on property wealth.
I'm sure all of these would provoke howls of outrage to make the kerfuffle over WFA look like the newest political ripple, but fixing the situation isn't going to be done without, as the politicians like to say, hard choices. And on spending, too.
That last one is a non-starter for Labour given how badly Londoners would lose out.
There are no tax rises that are not a non starter for somebody. Labour's support base means that they can't attack the public sector, can't attack welfare and can't attack the middle class and can't attack London. Dubai and Monaco plus the special interests of media owners means they can't attack the very rich, and you can't attack the very poor because you can't tax a lack of income or assets.
And you can't do massive 'start again' structural changes - which is what we need - because you can't rebuild your plane in the middle of a stormy crossing of the Atlantic.
Apart from all that it's easy.
A guess: The best thing to do would be at the next budget to announce so many measures, hundreds of them, including major tax rises, that you both get all the criticism over in one go, and tell ordinary people that the government actually has a plan and some courage. If you really need an extra £100billion, and you come under existential fire for a few billion, you might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.
So the critics need to suggest solutions instead of being like Labour MPs who are being the problem rather than the solution.
My top three tax increases would be:
1. Merge income tax and national insurance (thereby increasing tax on pensioner income). 2. Restrict tax relief on pension contributions to the basic rate (given how wealthy some pensioners are it's arguable that higher rate taxpayers are saving too much for their retirement). 3. Replace council tax and stamp duty with a proportional property tax, land value tax, or similar tax on property wealth.
I'm sure all of these would provoke howls of outrage to make the kerfuffle over WFA look like the newest political ripple, but fixing the situation isn't going to be done without, as the politicians like to say, hard choices. And on spending, too.
That last one is a non-starter for Labour given how badly Londoners would lose out.
There are no tax rises that are not a non starter for somebody. Labour's support base means that they can't attack the public sector, can't attack welfare and can't attack the middle class and can't attack London. Dubai and Monaco plus the special interests of media owners means they can't attack the very rich, and you can't attack the very poor because you can't tax a lack of income or assets.
And you can't do massive 'start again' structural changes - which is what we need - because you can't rebuild your plane in the middle of a stormy crossing of the Atlantic.
Apart from all that it's easy.
A guess: The best thing to do would be at the next budget to announce so many measures, hundreds of them, including major tax rises, that you both get all the criticism over in one go, and tell ordinary people that the government actually has a plan and some courage. If you really need an extra £100billion, and you come under existential fire for a few billion, you might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.
Except this issue was obvious a year ago and many of the changes required will take 2-4 years to implement so will start to impact people just as the next election arrives
On housing and development, it's worth pointing out the biggest obstacle to development isn't "NIMBY-ism" (whatever that means), it's the actual cost of construction.
In London, there's the Section 106 payment, the Community Infrastructure Levy and the Carbon Off-Set Tax to name but three. Developers look at sites and you and I might ask why they aren't being developed - the answer isn't to blame the LDs (far too easy and wrong) but to blame successive Governments for hiking construction costs.
That's before we get into supply chain capacity issues, shortages of specialist trades etc, etc. If you are serious about building houses, then get your children to be bricklayers, sparks or chippies and create a meaningful National Apprentice Scheme and encourage (or cajole) private sector companies to employ these apprentices.
Developers want to develop and they want to work WITH local communities to provide developments which work for everyone but they have to at least be able to break even on a site and what's stopping them are the costs.
The real, sensible arguments are about services, and about conforming to local building plans.
Rather than baroque attempts to charge developers for schools and GP surgeries etc... Why not do the following -
- lay out the planned street grid for a new area. - build the services - sewers, leecy, schools, hospitals etc. first. This has the advantage of reducing load on existing local services, even before the new houses go up. - sell the plots to the developers at a price that covers the above. Make sure that the parcels of plots are not all sold to the same developer.
I actually agree with the Lord Elon over the America Party. Their 2 party system is utterly corrupted and needs challenging. With the Democrats struggling with "do we select mentalists or the corrupt elite" and the Republicans now cheering on having their own faces eaten by leopards, the time is right for a challenge.
Helps that the challenger has previously been in both party's orbits and accidentally has a bazillion dollars to spend and a major social media platform to use.
There's something in that, but just throwing money at a political problem doesn't work, as Musk himself recently discovered when he tried to swing a special (by-)election. Not convinced that Musk has coat-tails at all.
Just caught up with the IFS proposal for VAT on food.
Where on earth do we dig these lunatics up, and why do we give them any airtime at all? Why are they not doing something on their own intellectual level like cleaning out a stables?
If they are serious, I would remind them that Balfour had a majority comparable to Starmer's, but proposed taxes on food - much more modest ones - destroyed his government and very nearly his entire political movement.
I completely missed this. They arent proposing bringing all food under VAT surely??
Yep - it's that time this decade when the idea gets trotted out - alongside the response of you do know that's an incredibly regressive change because poor people spend more of their income on food than rich people..
I still wonder whether it would work to have a second level of VAT on “luxury goods” where it doesn’t affect the lowest paid levels but it’s on purely discretionary spending on things that really are not necessary just desirable.
For example, you could set a level of a price of car and then add on a luxury vat on purchase of cars over that amount, say £50k. Now there is absolutely no “need” to spend more than £50k on a car and is purely a choice made for reasons.
If you cannot afford to pay the extra rate of luxury vat on your over 50k car then you should probably be questioning whether you should be in the market for a £50k car in the first place as a proportion of your wealth/disposable.
Again this could be rolled out on multiple goods - watches over £200, handbags over £200, clothing over £200 (apart from specialist workwear/sports kit).
There are huge sums spent on “unnecessary” goods in the UK, often that people are buying on the never-never where either the extra tax is rolled into their repayments or it makes people think a bit first.
I can’t think of anyone who is going to be buying a Mercedes G65 who is going to not buy it because there is an extra £20k in tax on it, if you have to squeeze every penny you have to buy it under current VAT then just don’t buy it.
I’m sure someone will point out why this won’t work though.
One of the principal reasons for our sluggish growth in recent years is asset rich (generally older) people not spending enough money.
Savings rates are through the roof and private debt is the lowest for decades.
We need those OAPs buying as much tat as possible (so long as it’s eco friendly tat). And that includes foreign made goods and foreign holidays, because a large chunk of the associated economic activity and profit arises here.
I rarely spend anything other than on day-to-day expenses but quite a bit of my income goes to helping my wider family survive now. My savings are there to pay for such care as I may need as incapacity arrives (if it does).
By your approach, I'd buy loads of tat to go into charity shops or landfill and then rely on tax-payers to fund my incapacitated years (or to fund my medical death, if my opinions aren't respected).
Tat isn't a great use of money, but spending on home improvements (particularly insulation, energy efficient heating, solar, batteries etc) could be seen as more of a public good as that would help improve the general housing stock. In principle, it should also increase house sale price, either funding later care or boosting inheritances (possibly more so than saving the money, if house prices outstrip savings rates).
Alternatively, things like domestic travel can boost local economies (not necessarily local to you!) or even foreign travel boosts airports, ports etc and UK based arrangers and operators. Likewise local visits to places nearby, meals out etc.
It's an interesting balance with keeping savings for better end of life care (and so likely reducing state expenditure). It would be interesting to see which has a more positive economic impact for the country overall. Probably depends on date and type of spending versus saving (spaffing savings on TEMU the day before entering a care home probably not helpful!).
Personally, I think the State should cover (good) social care in exchange for a share of whatever capital/assets remain at end of life. We could call it Social Care Insurance and set it to, say, 40% at end of life.
The Telegraph is concerned by the rising threat posed by Islamist prisoners, and so is everyone's favourite social media star:-
Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, said: “Extremists and career criminals now operate with near impunity inside some of this country’s highest-security prisons.
“That is a complete failure of leadership – and a dangerous abdication of one of the state’s core duties: maintaining order behind bars.
“When Islamist terrorists and organised crime figures are left to forge alliances, we aren’t just witnessing a security lapse – we’re watching a national threat incubate in plain sight. This cannot be allowed to continue.”
There is also a helpful graph to demonstrate this rising threat but can anyone spot an anomaly the Telegraph and Rob J have both missed?
But it's been known for decades that prisons are what you'd come up with if you wanted a university for criminals. Obviously the courses on offer are going to reflect the people who are sent to live there.
But maybe there's hope - with the trend away from jailing dangerous people towards jailing hurty words people, maybe society will become less violent in a century or so.
But the hurty words people will all come out with an even more vicious tongue.
So the critics need to suggest solutions instead of being like Labour MPs who are being the problem rather than the solution.
My top three tax increases would be:
1. Merge income tax and national insurance (thereby increasing tax on pensioner income). 2. Restrict tax relief on pension contributions to the basic rate (given how wealthy some pensioners are it's arguable that higher rate taxpayers are saving too much for their retirement). 3. Replace council tax and stamp duty with a proportional property tax, land value tax, or similar tax on property wealth.
I'm sure all of these would provoke howls of outrage to make the kerfuffle over WFA look like the newest political ripple, but fixing the situation isn't going to be done without, as the politicians like to say, hard choices. And on spending, too.
That last one is a non-starter for Labour given how badly Londoners would lose out.
There are no tax rises that are not a non starter for somebody. Labour's support base means that they can't attack the public sector, can't attack welfare and can't attack the middle class and can't attack London. Dubai and Monaco plus the special interests of media owners means they can't attack the very rich, and you can't attack the very poor because you can't tax a lack of income or assets.
And you can't do massive 'start again' structural changes - which is what we need - because you can't rebuild your plane in the middle of a stormy crossing of the Atlantic.
Apart from all that it's easy.
A guess: The best thing to do would be at the next budget to announce so many measures, hundreds of them, including major tax rises, that you both get all the criticism over in one go, and tell ordinary people that the government actually has a plan and some courage. If you really need an extra £100billion, and you come under existential fire for a few billion, you might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.
Except this issue was obvious a year ago and many of the changes required will take 2-4 years to implement so will start to impact people just as the next election arrives
Can there ever be a right time for doing the right thing in politics? It seems to me that the most recent examples of really trying to 'do the right thing' involved real courage and uncertainty. Thatcher after 1979, Attlee after 1945, and Churchill in 1940.
If Blair had had the courage after 1997 to do the right thing that he had in 2003 to do the wrong thing, he would have gone down in history too.
If Starmer wants a chance of being historic in good ways, he has a short window to do it in.
On housing and development, it's worth pointing out the biggest obstacle to development isn't "NIMBY-ism" (whatever that means), it's the actual cost of construction.
In London, there's the Section 106 payment, the Community Infrastructure Levy and the Carbon Off-Set Tax to name but three. Developers look at sites and you and I might ask why they aren't being developed - the answer isn't to blame the LDs (far too easy and wrong) but to blame successive Governments for hiking construction costs.
That's before we get into supply chain capacity issues, shortages of specialist trades etc, etc. If you are serious about building houses, then get your children to be bricklayers, sparks or chippies and create a meaningful National Apprentice Scheme and encourage (or cajole) private sector companies to employ these apprentices.
Developers want to develop and they want to work WITH local communities to provide developments which work for everyone but they have to at least be able to break even on a site and what's stopping them are the costs.
The real, sensible arguments are about services, and about conforming to local building plans.
Rather than baroque attempts to charge developers for schools and GP surgeries etc... Why not do the following -
- lay out the planned street grid for a new area. - build the services - sewers, leecy, schools, hospitals etc. first. This has the advantage of reducing load on existing local services, even before the new houses go up. - sell the plots to the developers at a price that covers the above. Make sure that the parcels of plots are not all sold to the same developer.
The Dutch approach - many on her have advocated it for years
So the critics need to suggest solutions instead of being like Labour MPs who are being the problem rather than the solution.
My top three tax increases would be:
1. Merge income tax and national insurance (thereby increasing tax on pensioner income). 2. Restrict tax relief on pension contributions to the basic rate (given how wealthy some pensioners are it's arguable that higher rate taxpayers are saving too much for their retirement). 3. Replace council tax and stamp duty with a proportional property tax, land value tax, or similar tax on property wealth.
I'm sure all of these would provoke howls of outrage to make the kerfuffle over WFA look like the newest political ripple, but fixing the situation isn't going to be done without, as the politicians like to say, hard choices. And on spending, too.
That last one is a non-starter for Labour given how badly Londoners would lose out.
There are no tax rises that are not a non starter for somebody. Labour's support base means that they can't attack the public sector, can't attack welfare and can't attack the middle class and can't attack London. Dubai and Monaco plus the special interests of media owners means they can't attack the very rich, and you can't attack the very poor because you can't tax a lack of income or assets.
And you can't do massive 'start again' structural changes - which is what we need - because you can't rebuild your plane in the middle of a stormy crossing of the Atlantic.
Apart from all that it's easy.
A guess: The best thing to do would be at the next budget to announce so many measures, hundreds of them, including major tax rises, that you both get all the criticism over in one go, and tell ordinary people that the government actually has a plan and some courage. If you really need an extra £100billion, and you come under existential fire for a few billion, you might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.
That has been suggested by quite a number - including myself.
Sell a rework of tax by folding NI into income tax. This would save billions in administration. Before you get to increased tax yield. To soften the hit for pensioners, the retired get a lower rate of tax that doesn't include the NI. So only rich pensioners pay extra tax. While you are at it, add a bit on tax rates, while getting rid of the complications regarding personal allowance withdrawal etc. Claim that this isn't really breaking the promises on tax not going up. Because of the reduction in complexity, some will gain and some will lose. The argument will be lost in time....
On pensions, quadruple lock - the extra lock is that the pension must be equal to the personal tax allowance. All the other old age benefits (WFA etc) go in a blender and come out means tested/taxable. Sell this as "Guaranteeing the future of the universal state pension. Our reforms means that poor pensioners get x% more. Pensioners on 50K are able to pay a bit more"
If the government had started with this, they would have raised more money, kept the markets calm and their back benchers would be happy - more money for the poor.
On housing and development, it's worth pointing out the biggest obstacle to development isn't "NIMBY-ism" (whatever that means), it's the actual cost of construction.
In London, there's the Section 106 payment, the Community Infrastructure Levy and the Carbon Off-Set Tax to name but three. Developers look at sites and you and I might ask why they aren't being developed - the answer isn't to blame the LDs (far too easy and wrong) but to blame successive Governments for hiking construction costs.
That's before we get into supply chain capacity issues, shortages of specialist trades etc, etc. If you are serious about building houses, then get your children to be bricklayers, sparks or chippies and create a meaningful National Apprentice Scheme and encourage (or cajole) private sector companies to employ these apprentices.
Developers want to develop and they want to work WITH local communities to provide developments which work for everyone but they have to at least be able to break even on a site and what's stopping them are the costs.
The real, sensible arguments are about services, and about conforming to local building plans.
Rather than baroque attempts to charge developers for schools and GP surgeries etc... Why not do the following -
- lay out the planned street grid for a new area. - build the services - sewers, leecy, schools, hospitals etc. first. This has the advantage of reducing load on existing local services, even before the new houses go up. - sell the plots to the developers at a price that covers the above. Make sure that the parcels of plots are not all sold to the same developer.
The Dutch approach - many on her have advocated it for years
It was how the Victorians did town planning - to them, it was obvious that the town planning should be planned by the town. Schools, hospitals etc were a responsibility of the town/local area - so they built them.
The actual house building was up to people who wanted to build houses.
I actually agree with the Lord Elon over the America Party. Their 2 party system is utterly corrupted and needs challenging. With the Democrats struggling with "do we select mentalists or the corrupt elite" and the Republicans now cheering on having their own faces eaten by leopards, the time is right for a challenge.
Helps that the challenger has previously been in both party's orbits and accidentally has a bazillion dollars to spend and a major social media platform to use.
There's something in that, but just throwing money at a political problem doesn't work, as Musk himself recently discovered when he tried to swing a special (by-)election. Not convinced that Musk has coat-tails at all.
Its a massive challenge - no debate from me on that. But I am an instinct democrat - more democracy is better than less, and I would really struggle to vote for either party in America...
The Telegraph is concerned by the rising threat posed by Islamist prisoners, and so is everyone's favourite social media star:-
Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, said: “Extremists and career criminals now operate with near impunity inside some of this country’s highest-security prisons.
“That is a complete failure of leadership – and a dangerous abdication of one of the state’s core duties: maintaining order behind bars.
“When Islamist terrorists and organised crime figures are left to forge alliances, we aren’t just witnessing a security lapse – we’re watching a national threat incubate in plain sight. This cannot be allowed to continue.”
There is also a helpful graph to demonstrate this rising threat but can anyone spot an anomaly the Telegraph and Rob J have both missed?
There are only 500 Jewish prisoners though, so a few random incidents could have bumped those numbers up.
The graph says 23.1 assaults per 100 prisoners. If there are 500 Jewish prisoners, then that should be 115.5 assaults. Let's call it 115. This is probably Poisson distributed, so on that basis, we can calculate a 95% confidence interval of 95-138 events. That translates back to 19.0-27.6 assaults per 100 prisoners. The lower end of that confidence interval is still higher than the figure reported for Muslim prisoners, but the confidence intervals for the two groups probably overlap.
Good stuff. I'd still be interested to know how many of the assaults by Jewish inmates were committed by the most violent ten individuals, and how that distribution compared to the other categories.
Assuming the presented figures are for a single year, it would also be interesting to look at the variation over the last five years.
If the assaults are conducted by a small number of the most violent individuals, then you probably have an overdispersed Poisson distribution and the confidence intervals would be larger. If one had the full dataset, there are all sorts of analyses one could do. It remains odd that the Telegraph article does not mention that it is not Muslim prisoners who have recorded the highest proportion of assaults.
Hypothetically if the Attorney General over here, as the chief legal adviser to the government, said they had some evidence "on their desk" and then a few months later their department said "no such evidence exists", wouldn't that normally be grounds for resignation, dismissal, and maybe even proceedings against them?
It seems a bit odd to me that such a senior law officer can make such misleading statements and get away with it.
Tax? Well if we're not imposing a tax on all foreigners living abroad or a tax on thingy (you know, THNGY!!!) then we need to go after the daddy - Council Tax.
This one is fairly straight forward - what we have now is utterly absurd. Valuations decades into the past with no band that covers the actual values of so many houses? Madness.
Arguing that we must keep the status quo is cowardice. People don't like or understand council tax anyway, so replacing it shouldn't be that controversial.
Two principles: we need to fund local government effectively, and property is far harder to move out of tax than cash or other assets. So a Land Value Tax to replace Council Tax. Based on actual land value today, not eons ago. Some places are quite expensive, others less so. Won't be as popular in Godalming as is will be in Grimsby.
I also believe that almost all of a local council's budget should be levied via council tax - there should be no role for central government. If that means council taxes rise/fall then so be it.
Express, bastion of level headed reporting, suggests Keirs one in one out deal with France is being scuppered and 'not to expect a breakthrough' on Macrons 'State visit'/jolly The EeeeYoo have stuck their fetid beaks in, it is alleged
I still can't see Basildon voters being that bothered about how much Mcmurdock borrowed for his businesses in lockdown.
If there was a recall petition and by election in his Basildon and South Thurrock seat I suspect Reform would hold it even if McMurdock was the candidate
You seem to have (although in fairness it is your view of Basildon voters rather than yourself) an unbalanced moral compass. I appear to to be a tax avoider by having ISAs (I forgot to mention I also have premium bonds as well, what a tax avoiding bastard I am) but alleged criminal activity (presumably alleged fraud) is, well, ok.
Bear in mind there is no by election if he is innocent so the scenario of Basildon voters not minding only applies if he isn't.
PS Having said that you may well be correct as it is difficult to see who else the voters vote for. The obvious other protest vote is LD or Green, neither of which I believe are big in Basildon.
2024 was 30/30/25 Ref/Lab/Con. If Lab or Con can cannibalise the other they win i think, if they split the vote, Reform hold in the low to mid 30s
Yep I agree. It is a 3 way marginal and a real pickle for the voters. Normally if they decide the incumbent doesn't deserve their vote they have an alternative, but the alternatives here (Lab/Con) they have also decided don't deserve their vote.
Each could be losing/winning votes to/from the other 2. Staying home and watching the telly might be the winner.
People will be wondering what I think on this tax point, I suppose.
Well, my startpoint is the contrast between the public balance sheet (stressed) and the private one (not so much). Data indicates there are more comfortably off people in this country than ever before. You don't find them featured much in vox pops or articles or blogs (since the greater appetite is for 'all is woe' and if you're comfortable you tend to not shout it from the rooftops) but they are there in large numbers.
So the mission, should the government choose to accept it, is to increase the £££ raised from this cohort without impacting that section of the population who are struggling as it is to get by (there are also more of these than ever before - a consequence of our relatively high tolerance for inequality).
How to do it? Always the rub. Every serious proposal will face a tsunami of 'politics of envy' or 'anti wealth creation' opposition from those who will lose out, who also happen to be the most articulate and influential members of society. But c'mon, we have a Labour government with a huge majority and 4 years to the next election, their MPs with no appetite (as just shown) to cut welfare or public services, so if not now when?
My top 2 are an annual levy on property wealth and replacing tax relief on pensions with state match funding of contributions up to a cap (same cap for everyone) - or alternatively (if easier to implement) restricting tax relief to the basic rate (which has a similar effect). I doubt the government will do the property levy but I think there's a fair chance they will have a tilt at the pensions reform.
The Telegraph is concerned by the rising threat posed by Islamist prisoners, and so is everyone's favourite social media star:-
Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, said: “Extremists and career criminals now operate with near impunity inside some of this country’s highest-security prisons.
“That is a complete failure of leadership – and a dangerous abdication of one of the state’s core duties: maintaining order behind bars.
“When Islamist terrorists and organised crime figures are left to forge alliances, we aren’t just witnessing a security lapse – we’re watching a national threat incubate in plain sight. This cannot be allowed to continue.”
There is also a helpful graph to demonstrate this rising threat but can anyone spot an anomaly the Telegraph and Rob J have both missed?
But it's been known for decades that prisons are what you'd come up with if you wanted a university for criminals. Obviously the courses on offer are going to reflect the people who are sent to live there.
But maybe there's hope - with the trend away from jailing dangerous people towards jailing hurty words people, maybe society will become less violent in a century or so.
There is the optimist in you. Instead they might come out and mug you and then decide to insult you on social media to boot.
So the critics need to suggest solutions instead of being like Labour MPs who are being the problem rather than the solution.
My top three tax increases would be:
1. Merge income tax and national insurance (thereby increasing tax on pensioner income). 2. Restrict tax relief on pension contributions to the basic rate (given how wealthy some pensioners are it's arguable that higher rate taxpayers are saving too much for their retirement). 3. Replace council tax and stamp duty with a proportional property tax, land value tax, or similar tax on property wealth.
I'm sure all of these would provoke howls of outrage to make the kerfuffle over WFA look like the newest political ripple, but fixing the situation isn't going to be done without, as the politicians like to say, hard choices. And on spending, too.
That last one is a non-starter for Labour given how badly Londoners would lose out.
There are no tax rises that are not a non starter for somebody. Labour's support base means that they can't attack the public sector, can't attack welfare and can't attack the middle class and can't attack London. Dubai and Monaco plus the special interests of media owners means they can't attack the very rich, and you can't attack the very poor because you can't tax a lack of income or assets.
And you can't do massive 'start again' structural changes - which is what we need - because you can't rebuild your plane in the middle of a stormy crossing of the Atlantic.
Apart from all that it's easy.
A guess: The best thing to do would be at the next budget to announce so many measures, hundreds of them, including major tax rises, that you both get all the criticism over in one go, and tell ordinary people that the government actually has a plan and some courage. If you really need an extra £100billion, and you come under existential fire for a few billion, you might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.
That has been suggested by quite a number - including myself.
Sell a rework of tax by folding NI into income tax. This would save billions in administration. Before you get to increased tax yield. To soften the hit for pensioners, the retired get a lower rate of tax that doesn't include the NI. So only rich pensioners pay extra tax. While you are at it, add a bit on tax rates, while getting rid of the complications regarding personal allowance withdrawal etc. Claim that this isn't really breaking the promises on tax not going up. Because of the reduction in complexity, some will gain and some will lose. The argument will be lost in time....
On pensions, quadruple lock - the extra lock is that the pension must be equal to the personal tax allowance. All the other old age benefits (WFA etc) go in a blender and come out means tested/taxable. Sell this as "Guaranteeing the future of the universal state pension. Our reforms means that poor pensioners get x% more. Pensioners on 50K are able to pay a bit more"
If the government had started with this, they would have raised more money, kept the markets calm and their back benchers would be happy - more money for the poor.
Can I be Labour Chancellor?
Yes, I was saying "you might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb" on Day 1. Keir Starmer just isn't enough of a b*st*rd in the right ways. Hit everybody at once. Extra IHT and CGT on me as a business owner, screw the pensioners via a merger of IT and NI, screw everyone except the HENRYs (high earning not rich yet) with their child benefit and personal allowance clawbacks, their 9% student loan tax etc etc.
The Telegraph is concerned by the rising threat posed by Islamist prisoners, and so is everyone's favourite social media star:-
Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, said: “Extremists and career criminals now operate with near impunity inside some of this country’s highest-security prisons.
“That is a complete failure of leadership – and a dangerous abdication of one of the state’s core duties: maintaining order behind bars.
“When Islamist terrorists and organised crime figures are left to forge alliances, we aren’t just witnessing a security lapse – we’re watching a national threat incubate in plain sight. This cannot be allowed to continue.”
There is also a helpful graph to demonstrate this rising threat but can anyone spot an anomaly the Telegraph and Rob J have both missed?
But it's been known for decades that prisons are what you'd come up with if you wanted a university for criminals. Obviously the courses on offer are going to reflect the people who are sent to live there.
But maybe there's hope - with the trend away from jailing dangerous people towards jailing hurty words people, maybe society will become less violent in a century or so.
Most of those involved in the tweets during Southport got community or suspended sentenced.
Most violent criminals are in jail so at least not on the streets at that time.
There are also plenty of vocational courses you can do in jail
I actually agree with the Lord Elon over the America Party. Their 2 party system is utterly corrupted and needs challenging. With the Democrats struggling with "do we select mentalists or the corrupt elite" and the Republicans now cheering on having their own faces eaten by leopards, the time is right for a challenge.
Helps that the challenger has previously been in both party's orbits and accidentally has a bazillion dollars to spend and a major social media platform to use.
PR is the main way to replace a 2 party dominated system
Tax? Well if we're not imposing a tax on all foreigners living abroad or a tax on thingy (you know, THNGY!!!) then we need to go after the daddy - Council Tax.
This one is fairly straight forward - what we have now is utterly absurd. Valuations decades into the past with no band that covers the actual values of so many houses? Madness.
Arguing that we must keep the status quo is cowardice. People don't like or understand council tax anyway, so replacing it shouldn't be that controversial.
Two principles: we need to fund local government effectively, and property is far harder to move out of tax than cash or other assets. So a Land Value Tax to replace Council Tax. Based on actual land value today, not eons ago. Some places are quite expensive, others less so. Won't be as popular in Godalming as is will be in Grimsby.
I also believe that almost all of a local council's budget should be levied via council tax - there should be no role for central government. If that means council taxes rise/fall then so be it.
No qualms with that so long as everything central government mandates, like care and education/SEND, is centrally funded too.
I still can't see Basildon voters being that bothered about how much Mcmurdock borrowed for his businesses in lockdown.
If there was a recall petition and by election in his Basildon and South Thurrock seat I suspect Reform would hold it even if McMurdock was the candidate
You seem to have (although in fairness it is your view of Basildon voters rather than yourself) an unbalanced moral compass. I appear to to be a tax avoider by having ISAs (I forgot to mention I also have premium bonds as well, what a tax avoiding bastard I am) but alleged criminal activity (presumably alleged fraud) is, well, ok.
Bear in mind there is no by election if he is innocent so the scenario of Basildon voters not minding only applies if he isn't.
You spent ages whittering on about how you would keep your WFA without recognising the only reason you did is you albeit legally minimised your tax through ISAs to keep your income below the threshold of taxable income where WFA is removed.
He would need to be convicted and given a jail sentence of over 1 year to be removed as an MP or any jail term, even if suspended, for a recall petition.
I suspect most Basildon voters opposed any lockdown at all and certainly couldn't care less about amounts borrowed to keep businesses going through it. On current polls it would be an easy Reform hold with increased majority
I still can't see Basildon voters being that bothered about how much Mcmurdock borrowed for his businesses in lockdown.
If there was a recall petition and by election in his Basildon and South Thurrock seat I suspect Reform would hold it even if McMurdock was the candidate
We've just seem how Reform voters feel about being dragged back to vote because the candidate wasn't suitable or stepped down etc, twice And if he legitimately borrowed Covid funds for his businesses he won't be facing recall anyway, its if he didn't there's a problem. Reform have not backed him at all, so the chance of him being the Reform candidate in such circumstances are low
They haven't opposed him either, just suspended him during investigation
Just caught up with the IFS proposal for VAT on food.
Where on earth do we dig these lunatics up, and why do we give them any airtime at all? Why are they not doing something on their own intellectual level like cleaning out a stables?
If they are serious, I would remind them that Balfour had a majority comparable to Starmer's, but proposed taxes on food - much more modest ones - destroyed his government and very nearly his entire political movement.
All easily said, but the facts are a problem. We borrow £150 billion, every activity under state direction wants and needs more money - much more money, Labour MPs appear to believe in MMT as do many of the public, Truss history and the bond markets are a reality, there is no such thing as a popular and workable tax rise. PBers tell us that every tax on the well off means they all go to Monaco or Dubai; PBers tell us that every general tax on everyone (like VAT) will destroy the government.
If my maths is right (it may not be) VAT on food and non alcoholic drink at a low rate - eg 5%- would raise only about £8 billion annually, a sum which is dwarfed by the demands on the state. At 20% it would raise about £32 billion, which begins to look like serious money.
So the critics need to suggest solutions instead of being like Labour MPs who are being the problem rather than the solution.
There are multiple much more workable solutions.
Merge National Insurance and Income Tax should be top of the list so that everyone pays the same rate of tax regardless of how they earn their money, rather than people who work for a living being on a higher rate of tax.
Absolutely not, NI should be ringfenced for state pension and JSA based on what it was founded to fund
The Telegraph is concerned by the rising threat posed by Islamist prisoners, and so is everyone's favourite social media star:-
Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, said: “Extremists and career criminals now operate with near impunity inside some of this country’s highest-security prisons.
“That is a complete failure of leadership – and a dangerous abdication of one of the state’s core duties: maintaining order behind bars.
“When Islamist terrorists and organised crime figures are left to forge alliances, we aren’t just witnessing a security lapse – we’re watching a national threat incubate in plain sight. This cannot be allowed to continue.”
There is also a helpful graph to demonstrate this rising threat but can anyone spot an anomaly the Telegraph and Rob J have both missed?
But it's been known for decades that prisons are what you'd come up with if you wanted a university for criminals. Obviously the courses on offer are going to reflect the people who are sent to live there.
But maybe there's hope - with the trend away from jailing dangerous people towards jailing hurty words people, maybe society will become less violent in a century or so.
Most of those involved in the tweets during Southport got community or suspended sentenced.
Most violent criminals are in jail so at least not on the streets at that time.
There are also plenty of vocational courses you can do in jail
They tend (according to one of the course organisers who I saw interviewed) to be frustrated by constant reshuffling of prisoners to other prisons to cope with shortage of space, so completing any course is a challenge. I don't know what proportion of prisoners ctually get transferred each year, though.
So the critics need to suggest solutions instead of being like Labour MPs who are being the problem rather than the solution.
My top three tax increases would be:
1. Merge income tax and national insurance (thereby increasing tax on pensioner income). 2. Restrict tax relief on pension contributions to the basic rate (given how wealthy some pensioners are it's arguable that higher rate taxpayers are saving too much for their retirement). 3. Replace council tax and stamp duty with a proportional property tax, land value tax, or similar tax on property wealth.
I'm sure all of these would provoke howls of outrage to make the kerfuffle over WFA look like the newest political ripple, but fixing the situation isn't going to be done without, as the politicians like to say, hard choices. And on spending, too.
That last one is a non-starter for Labour given how badly Londoners would lose out.
There are no tax rises that are not a non starter for somebody. Labour's support base means that they can't attack the public sector, can't attack welfare and can't attack the middle class and can't attack London. Dubai and Monaco plus the special interests of media owners means they can't attack the very rich, and you can't attack the very poor because you can't tax a lack of income or assets.
And you can't do massive 'start again' structural changes - which is what we need - because you can't rebuild your plane in the middle of a stormy crossing of the Atlantic.
Apart from all that it's easy.
A guess: The best thing to do would be at the next budget to announce so many measures, hundreds of them, including major tax rises, that you both get all the criticism over in one go, and tell ordinary people that the government actually has a plan and some courage. If you really need an extra £100billion, and you come under existential fire for a few billion, you might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.
That has been suggested by quite a number - including myself.
Sell a rework of tax by folding NI into income tax. This would save billions in administration. Before you get to increased tax yield. To soften the hit for pensioners, the retired get a lower rate of tax that doesn't include the NI. So only rich pensioners pay extra tax. While you are at it, add a bit on tax rates, while getting rid of the complications regarding personal allowance withdrawal etc. Claim that this isn't really breaking the promises on tax not going up. Because of the reduction in complexity, some will gain and some will lose. The argument will be lost in time....
On pensions, quadruple lock - the extra lock is that the pension must be equal to the personal tax allowance. All the other old age benefits (WFA etc) go in a blender and come out means tested/taxable. Sell this as "Guaranteeing the future of the universal state pension. Our reforms means that poor pensioners get x% more. Pensioners on 50K are able to pay a bit more"
If the government had started with this, they would have raised more money, kept the markets calm and their back benchers would be happy - more money for the poor.
Can I be Labour Chancellor?
Yes, I was saying "you might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb" on Day 1. Keir Starmer just isn't enough of a b*st*rd in the right ways. Hit everybody at once....
The only way to make a significant difference and retain public acquiescence, IMO. Essentially "we're all in this together", which was one of Osborne's better ideas.
You get some rum comment on Youtube. This on an Ashley Neal video (It was about Critical Mass, and I had made a comparison with the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass):
Mr. Wardman. By stating that I believe the wrong side won the English Civil Wars, you may understand my approach. I do not believe in parliamentary rule, as i do not believe the plebiscite can understand how to elect wholly unqualified people to run the country. The great unwashed should respect the right of people to own property in my humble opinion. I served the Crown throughout my career and was proud to do so.
Someone needs to tell him about the Restoration ... he sounds like a Society of King Charles the Martyr type.
Laos will send soldiers to Russia to help them against Ukraine in the Kursk region.
The Laotian soldiers are supposed to demine the area and help free up Russian soldiers who will then go to fight in Ukraine itself. Laos has been a communist state since 1975. https://x.com/visegrad24/status/1941539171321118969
Isn’t the Russian approach to de-mining just to get PoWs to walk through the minefields?
I still can't see Basildon voters being that bothered about how much Mcmurdock borrowed for his businesses in lockdown.
If there was a recall petition and by election in his Basildon and South Thurrock seat I suspect Reform would hold it even if McMurdock was the candidate
We've just seem how Reform voters feel about being dragged back to vote because the candidate wasn't suitable or stepped down etc, twice And if he legitimately borrowed Covid funds for his businesses he won't be facing recall anyway, its if he didn't there's a problem. Reform have not backed him at all, so the chance of him being the Reform candidate in such circumstances are low
They haven't opposed him either, just suspended him during investigation
He suspended himself. They have made no comment other than acknowledging his self suspension.
I still can't see Basildon voters being that bothered about how much Mcmurdock borrowed for his businesses in lockdown.
If there was a recall petition and by election in his Basildon and South Thurrock seat I suspect Reform would hold it even if McMurdock was the candidate
You seem to have (although in fairness it is your view of Basildon voters rather than yourself) an unbalanced moral compass. I appear to to be a tax avoider by having ISAs (I forgot to mention I also have premium bonds as well, what a tax avoiding bastard I am) but alleged criminal activity (presumably alleged fraud) is, well, ok.
Bear in mind there is no by election if he is innocent so the scenario of Basildon voters not minding only applies if he isn't.
You spent ages whittering on about how you would keep your WFA without recognising the only reason you did is you albeit legally minimised your tax through ISAs to keep your income below the threshold of taxable income where WFA is removed.
He would need to be convicted and given a jail sentence of over 1 year to be removed as an MP or any jail term, even if suspended, for a recall petition.
I suspect most Basildon voters opposed any lockdown at all and certainly couldn't care less about amounts borrowed to keep businesses going through it. On current polls it would be an easy Reform hold with increased majority
Given the polling about lockdown at the time I think it's highly unlikely that a majority of Basildon voters opposed it. They may oppose it now but that's different. Also, if people do oppose lockdowns then they're going to take an even dimmer view of someone undeservedly profiting from them.
Just caught up with the IFS proposal for VAT on food.
Where on earth do we dig these lunatics up, and why do we give them any airtime at all? Why are they not doing something on their own intellectual level like cleaning out a stables?
If they are serious, I would remind them that Balfour had a majority comparable to Starmer's, but proposed taxes on food - much more modest ones - destroyed his government and very nearly his entire political movement.
All easily said, but the facts are a problem. We borrow £150 billion, every activity under state direction wants and needs more money - much more money, Labour MPs appear to believe in MMT as do many of the public, Truss history and the bond markets are a reality, there is no such thing as a popular and workable tax rise. PBers tell us that every tax on the well off means they all go to Monaco or Dubai; PBers tell us that every general tax on everyone (like VAT) will destroy the government.
If my maths is right (it may not be) VAT on food and non alcoholic drink at a low rate - eg 5%- would raise only about £8 billion annually, a sum which is dwarfed by the demands on the state. At 20% it would raise about £32 billion, which begins to look like serious money.
So the critics need to suggest solutions instead of being like Labour MPs who are being the problem rather than the solution.
There are multiple much more workable solutions.
Merge National Insurance and Income Tax should be top of the list so that everyone pays the same rate of tax regardless of how they earn their money, rather than people who work for a living being on a higher rate of tax.
Absolutely not, NI should be ringfenced for state pension and JSA based on what it was founded to fund
You're probably one of a very few who hold this as an absolute principle. It's positively eccentric, and never going to happen.
Laos will send soldiers to Russia to help them against Ukraine in the Kursk region.
The Laotian soldiers are supposed to demine the area and help free up Russian soldiers who will then go to fight in Ukraine itself. Laos has been a communist state since 1975. https://x.com/visegrad24/status/1941539171321118969
Isn’t the Russian approach to de-mining just to get PoWs to walk through the minefields?
When it suits them, yes. I don't expect the Laotians will be treated with a great deal more consideration.
I'm shocked, shocked I tell you, that Trump's agencies would come to this conclusion.
President Trump's Justice Department and FBI have concluded they have no evidence that Jeffrey Epstein blackmailed powerful figures, kept a "client list” or was murdered, according to a memo detailing the findings obtained by Axios. https://x.com/axios/status/1942023706328420837
Can I just point out that anyone saying merging NI with income tax is straight doesn’t understand the complexity.
Last year the Government tried to change how agency workers get paid - their approach has now been scrapped because the impact would have lead to a 2 year delay for the software companies to implement
So because it wasn’t implemented immediately doing it now would result in it occurring just as the election kicks off
On housing and development, it's worth pointing out the biggest obstacle to development isn't "NIMBY-ism" (whatever that means), it's the actual cost of construction.
In London, there's the Section 106 payment, the Community Infrastructure Levy and the Carbon Off-Set Tax to name but three. Developers look at sites and you and I might ask why they aren't being developed - the answer isn't to blame the LDs (far too easy and wrong) but to blame successive Governments for hiking construction costs.
That's before we get into supply chain capacity issues, shortages of specialist trades etc, etc. If you are serious about building houses, then get your children to be bricklayers, sparks or chippies and create a meaningful National Apprentice Scheme and encourage (or cajole) private sector companies to employ these apprentices.
Developers want to develop and they want to work WITH local communities to provide developments which work for everyone but they have to at least be able to break even on a site and what's stopping them are the costs.
I don't think that's true. All these idiotic levies certainly don't help, and should of course be scrapped tomorrow, but the real issue for building houses is the planning process - the appalling shortage of land cleared for building anywhere anyone wants to live, together with the nightmarish process of getting approval once you've developed a site. That's why the cost of land is 70% of a new-build house (more in many areas), up from 2% before the Second World War. And that's pure NIMBY-ism.
On housing and development, it's worth pointing out the biggest obstacle to development isn't "NIMBY-ism" (whatever that means), it's the actual cost of construction.
In London, there's the Section 106 payment, the Community Infrastructure Levy and the Carbon Off-Set Tax to name but three. Developers look at sites and you and I might ask why they aren't being developed - the answer isn't to blame the LDs (far too easy and wrong) but to blame successive Governments for hiking construction costs.
That's before we get into supply chain capacity issues, shortages of specialist trades etc, etc. If you are serious about building houses, then get your children to be bricklayers, sparks or chippies and create a meaningful National Apprentice Scheme and encourage (or cajole) private sector companies to employ these apprentices.
Developers want to develop and they want to work WITH local communities to provide developments which work for everyone but they have to at least be able to break even on a site and what's stopping them are the costs.
I don't think that's true. All these idiotic levies certainly don't help, and should of course be scrapped tomorrow, but the real issue for building houses is the planning process - the appalling shortage of land cleared for building anywhere anyone wants to live, together with the nightmarish process of getting approval once you've developed a site. That's why the cost of land is 70% of a new-build house (more in many areas), up from 2% before the Second World War. And that's pure NIMBY-ism.
Anything else is spare change.
In 2021 there was 1.1 million plots with planning permission that haven’t been built yet. Supposedly that number is higher now (although in a lot of cases permission may have lapsed).
The Telegraph is concerned by the rising threat posed by Islamist prisoners, and so is everyone's favourite social media star:-
Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, said: “Extremists and career criminals now operate with near impunity inside some of this country’s highest-security prisons.
“That is a complete failure of leadership – and a dangerous abdication of one of the state’s core duties: maintaining order behind bars.
“When Islamist terrorists and organised crime figures are left to forge alliances, we aren’t just witnessing a security lapse – we’re watching a national threat incubate in plain sight. This cannot be allowed to continue.”
There is also a helpful graph to demonstrate this rising threat but can anyone spot an anomaly the Telegraph and Rob J have both missed?
There are only 500 Jewish prisoners though, so a few random incidents could have bumped those numbers up.
The graph says 23.1 assaults per 100 prisoners. If there are 500 Jewish prisoners, then that should be 115.5 assaults. Let's call it 115. This is probably Poisson distributed, so on that basis, we can calculate a 95% confidence interval of 95-138 events. That translates back to 19.0-27.6 assaults per 100 prisoners. The lower end of that confidence interval is still higher than the figure reported for Muslim prisoners, but the confidence intervals for the two groups probably overlap.
Good stuff. I'd still be interested to know how many of the assaults by Jewish inmates were committed by the most violent ten individuals, and how that distribution compared to the other categories.
Assuming the presented figures are for a single year, it would also be interesting to look at the variation over the last five years.
If the assaults are conducted by a small number of the most violent individuals, then you probably have an overdispersed Poisson distribution and the confidence intervals would be larger. If one had the full dataset, there are all sorts of analyses one could do. It remains odd that the Telegraph article does not mention that it is not Muslim prisoners who have recorded the highest proportion of assaults.
Telegraph readers believe all Muslims are evil, so seeing Muslim prisoners near the top doesn't need any explanation for them. But Jewish prisoners being at the top seems odd, so we reach for other explanations: a small sample, a statistical anomaly.
That's wrong. We should consider alternate possible explanations for all groups. I'd guess that there's an urban/rural thing going on. Muslims and Jews are concentrated in cities and maybe city prisons are rougher generally.
I actually agree with the Lord Elon over the America Party. Their 2 party system is utterly corrupted and needs challenging. With the Democrats struggling with "do we select mentalists or the corrupt elite" and the Republicans now cheering on having their own faces eaten by leopards, the time is right for a challenge.
Helps that the challenger has previously been in both party's orbits and accidentally has a bazillion dollars to spend and a major social media platform to use.
PR is the main way to replace a 2 party dominated system
It's the sensible way, my friend. Which is why the Septics, in their current mindset, won't do it.
On a different subject, as an OAP, there have been, so far anyway, two stages in the Cole's pensioner life. The first was the first fifteen or so after retirement/ We were reasonably fit, felt we'd enough money to go where we wanted to, and wanted to see more of the world. This was helped/hindered by one of our sons settling in Thailand and starting a family there. Grandchildren are an attraction for OAP travel! So we travelled. Spent a bit on the house and garden, but not a lot..... if I have a regret it's not getting solar panels fitted years ago. We invested prudently and lived off our income. The second stage has been a lot less fun as it's included a significant spell in hospital and severely reduced mobility for me, and we're now wondering about what happens if Mrs C becomes unable to look after me. We've got carer support and we could always increase that, but more of that and we're going to have to look at our savings and investments. I hope that I'll sign off here for good ...... I've left instructions for whichever of the grandchildren sorts out my computer to let you know ...... before I'm needing even more support. Mrs C feel the same about herself. We both want to go to sleep one night and not wake up, but ......
The Telegraph is concerned by the rising threat posed by Islamist prisoners, and so is everyone's favourite social media star:-
Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, said: “Extremists and career criminals now operate with near impunity inside some of this country’s highest-security prisons.
“That is a complete failure of leadership – and a dangerous abdication of one of the state’s core duties: maintaining order behind bars.
“When Islamist terrorists and organised crime figures are left to forge alliances, we aren’t just witnessing a security lapse – we’re watching a national threat incubate in plain sight. This cannot be allowed to continue.”
There is also a helpful graph to demonstrate this rising threat but can anyone spot an anomaly the Telegraph and Rob J have both missed?
But it's been known for decades that prisons are what you'd come up with if you wanted a university for criminals. Obviously the courses on offer are going to reflect the people who are sent to live there.
But maybe there's hope - with the trend away from jailing dangerous people towards jailing hurty words people, maybe society will become less violent in a century or so.
Most of those involved in the tweets during Southport got community or suspended sentenced.
Most violent criminals are in jail so at least not on the streets at that time.
There are also plenty of vocational courses you can do in jail
They tend (according to one of the course organisers who I saw interviewed) to be frustrated by constant reshuffling of prisoners to other prisons to cope with shortage of space, so completing any course is a challenge. I don't know what proportion of prisoners ctually get transferred each year, though.
How does moving prisoners help with shortage of space? If you've a chap in prison, he uses one place, no matter where in the country you put him. If the problem boils down to 100 prisoners, 99 cells, it doesn't matter how you distribute the prisoners across the cells, you still have one over at the end.
Can I just point out that anyone saying merging NI with income tax is straight doesn’t understand the complexity.
Last year the Government tried to change how agency workers get paid - their approach has now been scrapped because the impact would have lead to a 2 year delay for the software companies to implement
So because it wasn’t implemented immediately doing it now would result in it occurring just as the election kicks off
One could take the Blair approach to hereditary lords -
Reduce the employee NI rate to a nominal amount, increase Income Tax by a counterbalancing amount, which would likely be lower than the NI drop in percentage terms, then when the final complex switchover comes it will be a much smaller thing in fiscal terms.
I actually agree with the Lord Elon over the America Party. Their 2 party system is utterly corrupted and needs challenging. With the Democrats struggling with "do we select mentalists or the corrupt elite" and the Republicans now cheering on having their own faces eaten by leopards, the time is right for a challenge.
Helps that the challenger has previously been in both party's orbits and accidentally has a bazillion dollars to spend and a major social media platform to use.
PR is the main way to replace a 2 party dominated system
It's the sensible way, my friend. Which is why the Septics, in their current mindset, won't do it.
On a different subject, as an OAP, there have been, so far anyway, two stages in the Cole's pensioner life. The first was the first fifteen or so after retirement/ We were reasonably fit, felt we'd enough money to go where we wanted to, and wanted to see more of the world. This was helped/hindered by one of our sons settling in Thailand and starting a family there. Grandchildren are an attraction for OAP travel! So we travelled. Spent a bit on the house and garden, but not a lot..... if I have a regret it's not getting solar panels fitted years ago. We invested prudently and lived off our income. The second stage has been a lot less fun as it's included a significant spell in hospital and severely reduced mobility for me, and we're now wondering about what happens if Mrs C becomes unable to look after me. We've got carer support and we could always increase that, but more of that and we're going to have to look at our savings and investments. I hope that I'll sign off here for good ...... I've left instructions for whichever of the grandchildren sorts out my computer to let you know ...... before I'm needing even more support. Mrs C feel the same about herself. We both want to go to sleep one night and not wake up, but ......
Can I just point out that anyone saying merging NI with income tax is straight doesn’t understand the complexity.
Last year the Government tried to change how agency workers get paid - their approach has now been scrapped because the impact would have lead to a 2 year delay for the software companies to implement
So because it wasn’t implemented immediately doing it now would result in it occurring just as the election kicks off
I understand the complexity, all changes that are worth doing are generally complex.
I'm not saying merge them without anyone being worse off though, I'm saying merge them so that working people are no worse off, if not better off.
Instead of having a base rate of 20% and NI of 8% you could have a base rate of 28% and working people would be no worse off . . . or have a base rate of eg 27% and have a real terms tax cut for working people while being approximately revenue neutral.
People will be wondering what I think on this tax point, I suppose.
Well, my startpoint is the contrast between the public balance sheet (stressed) and the private one (not so much). Data indicates there are more comfortably off people in this country than ever before. You don't find them featured much in vox pops or articles or blogs (since the greater appetite is for 'all is woe' and if you're comfortable you tend to not shout it from the rooftops) but they are there in large numbers.
So the mission, should the government choose to accept it, is to increase the £££ raised from this cohort without impacting that section of the population who are struggling as it is to get by (there are also more of these than ever before - a consequence of our relatively high tolerance for inequality).
How to do it? Always the rub. Every serious proposal will face a tsunami of 'politics of envy' or 'anti wealth creation' opposition from those who will lose out, who also happen to be the most articulate and influential members of society. But c'mon, we have a Labour government with a huge majority and 4 years to the next election, their MPs with no appetite (as just shown) to cut welfare or public services, so if not now when?
My top 2 are an annual levy on property wealth and replacing tax relief on pensions with state match funding of contributions up to a cap (same cap for everyone) - or alternatively (if easier to implement) restricting tax relief to the basic rate (which has a similar effect). I doubt the government will do the property levy but I think there's a fair chance they will have a tilt at the pensions reform.
The increased value of tax breaks through salary sacrifice for the higher* earners is a real anomaly. Cycle to work - your lower wage person gets ~30% off what may be an essential means of transport; your higher earner gets 40%+ off a nice weekend mountain or road bike**. Pension contributions are clearly a much bigger thing, of course.
Property wealth also makes sense - hard to dodge and encourages things like downsizing. Would probably hit me, depending how valued, as we have a fair bit of land, but so be it.
*not all that high now, with fiscal drag - I'm one of them, as a lowly academic! **me, although I do actually use it for commuting more than anything else, which is something - a better cycle to work scheme would however perhaps give a capped £300-£400 off a bike: free or nearly free bike for someone buying something basic to tootle a few miles, but still a nice incentive for MAMILs like me (that would have put me somewhere near even - it would be fascinating to see the distribution of bike prices bought on cycle to work)
On housing and development, it's worth pointing out the biggest obstacle to development isn't "NIMBY-ism" (whatever that means), it's the actual cost of construction.
In London, there's the Section 106 payment, the Community Infrastructure Levy and the Carbon Off-Set Tax to name but three. Developers look at sites and you and I might ask why they aren't being developed - the answer isn't to blame the LDs (far too easy and wrong) but to blame successive Governments for hiking construction costs.
That's before we get into supply chain capacity issues, shortages of specialist trades etc, etc. If you are serious about building houses, then get your children to be bricklayers, sparks or chippies and create a meaningful National Apprentice Scheme and encourage (or cajole) private sector companies to employ these apprentices.
Developers want to develop and they want to work WITH local communities to provide developments which work for everyone but they have to at least be able to break even on a site and what's stopping them are the costs.
I don't think that's true. All these idiotic levies certainly don't help, and should of course be scrapped tomorrow, but the real issue for building houses is the planning process - the appalling shortage of land cleared for building anywhere anyone wants to live, together with the nightmarish process of getting approval once you've developed a site. That's why the cost of land is 70% of a new-build house (more in many areas), up from 2% before the Second World War. And that's pure NIMBY-ism.
Anything else is spare change.
In 2021 there was 1.1 million plots with planning permission that haven’t been built yet. Supposedly that number is higher now (although in a lot of cases permission may have lapsed).
Its an irrelevant statistic that is caused by just how broken our planning system is.
Getting planning permission provides an immediate uplift in the value of land, even without building the home, so if firms buy land and get permission but don't do anything with the land then they have a profit in their accounts in holding an asset that is worth more than they paid for it.
What's worse is that the firms with permission can hold on to it with no threat of competition as other land that could compete with it lacks the permission so competition is cut off.
With sensible planning reform, then 'permission' would be worthless, so holding land with permission would be worthless too.
Tax? Well if we're not imposing a tax on all foreigners living abroad or a tax on thingy (you know, THNGY!!!) then we need to go after the daddy - Council Tax.
This one is fairly straight forward - what we have now is utterly absurd. Valuations decades into the past with no band that covers the actual values of so many houses? Madness.
Arguing that we must keep the status quo is cowardice. People don't like or understand council tax anyway, so replacing it shouldn't be that controversial.
Two principles: we need to fund local government effectively, and property is far harder to move out of tax than cash or other assets. So a Land Value Tax to replace Council Tax. Based on actual land value today, not eons ago. Some places are quite expensive, others less so. Won't be as popular in Godalming as is will be in Grimsby.
That just lets central government off the hook.
If they mandate a service they should ensure it is properly funded.
Council tax should just be for local services and decisions that the council is democratically accountable for.
Can I just point out that anyone saying merging NI with income tax is straight doesn’t understand the complexity.
Last year the Government tried to change how agency workers get paid - their approach has now been scrapped because the impact would have lead to a 2 year delay for the software companies to implement
So because it wasn’t implemented immediately doing it now would result in it occurring just as the election kicks off
I understand the complexity, all changes that are worth doing are generally complex.
I'm not saying merge them without anyone being worse off though, I'm saying merge them so that working people are no worse off, if not better off.
Instead of having a base rate of 20% and NI of 8% you could have a base rate of 28% and working people would be no worse off . . . or have a base rate of eg 27% and have a real terms tax cut for working people while being approximately revenue neutral.
@eek is talking about the Process of having NI. Lots of process to change - lots of jobs will go as a result of this. Whole swathes out accounting software.
Changing to a base rate of 27.9% and an NI rate of 0.1% would be fairly trivial, OTOH
The Telegraph is concerned by the rising threat posed by Islamist prisoners, and so is everyone's favourite social media star:-
Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, said: “Extremists and career criminals now operate with near impunity inside some of this country’s highest-security prisons.
“That is a complete failure of leadership – and a dangerous abdication of one of the state’s core duties: maintaining order behind bars.
“When Islamist terrorists and organised crime figures are left to forge alliances, we aren’t just witnessing a security lapse – we’re watching a national threat incubate in plain sight. This cannot be allowed to continue.”
There is also a helpful graph to demonstrate this rising threat but can anyone spot an anomaly the Telegraph and Rob J have both missed?
But it's been known for decades that prisons are what you'd come up with if you wanted a university for criminals. Obviously the courses on offer are going to reflect the people who are sent to live there.
But maybe there's hope - with the trend away from jailing dangerous people towards jailing hurty words people, maybe society will become less violent in a century or so.
Most of those involved in the tweets during Southport got community or suspended sentenced.
Most violent criminals are in jail so at least not on the streets at that time.
There are also plenty of vocational courses you can do in jail
They tend (according to one of the course organisers who I saw interviewed) to be frustrated by constant reshuffling of prisoners to other prisons to cope with shortage of space, so completing any course is a challenge. I don't know what proportion of prisoners ctually get transferred each year, though.
How does moving prisoners help with shortage of space? If you've a chap in prison, he uses one place, no matter where in the country you put him. If the problem boils down to 100 prisoners, 99 cells, it doesn't matter how you distribute the prisoners across the cells, you still have one over at the end.
Space opens up. Move prisoners from overcrowded prisons to the 99% full one.
So it is that, with a languid stretch of limbs honed by adventure, Tramadol, Melnik wine and Netflix, he rises. And on the streets of Old Sofia, stray dogs lower their heads in reverence, even as grandmothers clutch their beads
“Eто го, Соколът!” - they say, one to another, again and again, with both mystery and awe
Can I just point out that anyone saying merging NI with income tax is straight doesn’t understand the complexity.
Last year the Government tried to change how agency workers get paid - their approach has now been scrapped because the impact would have lead to a 2 year delay for the software companies to implement
So because it wasn’t implemented immediately doing it now would result in it occurring just as the election kicks off
I understand the complexity, all changes that are worth doing are generally complex.
I'm not saying merge them without anyone being worse off though, I'm saying merge them so that working people are no worse off, if not better off.
Instead of having a base rate of 20% and NI of 8% you could have a base rate of 28% and working people would be no worse off . . . or have a base rate of eg 27% and have a real terms tax cut for working people while being approximately revenue neutral.
@eek is talking about the Process of having NI. Lots of process to change - lots of jobs will go as a result of this. Whole swathes out accounting software.
Changing to a base rate of 27.9% and an NI rate of 0.1% would be fairly trivial, OTOH
Or a base rate of 28.0% and an NI rate of 0.0%
Many people today already get marked as making NI contributions, with their contributions being £0.00
Can I just point out that anyone saying merging NI with income tax is straight doesn’t understand the complexity.
Last year the Government tried to change how agency workers get paid - their approach has now been scrapped because the impact would have lead to a 2 year delay for the software companies to implement
So because it wasn’t implemented immediately doing it now would result in it occurring just as the election kicks off
I understand the complexity, all changes that are worth doing are generally complex.
I'm not saying merge them without anyone being worse off though, I'm saying merge them so that working people are no worse off, if not better off.
Instead of having a base rate of 20% and NI of 8% you could have a base rate of 28% and working people would be no worse off . . . or have a base rate of eg 27% and have a real terms tax cut for working people while being approximately revenue neutral.
@eek is talking about the Process of having NI. Lots of process to change - lots of jobs will go as a result of this. Whole swathes out accounting software.
Changing to a base rate of 27.9% and an NI rate of 0.1% would be fairly trivial, OTOH
Actually very little would go based on the structure of the software. Problem is all changes take time and there are already a whole set of making tax digital in progress which is a blocker on when the next set of changes could be implemented
Can I just point out that anyone saying merging NI with income tax is straight doesn’t understand the complexity.
Last year the Government tried to change how agency workers get paid - their approach has now been scrapped because the impact would have lead to a 2 year delay for the software companies to implement
So because it wasn’t implemented immediately doing it now would result in it occurring just as the election kicks off
I understand the complexity, all changes that are worth doing are generally complex.
I'm not saying merge them without anyone being worse off though, I'm saying merge them so that working people are no worse off, if not better off.
Instead of having a base rate of 20% and NI of 8% you could have a base rate of 28% and working people would be no worse off . . . or have a base rate of eg 27% and have a real terms tax cut for working people while being approximately revenue neutral.
@eek is talking about the Process of having NI. Lots of process to change - lots of jobs will go as a result of this. Whole swathes out accounting software.
Changing to a base rate of 27.9% and an NI rate of 0.1% would be fairly trivial, OTOH
Or a base rate of 28.0% and an NI rate of 0.0%
The later would set off a trail of errors through software that was never designed to handle a zero. Yes, bad coding, but common.
Can I just point out that anyone saying merging NI with income tax is straight doesn’t understand the complexity.
Last year the Government tried to change how agency workers get paid - their approach has now been scrapped because the impact would have lead to a 2 year delay for the software companies to implement
So because it wasn’t implemented immediately doing it now would result in it occurring just as the election kicks off
One could take the Blair approach to hereditary lords -
Reduce the employee NI rate to a nominal amount, increase Income Tax by a counterbalancing amount, which would likely be lower than the NI drop in percentage terms, then when the final complex switchover comes it will be a much smaller thing in fiscal terms.
Then we just get even more non contributory welfare than now, an absolute disaster when most OECD nations already fund unemployment benefits and healthcare far more by social insurance than we do
So the critics need to suggest solutions instead of being like Labour MPs who are being the problem rather than the solution.
My top three tax increases would be:
1. Merge income tax and national insurance (thereby increasing tax on pensioner income). 2. Restrict tax relief on pension contributions to the basic rate (given how wealthy some pensioners are it's arguable that higher rate taxpayers are saving too much for their retirement). 3. Replace council tax and stamp duty with a proportional property tax, land value tax, or similar tax on property wealth.
I'm sure all of these would provoke howls of outrage to make the kerfuffle over WFA look like the newest political ripple, but fixing the situation isn't going to be done without, as the politicians like to say, hard choices. And on spending, too.
That last one is a non-starter for Labour given how badly Londoners would lose out.
I think even in London it could represent a tax cut for most households. The average for a flat in Haringey would be £2,200 per year, roughly equivalent to Band D, which is roughly in line with the change in house prices there since 1991.
So your mean flat in central London would see only a small change. It absolutely hammers high value houses though, while the council tax charge in Hartlepool for a flat would drop to £400, which is at least 75% off.
How would that work? Presumably hartlepool’s funding need hasn’t changed so unless you are assuming money comes in from elsewhere then the same cost is just distributed slightly differently
Can I just point out that anyone saying merging NI with income tax is straight doesn’t understand the complexity.
Last year the Government tried to change how agency workers get paid - their approach has now been scrapped because the impact would have lead to a 2 year delay for the software companies to implement
So because it wasn’t implemented immediately doing it now would result in it occurring just as the election kicks off
I understand the complexity, all changes that are worth doing are generally complex.
I'm not saying merge them without anyone being worse off though, I'm saying merge them so that working people are no worse off, if not better off.
Instead of having a base rate of 20% and NI of 8% you could have a base rate of 28% and working people would be no worse off . . . or have a base rate of eg 27% and have a real terms tax cut for working people while being approximately revenue neutral.
@eek is talking about the Process of having NI. Lots of process to change - lots of jobs will go as a result of this. Whole swathes out accounting software.
Changing to a base rate of 27.9% and an NI rate of 0.1% would be fairly trivial, OTOH
Why could you not change to a base rate of 28% and just set NI at a nil rate ?
Just caught up with the IFS proposal for VAT on food.
Where on earth do we dig these lunatics up, and why do we give them any airtime at all? Why are they not doing something on their own intellectual level like cleaning out a stables?
If they are serious, I would remind them that Balfour had a majority comparable to Starmer's, but proposed taxes on food - much more modest ones - destroyed his government and very nearly his entire political movement.
All easily said, but the facts are a problem. We borrow £150 billion, every activity under state direction wants and needs more money - much more money, Labour MPs appear to believe in MMT as do many of the public, Truss history and the bond markets are a reality, there is no such thing as a popular and workable tax rise. PBers tell us that every tax on the well off means they all go to Monaco or Dubai; PBers tell us that every general tax on everyone (like VAT) will destroy the government.
If my maths is right (it may not be) VAT on food and non alcoholic drink at a low rate - eg 5%- would raise only about £8 billion annually, a sum which is dwarfed by the demands on the state. At 20% it would raise about £32 billion, which begins to look like serious money.
So the critics need to suggest solutions instead of being like Labour MPs who are being the problem rather than the solution.
There are multiple much more workable solutions.
Merge National Insurance and Income Tax should be top of the list so that everyone pays the same rate of tax regardless of how they earn their money, rather than people who work for a living being on a higher rate of tax.
Absolutely not, NI should be ringfenced for state pension and JSA based on what it was founded to fund
You're probably one of a very few who hold this as an absolute principle. It's positively eccentric, and never going to happen.
You already can only claim the latter if sufficient NI payments made and the former if sufficient NI payments or credits made
I actually agree with the Lord Elon over the America Party. Their 2 party system is utterly corrupted and needs challenging. With the Democrats struggling with "do we select mentalists or the corrupt elite" and the Republicans now cheering on having their own faces eaten by leopards, the time is right for a challenge.
Helps that the challenger has previously been in both party's orbits and accidentally has a bazillion dollars to spend and a major social media platform to use.
Can I just point out that anyone saying merging NI with income tax is straight doesn’t understand the complexity.
Last year the Government tried to change how agency workers get paid - their approach has now been scrapped because the impact would have lead to a 2 year delay for the software companies to implement
So because it wasn’t implemented immediately doing it now would result in it occurring just as the election kicks off
I understand the complexity, all changes that are worth doing are generally complex.
I'm not saying merge them without anyone being worse off though, I'm saying merge them so that working people are no worse off, if not better off.
Instead of having a base rate of 20% and NI of 8% you could have a base rate of 28% and working people would be no worse off . . . or have a base rate of eg 27% and have a real terms tax cut for working people while being approximately revenue neutral.
@eek is talking about the Process of having NI. Lots of process to change - lots of jobs will go as a result of this. Whole swathes out accounting software.
Changing to a base rate of 27.9% and an NI rate of 0.1% would be fairly trivial, OTOH
Why could you not change to a base rate of 28% and just set NI at a nil rate ?
Zero on NI will cause a cascade of errors in various systems, I would bet.
I still can't see Basildon voters being that bothered about how much Mcmurdock borrowed for his businesses in lockdown.
If there was a recall petition and by election in his Basildon and South Thurrock seat I suspect Reform would hold it even if McMurdock was the candidate
You seem to have (although in fairness it is your view of Basildon voters rather than yourself) an unbalanced moral compass. I appear to to be a tax avoider by having ISAs (I forgot to mention I also have premium bonds as well, what a tax avoiding bastard I am) but alleged criminal activity (presumably alleged fraud) is, well, ok.
Bear in mind there is no by election if he is innocent so the scenario of Basildon voters not minding only applies if he isn't.
You spent ages whittering on about how you would keep your WFA without recognising the only reason you did is you albeit legally minimised your tax through ISAs to keep your income below the threshold of taxable income where WFA is removed.
He would need to be convicted and given a jail sentence of over 1 year to be removed as an MP or any jail term, even if suspended, for a recall petition.
I suspect most Basildon voters opposed any lockdown at all and certainly couldn't care less about amounts borrowed to keep businesses going through it. On current polls it would be an easy Reform hold with increased majority
Given the polling about lockdown at the time I think it's highly unlikely that a majority of Basildon voters opposed it. They may oppose it now but that's different. Also, if people do oppose lockdowns then they're going to take an even dimmer view of someone undeservedly profiting from them.
Basildon is full of small business owners who were fed up enough of lockdown without being punished for getting the funds to stop their businesses going bust during it
Labour must really be regretting the Runcorn byelection.
If they had put in one more minister day at Runcorn to get 7 extra votes, rather than bottling it, and Sarah Pochin had lost, Reform MPs would be on a trandem rather than in a taxi. Just like the Goodies.
On the header, there's another one this morning - Ref UK Councillor in Kent (for Thanet) hsa been charged with threatening to kill his wife, and has now appeared in court. The Whip was initially suspended at the start of June:
The 37-year-old - who represents the Cliftonville ward in Thanet - appeared at Folkestone Magistrates’ Court today charged with three offences, all of which he denied.
These included making threats to kill his wife on June 1, and a separate charge of sending an offensive, indecent, obscene or menacing message to her on the same day.
It was also alleged between January 1, 2014, and June 1, 2025, he repeatedly or continuously engaged in behaviour which was controlling or coercive.
Can I just point out that anyone saying merging NI with income tax is straight doesn’t understand the complexity.
Last year the Government tried to change how agency workers get paid - their approach has now been scrapped because the impact would have lead to a 2 year delay for the software companies to implement
So because it wasn’t implemented immediately doing it now would result in it occurring just as the election kicks off
I understand the complexity, all changes that are worth doing are generally complex.
I'm not saying merge them without anyone being worse off though, I'm saying merge them so that working people are no worse off, if not better off.
Instead of having a base rate of 20% and NI of 8% you could have a base rate of 28% and working people would be no worse off . . . or have a base rate of eg 27% and have a real terms tax cut for working people while being approximately revenue neutral.
@eek is talking about the Process of having NI. Lots of process to change - lots of jobs will go as a result of this. Whole swathes out accounting software.
Changing to a base rate of 27.9% and an NI rate of 0.1% would be fairly trivial, OTOH
Actually very little would go based on the structure of the software. Problem is all changes take time and there are already a whole set of making tax digital in progress which is a blocker on when the next set of changes could be implemented
Are people really building software that can't handle changes in tax rates?
Can I just point out that anyone saying merging NI with income tax is straight doesn’t understand the complexity.
Last year the Government tried to change how agency workers get paid - their approach has now been scrapped because the impact would have lead to a 2 year delay for the software companies to implement
So because it wasn’t implemented immediately doing it now would result in it occurring just as the election kicks off
I understand the complexity, all changes that are worth doing are generally complex.
I'm not saying merge them without anyone being worse off though, I'm saying merge them so that working people are no worse off, if not better off.
Instead of having a base rate of 20% and NI of 8% you could have a base rate of 28% and working people would be no worse off . . . or have a base rate of eg 27% and have a real terms tax cut for working people while being approximately revenue neutral.
@eek is talking about the Process of having NI. Lots of process to change - lots of jobs will go as a result of this. Whole swathes out accounting software.
Changing to a base rate of 27.9% and an NI rate of 0.1% would be fairly trivial, OTOH
There is a complication in that the thresholds and relative rates used for NICs are different to those for IT, so it's not a straight swap. I have a little model somewhere which would help smooth it out, depending on what criteria you set.
E.g it would push a lot of people over a 50% marginal rate because NICs is regressive on higher incomes.
Can I just point out that anyone saying merging NI with income tax is straight doesn’t understand the complexity.
Last year the Government tried to change how agency workers get paid - their approach has now been scrapped because the impact would have lead to a 2 year delay for the software companies to implement
So because it wasn’t implemented immediately doing it now would result in it occurring just as the election kicks off
One could take the Blair approach to hereditary lords -
Reduce the employee NI rate to a nominal amount, increase Income Tax by a counterbalancing amount, which would likely be lower than the NI drop in percentage terms, then when the final complex switchover comes it will be a much smaller thing in fiscal terms.
Then we just get even more non contributory welfare than now, an absolute disaster when most OECD nations already fund unemployment benefits and healthcare far more by social insurance than we do
Pretty much all our welfare is already non-contributory anyway, so no there is no more, just your vapid lack of understanding.
There is absolutely no, that I know of, welfare in this country that is only available if you've actually made contributions.
Even "new-style" "contributory" JSA you can be eligible for with "contributions" of £0.00 if you were earning more than the Lower Earnings Limit but less than the Primary Threshold.
This seems a reasonable proposition. What are the arguments against ?
Today, I've written the foreword to a new @LabourTogether & @BritishProgress report asking the question - how can we get Heathrow expansion off the ground rapidly & democratically?
He makes the point that despite the government committing to major national projects like Sizewell, or Heathrow, they can then be tied up in planning, and judicial reviews, for at least half a decade, often longer.
Parliament could cut that time to a year simply by voting on a bill in favour of a particular project. Is there any good reason that should not happen ?
Can I just point out that anyone saying merging NI with income tax is straight doesn’t understand the complexity.
Last year the Government tried to change how agency workers get paid - their approach has now been scrapped because the impact would have lead to a 2 year delay for the software companies to implement
So because it wasn’t implemented immediately doing it now would result in it occurring just as the election kicks off
I understand the complexity, all changes that are worth doing are generally complex.
I'm not saying merge them without anyone being worse off though, I'm saying merge them so that working people are no worse off, if not better off.
Instead of having a base rate of 20% and NI of 8% you could have a base rate of 28% and working people would be no worse off . . . or have a base rate of eg 27% and have a real terms tax cut for working people while being approximately revenue neutral.
@eek is talking about the Process of having NI. Lots of process to change - lots of jobs will go as a result of this. Whole swathes out accounting software.
Changing to a base rate of 27.9% and an NI rate of 0.1% would be fairly trivial, OTOH
Why could you not change to a base rate of 28% and just set NI at a nil rate ?
Zero on NI will cause a cascade of errors in various systems, I would bet.
The Telegraph is concerned by the rising threat posed by Islamist prisoners, and so is everyone's favourite social media star:-
Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, said: “Extremists and career criminals now operate with near impunity inside some of this country’s highest-security prisons.
“That is a complete failure of leadership – and a dangerous abdication of one of the state’s core duties: maintaining order behind bars.
“When Islamist terrorists and organised crime figures are left to forge alliances, we aren’t just witnessing a security lapse – we’re watching a national threat incubate in plain sight. This cannot be allowed to continue.”
There is also a helpful graph to demonstrate this rising threat but can anyone spot an anomaly the Telegraph and Rob J have both missed?
There are only 500 Jewish prisoners though, so a few random incidents could have bumped those numbers up.
The graph says 23.1 assaults per 100 prisoners. If there are 500 Jewish prisoners, then that should be 115.5 assaults. Let's call it 115. This is probably Poisson distributed, so on that basis, we can calculate a 95% confidence interval of 95-138 events. That translates back to 19.0-27.6 assaults per 100 prisoners. The lower end of that confidence interval is still higher than the figure reported for Muslim prisoners, but the confidence intervals for the two groups probably overlap.
Good stuff. I'd still be interested to know how many of the assaults by Jewish inmates were committed by the most violent ten individuals, and how that distribution compared to the other categories.
Assuming the presented figures are for a single year, it would also be interesting to look at the variation over the last five years.
If the assaults are conducted by a small number of the most violent individuals, then you probably have an overdispersed Poisson distribution and the confidence intervals would be larger. If one had the full dataset, there are all sorts of analyses one could do. It remains odd that the Telegraph article does not mention that it is not Muslim prisoners who have recorded the highest proportion of assaults.
Telegraph readers believe all Muslims are evil, so seeing Muslim prisoners near the top doesn't need any explanation for them. But Jewish prisoners being at the top seems odd, so we reach for other explanations: a small sample, a statistical anomaly.
That's wrong. We should consider alternate possible explanations for all groups. I'd guess that there's an urban/rural thing going on. Muslims and Jews are concentrated in cities and maybe city prisons are rougher generally.
That's very much your prejudice, right there. Any evidence for that assertion? I'm intrigued by the idea of city prisons. If I commit a crime in Frome do I go to a nice artisan dominated country prison?
He’s falling out of a window in the next six months.
Trump, Musk, or both?
Speaking of which, I am starting to see the same sorts of health rumours and conspiracy theories we used to hear about Biden (still alive) and Putin (still alive) – that President Trump is less mobile, needs to be seated, or holds his hands in a funny way.
Tbh I suspect what people are seeing is mainly Trump's power games. Jimmy Savile was the same, apparently, in that rather than circulating, he would sit behind the purple rope and anyone seeking an audience would need to come to his throne. Trump dropped some papers and the obsequious Starmer retrieved them.
Can I just point out that anyone saying merging NI with income tax is straight doesn’t understand the complexity.
Last year the Government tried to change how agency workers get paid - their approach has now been scrapped because the impact would have lead to a 2 year delay for the software companies to implement
So because it wasn’t implemented immediately doing it now would result in it occurring just as the election kicks off
You could get most of the way there by reducing the main rate of NI by 7pp to 1% and increasing the rate of income tax by the same amount.
And then start the project to sort out all the details and finish the job.
Can I just point out that anyone saying merging NI with income tax is straight doesn’t understand the complexity.
Last year the Government tried to change how agency workers get paid - their approach has now been scrapped because the impact would have lead to a 2 year delay for the software companies to implement
So because it wasn’t implemented immediately doing it now would result in it occurring just as the election kicks off
I understand the complexity, all changes that are worth doing are generally complex.
I'm not saying merge them without anyone being worse off though, I'm saying merge them so that working people are no worse off, if not better off.
Instead of having a base rate of 20% and NI of 8% you could have a base rate of 28% and working people would be no worse off . . . or have a base rate of eg 27% and have a real terms tax cut for working people while being approximately revenue neutral.
@eek is talking about the Process of having NI. Lots of process to change - lots of jobs will go as a result of this. Whole swathes out accounting software.
Changing to a base rate of 27.9% and an NI rate of 0.1% would be fairly trivial, OTOH
There is a complication in that the thresholds and relative rates used for NICs are different to those for IT, so it's not a straight swap. I have a little model somewhere which would help smooth it out, depending on what criteria you set.
E.g it would push a lot of people over a 50% marginal rate.
The process of simplifying tax will always have winners and losers.
Yes, you'd end up changing the IT rates and thresholds - not just NI +IT. This is where a Labour Chancellor could have finessed even more money.
One reason I've heard given for not merging the taxes, is that it hides real rates from people!
Can I just point out that anyone saying merging NI with income tax is straight doesn’t understand the complexity.
Last year the Government tried to change how agency workers get paid - their approach has now been scrapped because the impact would have lead to a 2 year delay for the software companies to implement
So because it wasn’t implemented immediately doing it now would result in it occurring just as the election kicks off
I understand the complexity, all changes that are worth doing are generally complex.
I'm not saying merge them without anyone being worse off though, I'm saying merge them so that working people are no worse off, if not better off.
Instead of having a base rate of 20% and NI of 8% you could have a base rate of 28% and working people would be no worse off . . . or have a base rate of eg 27% and have a real terms tax cut for working people while being approximately revenue neutral.
@eek is talking about the Process of having NI. Lots of process to change - lots of jobs will go as a result of this. Whole swathes out accounting software.
Changing to a base rate of 27.9% and an NI rate of 0.1% would be fairly trivial, OTOH
Why could you not change to a base rate of 28% and just set NI at a nil rate ?
Zero on NI will cause a cascade of errors in various systems, I would bet.
Isn't there effectively a nil rate band already, with the Lower Earnings Limit, and Primary Threshold ? You could simply set these at £1 billion...
The Telegraph is concerned by the rising threat posed by Islamist prisoners, and so is everyone's favourite social media star:-
Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, said: “Extremists and career criminals now operate with near impunity inside some of this country’s highest-security prisons.
“That is a complete failure of leadership – and a dangerous abdication of one of the state’s core duties: maintaining order behind bars.
“When Islamist terrorists and organised crime figures are left to forge alliances, we aren’t just witnessing a security lapse – we’re watching a national threat incubate in plain sight. This cannot be allowed to continue.”
There is also a helpful graph to demonstrate this rising threat but can anyone spot an anomaly the Telegraph and Rob J have both missed?
There are only 500 Jewish prisoners though, so a few random incidents could have bumped those numbers up.
The graph says 23.1 assaults per 100 prisoners. If there are 500 Jewish prisoners, then that should be 115.5 assaults. Let's call it 115. This is probably Poisson distributed, so on that basis, we can calculate a 95% confidence interval of 95-138 events. That translates back to 19.0-27.6 assaults per 100 prisoners. The lower end of that confidence interval is still higher than the figure reported for Muslim prisoners, but the confidence intervals for the two groups probably overlap.
Good stuff. I'd still be interested to know how many of the assaults by Jewish inmates were committed by the most violent ten individuals, and how that distribution compared to the other categories.
Assuming the presented figures are for a single year, it would also be interesting to look at the variation over the last five years.
If the assaults are conducted by a small number of the most violent individuals, then you probably have an overdispersed Poisson distribution and the confidence intervals would be larger. If one had the full dataset, there are all sorts of analyses one could do. It remains odd that the Telegraph article does not mention that it is not Muslim prisoners who have recorded the highest proportion of assaults.
Telegraph readers believe all Muslims are evil, so seeing Muslim prisoners near the top doesn't need any explanation for them. But Jewish prisoners being at the top seems odd, so we reach for other explanations: a small sample, a statistical anomaly.
That's wrong. We should consider alternate possible explanations for all groups. I'd guess that there's an urban/rural thing going on. Muslims and Jews are concentrated in cities and maybe city prisons are rougher generally.
Well the obvious other thing I was wondering about was the age profile of the different groups.
Anyhow, here’s today’s photo nice and early, as I’m now off on the road to catch a ferry…today’s sunset will be 0038, sunrise 0153.
Poor dog saying “dammit can’t I even take a shit without more bloody photos!”
He was actually just about to jump onto that rock in front of him. When I looked at the photo I agree it did look as if he was about to do something else, but the photo was good enough to keep regardless. Anyhow we're now sat in a long queue for the ferry
Can I just point out that anyone saying merging NI with income tax is straight doesn’t understand the complexity.
Last year the Government tried to change how agency workers get paid - their approach has now been scrapped because the impact would have lead to a 2 year delay for the software companies to implement
So because it wasn’t implemented immediately doing it now would result in it occurring just as the election kicks off
I understand the complexity, all changes that are worth doing are generally complex.
I'm not saying merge them without anyone being worse off though, I'm saying merge them so that working people are no worse off, if not better off.
Instead of having a base rate of 20% and NI of 8% you could have a base rate of 28% and working people would be no worse off . . . or have a base rate of eg 27% and have a real terms tax cut for working people while being approximately revenue neutral.
@eek is talking about the Process of having NI. Lots of process to change - lots of jobs will go as a result of this. Whole swathes out accounting software.
Changing to a base rate of 27.9% and an NI rate of 0.1% would be fairly trivial, OTOH
Why could you not change to a base rate of 28% and just set NI at a nil rate ?
Zero on NI will cause a cascade of errors in various systems, I would bet.
Why? Nil rates are already coded into the system.
Above LEL but below PT the rate is nil.
That assumes good software development. NI in a sensible system would be calculated from a function fed the relevant data, and the results would *always* be able to be zero.
In the real world, I wonder how much hard coding has taken place as a quick fix.
So it is that, with a languid stretch of limbs honed by adventure, Tramadol, Melnik wine and Netflix, he rises. And on the streets of Old Sofia, stray dogs lower their heads in reverence, even as grandmothers clutch their beads
“Eто го, Соколът!” - they say, one to another, again and again, with both mystery and awe
“There he is, The Falcon!”
Can I say that I have an actual moniker in published Italian fiction, as (some mild self doxxing) I am the basis for the character Il Mancuniano in Pallavicini's novel Il Mostro di Vigevano.
The glory is slightly limited, Il Mancuniano is a Godot like character in that his main feature is in not appearing, whilst absolutely everyone else in the novel, some based on people I knew, get involved in the kind of multivariate action that would boggle the mind of a TSE Stepmom.
Yes, fellows, I couldn't get laid in a 'Bad sex in literature' level porn novel. If any of Leon's acquaintances ever wished to reprise Il Mancuniano, I'm sure that would be fine!
I still can't see Basildon voters being that bothered about how much Mcmurdock borrowed for his businesses in lockdown.
If there was a recall petition and by election in his Basildon and South Thurrock seat I suspect Reform would hold it even if McMurdock was the candidate
We've just seem how Reform voters feel about being dragged back to vote because the candidate wasn't suitable or stepped down etc, twice And if he legitimately borrowed Covid funds for his businesses he won't be facing recall anyway, its if he didn't there's a problem. Reform have not backed him at all, so the chance of him being the Reform candidate in such circumstances are low
It’s a good chance for Reform to field a proper candidate ; McMurdock was a surprise winner last year.
I’m minded to think things like this will be used to good effect in a campaign, and Reform will suffer. Then again, Labour have had an MP suspended for punching a constituent! So they can’t really go in too hard
Can I just point out that anyone saying merging NI with income tax is straight doesn’t understand the complexity.
Last year the Government tried to change how agency workers get paid - their approach has now been scrapped because the impact would have lead to a 2 year delay for the software companies to implement
So because it wasn’t implemented immediately doing it now would result in it occurring just as the election kicks off
I understand the complexity, all changes that are worth doing are generally complex.
I'm not saying merge them without anyone being worse off though, I'm saying merge them so that working people are no worse off, if not better off.
Instead of having a base rate of 20% and NI of 8% you could have a base rate of 28% and working people would be no worse off . . . or have a base rate of eg 27% and have a real terms tax cut for working people while being approximately revenue neutral.
@eek is talking about the Process of having NI. Lots of process to change - lots of jobs will go as a result of this. Whole swathes out accounting software.
Changing to a base rate of 27.9% and an NI rate of 0.1% would be fairly trivial, OTOH
Why could you not change to a base rate of 28% and just set NI at a nil rate ?
Zero on NI will cause a cascade of errors in various systems, I would bet.
Why? Nil rates are already coded into the system.
Above LEL but below PT the rate is nil.
That assumes good software development. NI in a sensible system would be calculated from a function fed the relevant data, and the results would *always* be able to be zero.
In the real world, I wonder how much hard coding has taken place as a quick fix.
I’ve seen the internals of far too many payroll systems - all of them are quick fix city
Can I just point out that anyone saying merging NI with income tax is straight doesn’t understand the complexity.
Last year the Government tried to change how agency workers get paid - their approach has now been scrapped because the impact would have lead to a 2 year delay for the software companies to implement
So because it wasn’t implemented immediately doing it now would result in it occurring just as the election kicks off
I understand the complexity, all changes that are worth doing are generally complex.
I'm not saying merge them without anyone being worse off though, I'm saying merge them so that working people are no worse off, if not better off.
Instead of having a base rate of 20% and NI of 8% you could have a base rate of 28% and working people would be no worse off . . . or have a base rate of eg 27% and have a real terms tax cut for working people while being approximately revenue neutral.
@eek is talking about the Process of having NI. Lots of process to change - lots of jobs will go as a result of this. Whole swathes out accounting software.
Changing to a base rate of 27.9% and an NI rate of 0.1% would be fairly trivial, OTOH
Why could you not change to a base rate of 28% and just set NI at a nil rate ?
Zero on NI will cause a cascade of errors in various systems, I would bet.
Why? Nil rates are already coded into the system.
Above LEL but below PT the rate is nil.
That assumes good software development. NI in a sensible system would be calculated from a function fed the relevant data, and the results would *always* be able to be zero.
In the real world, I wonder how much hard coding has taken place as a quick fix.
Even if there is hard coding, the Nil rate is already hard coded into the system then. Above LEL but below PT is nil.
Keep LEL and raise PT to a billion and you have your nil rate.
Can I just point out that anyone saying merging NI with income tax is straight doesn’t understand the complexity.
Last year the Government tried to change how agency workers get paid - their approach has now been scrapped because the impact would have lead to a 2 year delay for the software companies to implement
So because it wasn’t implemented immediately doing it now would result in it occurring just as the election kicks off
I understand the complexity, all changes that are worth doing are generally complex.
I'm not saying merge them without anyone being worse off though, I'm saying merge them so that working people are no worse off, if not better off.
Instead of having a base rate of 20% and NI of 8% you could have a base rate of 28% and working people would be no worse off . . . or have a base rate of eg 27% and have a real terms tax cut for working people while being approximately revenue neutral.
@eek is talking about the Process of having NI. Lots of process to change - lots of jobs will go as a result of this. Whole swathes out accounting software.
Changing to a base rate of 27.9% and an NI rate of 0.1% would be fairly trivial, OTOH
There is a complication in that the thresholds and relative rates used for NICs are different to those for IT, so it's not a straight swap. I have a little model somewhere which would help smooth it out, depending on what criteria you set.
E.g it would push a lot of people over a 50% marginal rate.
The process of simplifying tax will always have winners and losers.
Yes, you'd end up changing the IT rates and thresholds - not just NI +IT. This is where a Labour Chancellor could have finessed even more money.
One reason I've heard given for not merging the taxes, is that it hides real rates from people!
I agree with the sentiment but the point of my model would be that for people with earnings only you would have no winners and losers by developing a ridiculously complex set of thresholds and rates that would allow a merger to have no impact at all.
But it would be better to just have a super simple system that also irons out the weird tax incentives for high earners etc
Can I just point out that anyone saying merging NI with income tax is straight doesn’t understand the complexity.
Last year the Government tried to change how agency workers get paid - their approach has now been scrapped because the impact would have lead to a 2 year delay for the software companies to implement
So because it wasn’t implemented immediately doing it now would result in it occurring just as the election kicks off
I understand the complexity, all changes that are worth doing are generally complex.
I'm not saying merge them without anyone being worse off though, I'm saying merge them so that working people are no worse off, if not better off.
Instead of having a base rate of 20% and NI of 8% you could have a base rate of 28% and working people would be no worse off . . . or have a base rate of eg 27% and have a real terms tax cut for working people while being approximately revenue neutral.
@eek is talking about the Process of having NI. Lots of process to change - lots of jobs will go as a result of this. Whole swathes out accounting software.
Changing to a base rate of 27.9% and an NI rate of 0.1% would be fairly trivial, OTOH
There is a complication in that the thresholds and relative rates used for NICs are different to those for IT, so it's not a straight swap. I have a little model somewhere which would help smooth it out, depending on what criteria you set.
E.g it would push a lot of people over a 50% marginal rate.
The process of simplifying tax will always have winners and losers.
Yes, you'd end up changing the IT rates and thresholds - not just NI +IT. This is where a Labour Chancellor could have finessed even more money.
One reason I've heard given for not merging the taxes, is that it hides real rates from people!
Oh it really, really does. People just don’t think of NI as a tax so don’t actually grasp that income tax is really 28%, 42% and 47% (ignoring the bit at £100,000 where it goes to 62% or 65% in Scotland)
Comments
South Wales Police probably won't dare...
Preferably with Vance and Johnson alongside...
Assuming the presented figures are for a single year, it would also be interesting to look at the variation over the last five years.
The issues arise when the national government can choose to reward or punish local government (often because of the colour of the rosette).
It seems a bit odd to me that such a senior law officer can make such misleading statements and get away with it.
Unfortunately, it doesn't.
Newham is not Surrey, Liverpool is not Cornwall. The amount each area needs and the ability of that area to meet that need from its own resources (council tax, parking fines, housing licences etc) would be so varied as to be ridiculous so the central Government "grant" helps equalise it.
If that grant were to be apportioned by an independent non-political body it would help but if it's dished out by the Government then some areas will always be "favoured" and you can guess which depending on which party is in power centrally and locally.
You could probably fund most of local Government locally IF you took the funding for social care and perhaps housing away and funded it directly through some national scheme such as a National Care Agency or a National Housing Agency.
But maybe there's hope - with the trend away from jailing dangerous people towards jailing hurty words people, maybe society will become less violent in a century or so.
On housing and development, it's worth pointing out the biggest obstacle to development isn't "NIMBY-ism" (whatever that means), it's the actual cost of construction.
In London, there's the Section 106 payment, the Community Infrastructure Levy and the Carbon Off-Set Tax to name but three. Developers look at sites and you and I might ask why they aren't being developed - the answer isn't to blame the LDs (far too easy and wrong) but to blame successive Governments for hiking construction costs.
That's before we get into supply chain capacity issues, shortages of specialist trades etc, etc. If you are serious about building houses, then get your children to be bricklayers, sparks or chippies and create a meaningful National Apprentice Scheme and encourage (or cajole) private sector companies to employ these apprentices.
Developers want to develop and they want to work WITH local communities to provide developments which work for everyone but they have to at least be able to break even on a site and what's stopping them are the costs.
Right now there is no penalty for doing so.
I am not as confident as they appear to be that it will remain so in perpetuity...
By your approach, I'd buy loads of tat to go into charity shops or landfill and then rely on tax-payers to fund my incapacitated years (or to fund my medical death, if my opinions aren't respected).
And you can't do massive 'start again' structural changes - which is what we need - because you can't rebuild your plane in the middle of a stormy crossing of the Atlantic.
Apart from all that it's easy.
A guess: The best thing to do would be at the next budget to announce so many measures, hundreds of them, including major tax rises, that you both get all the criticism over in one go, and tell ordinary people that the government actually has a plan and some courage.
If you really need an extra £100billion, and you come under existential fire for a few billion, you might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.
Rather than baroque attempts to charge developers for schools and GP surgeries etc... Why not do the following -
- lay out the planned street grid for a new area.
- build the services - sewers, leecy, schools, hospitals etc. first. This has the advantage of reducing load on existing local services, even before the new houses go up.
- sell the plots to the developers at a price that covers the above. Make sure that the parcels of plots are not all sold to the same developer.
Alternatively, things like domestic travel can boost local economies (not necessarily local to you!) or even foreign travel boosts airports, ports etc and UK based arrangers and operators. Likewise local visits to places nearby, meals out etc.
It's an interesting balance with keeping savings for better end of life care (and so likely reducing state expenditure). It would be interesting to see which has a more positive economic impact for the country overall. Probably depends on date and type of spending versus saving (spaffing savings on TEMU the day before entering a care home probably not helpful!).
Personally, I think the State should cover (good) social care in exchange for a share of whatever capital/assets remain at end of life. We could call it Social Care Insurance and set it to, say, 40% at end of life.
If Blair had had the courage after 1997 to do the right thing that he had in 2003 to do the wrong thing, he would have gone down in history too.
If Starmer wants a chance of being historic in good ways, he has a short window to do it in.
Sell a rework of tax by folding NI into income tax. This would save billions in administration. Before you get to increased tax yield. To soften the hit for pensioners, the retired get a lower rate of tax that doesn't include the NI. So only rich pensioners pay extra tax. While you are at it, add a bit on tax rates, while getting rid of the complications regarding personal allowance withdrawal etc. Claim that this isn't really breaking the promises on tax not going up. Because of the reduction in complexity, some will gain and some will lose. The argument will be lost in time....
On pensions, quadruple lock - the extra lock is that the pension must be equal to the personal tax allowance. All the other old age benefits (WFA etc) go in a blender and come out means tested/taxable. Sell this as "Guaranteeing the future of the universal state pension. Our reforms means that poor pensioners get x% more. Pensioners on 50K are able to pay a bit more"
If the government had started with this, they would have raised more money, kept the markets calm and their back benchers would be happy - more money for the poor.
Can I be Labour Chancellor?
The actual house building was up to people who wanted to build houses.
The EeeeYoo have stuck their fetid beaks in, it is alleged
Each could be losing/winning votes to/from the other 2. Staying home and watching the telly might be the winner.
Well, my startpoint is the contrast between the public balance sheet (stressed) and the private one (not so much). Data indicates there are more comfortably off people in this country than ever before. You don't find them featured much in vox pops or articles or blogs (since the greater appetite is for 'all is woe' and if you're comfortable you tend to not shout it from the rooftops) but they are there in large numbers.
So the mission, should the government choose to accept it, is to increase the £££ raised from this cohort without impacting that section of the population who are struggling as it is to get by (there are also more of these than ever before - a consequence of our relatively high tolerance for inequality).
How to do it? Always the rub. Every serious proposal will face a tsunami of 'politics of envy' or 'anti wealth creation' opposition from those who will lose out, who also happen to be the most articulate and influential members of society. But c'mon, we have a Labour government with a huge majority and 4 years to the next election, their MPs with no appetite (as just shown) to cut welfare or public services, so if not now when?
My top 2 are an annual levy on property wealth and replacing tax relief on pensions with state match funding of contributions up to a cap (same cap for everyone) - or alternatively (if easier to implement) restricting tax relief to the basic rate (which has a similar effect). I doubt the government will do the property levy but I think there's a fair chance they will have a tilt at the pensions reform.
Most violent criminals are in jail so at least not on the streets at that time.
There are also plenty of vocational courses you can do in jail
Let local government fund local choices only.
He would need to be convicted and given a jail sentence of over 1 year to be removed as an MP or any jail term, even if suspended, for a recall petition.
I suspect most Basildon voters opposed any lockdown at all and certainly couldn't care less about amounts borrowed to keep businesses going through it. On current polls it would be an easy Reform hold with increased majority
Essentially "we're all in this together", which was one of Osborne's better ideas.
You get some rum comment on Youtube. This on an Ashley Neal video (It was about Critical Mass, and I had made a comparison with the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass):
Mr. Wardman. By stating that I believe the wrong side won the English Civil Wars, you may understand my approach. I do not believe in parliamentary rule, as i do not believe the plebiscite can understand how to elect wholly unqualified people to run the country. The great unwashed should respect the right of people to own property in my humble opinion. I served the Crown throughout my career and was proud to do so.
Someone needs to tell him about the Restoration ... he sounds like a Society of King Charles the Martyr type.
City of London, perhaps?
I don't expect the Laotians will be treated with a great deal more consideration.
Last year the Government tried to change how agency workers get paid - their approach has now been scrapped because the impact would have lead to a 2 year delay for the software companies to implement
So because it wasn’t implemented immediately doing it now would result in it occurring just as the election kicks off
Anything else is spare change.
That's wrong. We should consider alternate possible explanations for all groups. I'd guess that there's an urban/rural thing going on. Muslims and Jews are concentrated in cities and maybe city prisons are rougher generally.
On a different subject, as an OAP, there have been, so far anyway, two stages in the Cole's pensioner life.
The first was the first fifteen or so after retirement/ We were reasonably fit, felt we'd enough money to go where we wanted to, and wanted to see more of the world. This was helped/hindered by one of our sons settling in Thailand and starting a family there. Grandchildren are an attraction for OAP travel! So we travelled. Spent a bit on the house and garden, but not a lot..... if I have a regret it's not getting solar panels fitted years ago. We invested prudently and lived off our income.
The second stage has been a lot less fun as it's included a significant spell in hospital and severely reduced mobility for me, and we're now wondering about what happens if Mrs C becomes unable to look after me. We've got carer support and we could always increase that, but more of that and we're going to have to look at our savings and investments.
I hope that I'll sign off here for good ...... I've left instructions for whichever of the grandchildren sorts out my computer to let you know ...... before I'm needing even more support. Mrs C feel the same about herself. We both want to go to sleep one night and not wake up, but ......
Reduce the employee NI rate to a nominal amount, increase Income Tax by a counterbalancing amount, which would likely be lower than the NI drop in percentage terms, then when the final complex switchover comes it will be a much smaller thing in fiscal terms.
I'm not saying merge them without anyone being worse off though, I'm saying merge them so that working people are no worse off, if not better off.
Instead of having a base rate of 20% and NI of 8% you could have a base rate of 28% and working people would be no worse off . . . or have a base rate of eg 27% and have a real terms tax cut for working people while being approximately revenue neutral.
Property wealth also makes sense - hard to dodge and encourages things like downsizing. Would probably hit me, depending how valued, as we have a fair bit of land, but so be it.
*not all that high now, with fiscal drag - I'm one of them, as a lowly academic!
**me, although I do actually use it for commuting more than anything else, which is something - a better cycle to work scheme would however perhaps give a capped £300-£400 off a bike: free or nearly free bike for someone buying something basic to tootle a few miles, but still a nice incentive for MAMILs like me (that would have put me somewhere near even - it would be fascinating to see the distribution of bike prices bought on cycle to work)
Getting planning permission provides an immediate uplift in the value of land, even without building the home, so if firms buy land and get permission but don't do anything with the land then they have a profit in their accounts in holding an asset that is worth more than they paid for it.
What's worse is that the firms with permission can hold on to it with no threat of competition as other land that could compete with it lacks the permission so competition is cut off.
With sensible planning reform, then 'permission' would be worthless, so holding land with permission would be worthless too.
If they mandate a service they should ensure it is properly funded.
Council tax should just be for local services and decisions that the council is democratically accountable for.
Changing to a base rate of 27.9% and an NI rate of 0.1% would be fairly trivial, OTOH
So it is that, with a languid stretch of limbs honed by adventure, Tramadol, Melnik wine and Netflix, he rises. And on the streets of Old Sofia, stray dogs lower their heads in reverence, even as grandmothers clutch their beads
“Eто го, Соколът!” - they say, one to another, again and again, with both mystery and awe
“There he is, The Falcon!”
Many people today already get marked as making NI contributions, with their contributions being £0.00
All that muscle…
If they had put in one more minister day at Runcorn to get 7 extra votes, rather than bottling it, and Sarah Pochin had lost, Reform MPs would be on a trandem rather than in a taxi. Just like the Goodies.
On the header, there's another one this morning - Ref UK Councillor in Kent (for Thanet) hsa been charged with threatening to kill his wife, and has now appeared in court. The Whip was initially suspended at the start of June:
The 37-year-old - who represents the Cliftonville ward in Thanet - appeared at Folkestone Magistrates’ Court today charged with three offences, all of which he denied.
These included making threats to kill his wife on June 1, and a separate charge of sending an offensive, indecent, obscene or menacing message to her on the same day.
It was also alleged between January 1, 2014, and June 1, 2025, he repeatedly or continuously engaged in behaviour which was controlling or coercive.
https://www.kentonline.co.uk/thanet/news/suspended-reform-councillor-appears-in-court-accused-of-thre-326773/
E.g it would push a lot of people over a 50% marginal rate because NICs is regressive on higher incomes.
There is absolutely no, that I know of, welfare in this country that is only available if you've actually made contributions.
Even "new-style" "contributory" JSA you can be eligible for with "contributions" of £0.00 if you were earning more than the Lower Earnings Limit but less than the Primary Threshold.
What are the arguments against ?
Today, I've written the foreword to a new @LabourTogether & @BritishProgress report asking the question - how can we get Heathrow expansion off the ground rapidly & democratically?
The answer: pass a public bill through Parliament within a year.
https://x.com/Dan4Barnet/status/1942114934789194079
He makes the point that despite the government committing to major national projects like Sizewell, or Heathrow, they can then be tied up in planning, and judicial reviews, for at least half a decade, often longer.
Parliament could cut that time to a year simply by voting on a bill in favour of a particular project.
Is there any good reason that should not happen ?
Above LEL but below PT the rate is nil.
Tbh I suspect what people are seeing is mainly Trump's power games. Jimmy Savile was the same, apparently, in that rather than circulating, he would sit behind the purple rope and anyone seeking an audience would need to come to his throne. Trump dropped some papers and the obsequious Starmer retrieved them.
And then start the project to sort out all the details and finish the job.
Yes, you'd end up changing the IT rates and thresholds - not just NI +IT. This is where a Labour Chancellor could have finessed even more money.
One reason I've heard given for not merging the taxes, is that it hides real rates from people!
You could simply set these at £1 billion...
In the real world, I wonder how much hard coding has taken place as a quick fix.
The glory is slightly limited, Il Mancuniano is a Godot like character in that his main feature is in not appearing, whilst absolutely everyone else in the novel, some based on people I knew, get involved in the kind of multivariate action that would boggle the mind of a TSE Stepmom.
Yes, fellows, I couldn't get laid in a 'Bad sex in literature' level porn novel. If any of Leon's acquaintances ever wished to reprise Il Mancuniano, I'm sure that would be fine!
I’m minded to think things like this will be used to good effect in a campaign, and Reform will suffer. Then again, Labour have had an MP suspended for punching a constituent! So they can’t really go in too hard
Keep LEL and raise PT to a billion and you have your nil rate.
But it would be better to just have a super simple system that also irons out the weird tax incentives for high earners etc