Conference season ends and I believe the unexpected happened
Kemi Badenoch delivered the best speech, rolled out an array of policies, and stamp duty the 'rabbit out of the hat'
She energised her supporters and have given them something to sell on the doorstep
And she did what I prayed she would, sent out a positive [conservative] message and barely mentioned Starmer or Farage
Labour and Farage fell into the trap of hurling insults at each other to the detriment of both
The added bonus is Jenrick is the biggest loser
I do not know how the polls will react, but today was a start on the long road to relevance
Rabbit out of a hat, or bollocks out of her arse?
Pound shop Liz Truss.
No Kemi identified welfare and spending cuts to fund her tax cut
It wasn't just welfare but cuts in climate change subsidies and increasing north sea production with associated tax income, as well as welcoming back millionaires, entrepreneurs, and wealth creators
She also will scrap IHT on farmers and abolish vat on private school fees
Add in banning doctor strikes
This is conservative policies and is a direct challenge to Labour and Reform
This is pennies BigG. No spending cuts plan is credible without some sort of control on pensioner benefits and health spending. They are are growing so quickly - from a very high base - that any other cut or even steady economic growth is completely overwhelmed by them. Literally by design in the case of the triple lock.
Labour haven't set out a plan either but let's not pretend the Conservative plan is fiscally prudent. DavidL's take on this is correct.
Google tells me that the number of UK civil servants has increased since 2016 by 132,000 and that the median salary is £34k.
That would imply a saving of £4.5bn under the Tory plan.
Not commenting on whether it is feasible or not but it’s not “pennies”
True - but I think the fact the median salary is so low suggests what kinds of roles those civil servants are doing - particularly when you consider how London dominated the civil service is.
If you could cut 130,000 people out of Whitehall or it's equivalent in Scotland, Wales then fair enough. But I think the stats show that increase is primarily agencies like HMRC and DWP. Basically call centres, which would mean a reduced service. AI might be the answer to that but it's not a magic button you can press.
It said that the range was £24 - 84k (from memory - haven’t checked).
The only way to plausibly cuts costs is to stop doing stuff. Governments need to cut verticals rather than horizontally. (Equally I am sure that there are the sort of grinding efficiencies - 1, 2, 3 percent a year - that the private sector makes which government agencies never seem to be able to find)
And that's why, at the moment, this is Potemkin Policy. Tell us which Civil Servants are going to be axed, and what's going to happen to the work they were doing, and it gets interesting. "It won't be done by the state" is a legitimate answer.
Otherwise, Kemi is doing the fun bit without doing the hard work first. Maggie wouldn't have approved.
PB Tories are normally pragmatic people, questioning the symmetry of a Labour or Lib Dem tax cut or spending pledge. "The books don't balance" they will cry.
Yet a welcome Tory £12b tax cut paid by fantasy wastage savings get a free ride.
Fortunately the Tories are not in Government. I am sure if they were the gilt markets might baulk.
They are not “fantasy wastage savings”.
They have said that they will reduce civil service numbers back to 2016 levels. That’s pretty specific - of course they haven’t identified “Me Mexican” or “Ms Pete” as being at risk of being made redundant - but it’s not just a number made up by some spreadsheet jockey.
You had fourteen years in Government. Fourteen years to identify and implement swingeing service cuts to pay for massive tax cuts. You failed. During that 14 years, service provision levels crashed at the same time the tax burden increased.
Posters have quoted Reform fantasy savings in Kent, savings so magnificent that Council tax increases could be suspended, until they found out there were few savings to be made and Council taxes were raised by 5%.
A nice speech offering the Moon on a stick is one thing, shoehorning the contents of that speech into reality is quite another.
Your party and the cheerleaders on here are profoundly unserious.
Good morning
And giveover
Badenoch gave a totally unexpected and successful speech that galvanised her audience and has given her party lots of policies, and of scrapping stamp duty has been well received from think tanks and Paul Johnson formally of the IFS who said yesterday it is the worst of many bad taxes
Your mixture of cynicism and satire is par for the cop* but at least this conservative is pleased to see conservative policies and Jenrick put back in his box
I don't believe I was being remotely cynical or satirical. If you want satire I can write all day about letter boxes and an offensive description of a smile.
You would be the first to criticise ( and justifiably so) an unfunded Reeves pledge. And make no mistake there is nothing in the credit column to match the tax cut in the debit column, except for a nebulous notion of cutting wastage.
If she has done enough to put Jenrick back in his box and take some points from Reform I'll drink to that, but my point stands, her welcome tax cut debit does not demonstrate a corresponding credit.
*If you don't like me posting on here you could always ask TSE politely to transfer me from "member" to " applicant" status, that way I can still access and read your posts but no longer post myself. There, that seems like a neat compromise.
At times you really are very silly as demonstrated by your last paragraph
4.5 billion cost as quoted by the IFS is eminently doable
I do apologise for my figures, I misinterpreted what you were writing. You were claiming that stamp duty only generated the Government £4.5b, I misinterpreted that, not least because I was under the misapprehension that the £11.6b figure was cast iron.
The widely accepted figure for stamp duty credit yesterday was £11.6b down from a little over £12b on the previous measurement timescale. I thought even Kemi accepted the stamp duty saving as £9b, although if you say it is only £4.5b I would be surprised, but £4.5b it is.
Nonetheless, how are you paying for that £4.5b shortfall? Nebulous growth wishcasting and bogus service cost savings don't count.
Thank you for your comments and in the scheme of things 4.5 billion is small beer
LOL! I won't be offering to buy you a pint!
You haven't answered my question. How are you paying for that £4.5b shortfall? Nebulous growth wishcasting and bogus service cost savings don't count.
Badenoch announced the end of ev and heat pump subsidies - that accounts for 2.5 billion alone
Yet another example of Badenoch inventing wild numbers. The EV subsidy is capped at £650 million over three years and the heat pump subsidy at £295 million for just one year, nowhere near £2.5 billion per year. It's so illiterate and lazy. If the Conservatives could spend just five minutes on Google if they wanted to "fully cost" their proposals
If so, I accept your revised figures to circa 1 billion pa, but the abolition of stamp duty is now a top priority for the conservatives endorsed by think tanks and many others
It is a bad tax, but more widely Badenoch has put forward a platform of policies that were previously missing and has energised the party
I doubt it will make a big difference in the immediate polling, but this is a four year trek to the next GE and certainly reducing Jenrick's hopes are an even more positive
I think everyone is on board with dumping stamp duty, but some of us are keen to see how it is being paid for.
Maybe Reeves steals Tory clothes.
If you remove £X stamp duty from a house purchase, the vendor will expect to receive an extra £X on the sale price, as that is the going rate for their property (all-in). More money in the pockets of vendors, buyers no better off. The Tory Chancellor £10 billion a year worse off.
Conference season ends and I believe the unexpected happened
Kemi Badenoch delivered the best speech, rolled out an array of policies, and stamp duty the 'rabbit out of the hat'
She energised her supporters and have given them something to sell on the doorstep
And she did what I prayed she would, sent out a positive [conservative] message and barely mentioned Starmer or Farage
Labour and Farage fell into the trap of hurling insults at each other to the detriment of both
The added bonus is Jenrick is the biggest loser
I do not know how the polls will react, but today was a start on the long road to relevance
Rabbit out of a hat, or bollocks out of her arse?
Pound shop Liz Truss.
No Kemi identified welfare and spending cuts to fund her tax cut
It wasn't just welfare but cuts in climate change subsidies and increasing north sea production with associated tax income, as well as welcoming back millionaires, entrepreneurs, and wealth creators
She also will scrap IHT on farmers and abolish vat on private school fees
Add in banning doctor strikes
This is conservative policies and is a direct challenge to Labour and Reform
This is pennies BigG. No spending cuts plan is credible without some sort of control on pensioner benefits and health spending. They are are growing so quickly - from a very high base - that any other cut or even steady economic growth is completely overwhelmed by them. Literally by design in the case of the triple lock.
Labour haven't set out a plan either but let's not pretend the Conservative plan is fiscally prudent. DavidL's take on this is correct.
Google tells me that the number of UK civil servants has increased since 2016 by 132,000 and that the median salary is £34k.
That would imply a saving of £4.5bn under the Tory plan.
Not commenting on whether it is feasible or not but it’s not “pennies”
True - but I think the fact the median salary is so low suggests what kinds of roles those civil servants are doing - particularly when you consider how London dominated the civil service is.
If you could cut 130,000 people out of Whitehall or it's equivalent in Scotland, Wales then fair enough. But I think the stats show that increase is primarily agencies like HMRC and DWP. Basically call centres, which would mean a reduced service. AI might be the answer to that but it's not a magic button you can press.
It said that the range was £24 - 84k (from memory - haven’t checked).
The only way to plausibly cuts costs is to stop doing stuff. Governments need to cut verticals rather than horizontally. (Equally I am sure that there are the sort of grinding efficiencies - 1, 2, 3 percent a year - that the private sector makes which government agencies never seem to be able to find)
And that's why, at the moment, this is Potemkin Policy. Tell us which Civil Servants are going to be axed, and what's going to happen to the work they were doing, and it gets interesting. "It won't be done by the state" is a legitimate answer.
Otherwise, Kemi is doing the fun bit without doing the hard work first. Maggie wouldn't have approved.
PB Tories are normally pragmatic people, questioning the symmetry of a Labour or Lib Dem tax cut or spending pledge. "The books don't balance" they will cry.
Yet a welcome Tory £12b tax cut paid by fantasy wastage savings get a free ride.
Fortunately the Tories are not in Government. I am sure if they were the gilt markets might baulk.
They are not “fantasy wastage savings”.
They have said that they will reduce civil service numbers back to 2016 levels. That’s pretty specific - of course they haven’t identified “Me Mexican” or “Ms Pete” as being at risk of being made redundant - but it’s not just a number made up by some spreadsheet jockey.
You had fourteen years in Government. Fourteen years to identify and implement swingeing service cuts to pay for massive tax cuts. You failed. During that 14 years, service provision levels crashed at the same time the tax burden increased.
Posters have quoted Reform fantasy savings in Kent, savings so magnificent that Council tax increases could be suspended, until they found out there were few savings to be made and Council taxes were raised by 5%.
A nice speech offering the Moon on a stick is one thing, shoehorning the contents of that speech into reality is quite another.
Your party and the cheerleaders on here are profoundly unserious.
Good morning
And giveover
Badenoch gave a totally unexpected and successful speech that galvanised her audience and has given her party lots of policies, and of scrapping stamp duty has been well received from think tanks and Paul Johnson formally of the IFS who said yesterday it is the worst of many bad taxes
Your mixture of cynicism and satire is par for the cop* but at least this conservative is pleased to see conservative policies and Jenrick put back in his box
I don't believe I was being remotely cynical or satirical. If you want satire I can write all day about letter boxes and an offensive description of a smile.
You would be the first to criticise ( and justifiably so) an unfunded Reeves pledge. And make no mistake there is nothing in the credit column to match the tax cut in the debit column, except for a nebulous notion of cutting wastage.
If she has done enough to put Jenrick back in his box and take some points from Reform I'll drink to that, but my point stands, her welcome tax cut debit does not demonstrate a corresponding credit.
*If you don't like me posting on here you could always ask TSE politely to transfer me from "member" to " applicant" status, that way I can still access and read your posts but no longer post myself. There, that seems like a neat compromise.
At times you really are very silly as demonstrated by your last paragraph
4.5 billion cost as quoted by the IFS is eminently doable
I do apologise for my figures, I misinterpreted what you were writing. You were claiming that stamp duty only generated the Government £4.5b, I misinterpreted that, not least because I was under the misapprehension that the £11.6b figure was cast iron.
The widely accepted figure for stamp duty credit yesterday was £11.6b down from a little over £12b on the previous measurement timescale. I thought even Kemi accepted the stamp duty saving as £9b, although if you say it is only £4.5b I would be surprised, but £4.5b it is.
Nonetheless, how are you paying for that £4.5b shortfall? Nebulous growth wishcasting and bogus service cost savings don't count.
Thank you for your comments and in the scheme of things 4.5 billion is small beer
LOL! I won't be offering to buy you a pint!
You haven't answered my question. How are you paying for that £4.5b shortfall? Nebulous growth wishcasting and bogus service cost savings don't count.
Badenoch announced the end of ev and heat pump subsidies - that accounts for 2.5 billion alone
Yet another example of Badenoch inventing wild numbers. The EV subsidy is capped at £650 million over three years and the heat pump subsidy at £295 million for just one year, nowhere near £2.5 billion per year. It's so illiterate and lazy. If the Conservatives could spend just five minutes on Google if they wanted to "fully cost" their proposals
If so, I accept your revised figures to circa 1 billion pa, but the abolition of stamp duty is now a top priority for the conservatives endorsed by think tanks and many others
It is a bad tax, but more widely Badenoch has put forward a platform of policies that were previously missing and has energised the party
I doubt it will make a big difference in the immediate polling, but this is a four year trek to the next GE and certainly reducing Jenrick's hopes are an even more positive
I think everyone is on board with dumping stamp duty, but some of us are keen to see how it is being paid for.
Maybe Reeves steals Tory clothes.
After disinfecting them, presumably.
One side effect - or intentional effect - to watch out for would be on the fiscal autonomy of the devolved administrations. The tax is devolved; its replacement might not be.
That may be also be a matter of interest for the funding.
Conference season ends and I believe the unexpected happened
Kemi Badenoch delivered the best speech, rolled out an array of policies, and stamp duty the 'rabbit out of the hat'
She energised her supporters and have given them something to sell on the doorstep
And she did what I prayed she would, sent out a positive [conservative] message and barely mentioned Starmer or Farage
Labour and Farage fell into the trap of hurling insults at each other to the detriment of both
The added bonus is Jenrick is the biggest loser
I do not know how the polls will react, but today was a start on the long road to relevance
Rabbit out of a hat, or bollocks out of her arse?
Pound shop Liz Truss.
No Kemi identified welfare and spending cuts to fund her tax cut
It wasn't just welfare but cuts in climate change subsidies and increasing north sea production with associated tax income, as well as welcoming back millionaires, entrepreneurs, and wealth creators
She also will scrap IHT on farmers and abolish vat on private school fees
Add in banning doctor strikes
This is conservative policies and is a direct challenge to Labour and Reform
This is pennies BigG. No spending cuts plan is credible without some sort of control on pensioner benefits and health spending. They are are growing so quickly - from a very high base - that any other cut or even steady economic growth is completely overwhelmed by them. Literally by design in the case of the triple lock.
Labour haven't set out a plan either but let's not pretend the Conservative plan is fiscally prudent. DavidL's take on this is correct.
Google tells me that the number of UK civil servants has increased since 2016 by 132,000 and that the median salary is £34k.
That would imply a saving of £4.5bn under the Tory plan.
Not commenting on whether it is feasible or not but it’s not “pennies”
True - but I think the fact the median salary is so low suggests what kinds of roles those civil servants are doing - particularly when you consider how London dominated the civil service is.
If you could cut 130,000 people out of Whitehall or it's equivalent in Scotland, Wales then fair enough. But I think the stats show that increase is primarily agencies like HMRC and DWP. Basically call centres, which would mean a reduced service. AI might be the answer to that but it's not a magic button you can press.
It said that the range was £24 - 84k (from memory - haven’t checked).
The only way to plausibly cuts costs is to stop doing stuff. Governments need to cut verticals rather than horizontally. (Equally I am sure that there are the sort of grinding efficiencies - 1, 2, 3 percent a year - that the private sector makes which government agencies never seem to be able to find)
And that's why, at the moment, this is Potemkin Policy. Tell us which Civil Servants are going to be axed, and what's going to happen to the work they were doing, and it gets interesting. "It won't be done by the state" is a legitimate answer.
Otherwise, Kemi is doing the fun bit without doing the hard work first. Maggie wouldn't have approved.
PB Tories are normally pragmatic people, questioning the symmetry of a Labour or Lib Dem tax cut or spending pledge. "The books don't balance" they will cry.
Yet a welcome Tory £12b tax cut paid by fantasy wastage savings get a free ride.
Fortunately the Tories are not in Government. I am sure if they were the gilt markets might baulk.
They are not “fantasy wastage savings”.
They have said that they will reduce civil service numbers back to 2016 levels. That’s pretty specific - of course they haven’t identified “Me Mexican” or “Ms Pete” as being at risk of being made redundant - but it’s not just a number made up by some spreadsheet jockey.
You had fourteen years in Government. Fourteen years to identify and implement swingeing service cuts to pay for massive tax cuts. You failed. During that 14 years, service provision levels crashed at the same time the tax burden increased.
Posters have quoted Reform fantasy savings in Kent, savings so magnificent that Council tax increases could be suspended, until they found out there were few savings to be made and Council taxes were raised by 5%.
A nice speech offering the Moon on a stick is one thing, shoehorning the contents of that speech into reality is quite another.
Your party and the cheerleaders on here are profoundly unserious.
Good morning
And giveover
Badenoch gave a totally unexpected and successful speech that galvanised her audience and has given her party lots of policies, and of scrapping stamp duty has been well received from think tanks and Paul Johnson formally of the IFS who said yesterday it is the worst of many bad taxes
Your mixture of cynicism and satire is par for the cop* but at least this conservative is pleased to see conservative policies and Jenrick put back in his box
I don't believe I was being remotely cynical or satirical. If you want satire I can write all day about letter boxes and an offensive description of a smile.
You would be the first to criticise ( and justifiably so) an unfunded Reeves pledge. And make no mistake there is nothing in the credit column to match the tax cut in the debit column, except for a nebulous notion of cutting wastage.
If she has done enough to put Jenrick back in his box and take some points from Reform I'll drink to that, but my point stands, her welcome tax cut debit does not demonstrate a corresponding credit.
*If you don't like me posting on here you could always ask TSE politely to transfer me from "member" to " applicant" status, that way I can still access and read your posts but no longer post myself. There, that seems like a neat compromise.
At times you really are very silly as demonstrated by your last paragraph
4.5 billion cost as quoted by the IFS is eminently doable
I do apologise for my figures, I misinterpreted what you were writing. You were claiming that stamp duty only generated the Government £4.5b, I misinterpreted that, not least because I was under the misapprehension that the £11.6b figure was cast iron.
The widely accepted figure for stamp duty credit yesterday was £11.6b down from a little over £12b on the previous measurement timescale. I thought even Kemi accepted the stamp duty saving as £9b, although if you say it is only £4.5b I would be surprised, but £4.5b it is.
Nonetheless, how are you paying for that £4.5b shortfall? Nebulous growth wishcasting and bogus service cost savings don't count.
Thank you for your comments and in the scheme of things 4.5 billion is small beer
LOL! I won't be offering to buy you a pint!
You haven't answered my question. How are you paying for that £4.5b shortfall? Nebulous growth wishcasting and bogus service cost savings don't count.
Badenoch announced the end of ev and heat pump subsidies - that accounts for 2.5 billion alone
Yet another example of Badenoch inventing wild numbers. The EV subsidy is capped at £650 million over three years and the heat pump subsidy at £295 million for just one year, nowhere near £2.5 billion per year. It's so illiterate and lazy. If the Conservatives could spend just five minutes on Google if they wanted to "fully cost" their proposals
If so, I accept your revised figures to circa 1 billion pa, but the abolition of stamp duty is now a top priority for the conservatives endorsed by think tanks and many others
It is a bad tax, but more widely Badenoch has put forward a platform of policies that were previously missing and has energised the party
I doubt it will make a big difference in the immediate polling, but this is a four year trek to the next GE and certainly reducing Jenrick's hopes are an even more positive
I think everyone is on board with dumping stamp duty, but some of us are keen to see how it is being paid for.
Maybe Reeves steals Tory clothes.
If you remove £X stamp duty from a house purchase, the vendor will expect to receive an extra £X on the sale price, as that is the going rate for their property (all-in). More money in the pockets of vendors, buyers no better off. The Tory Chancellor £10 billion a year worse off.
And as noted yesterday passim, even more money for rich SE houseowners.
Conference season ends and I believe the unexpected happened
Kemi Badenoch delivered the best speech, rolled out an array of policies, and stamp duty the 'rabbit out of the hat'
She energised her supporters and have given them something to sell on the doorstep
And she did what I prayed she would, sent out a positive [conservative] message and barely mentioned Starmer or Farage
Labour and Farage fell into the trap of hurling insults at each other to the detriment of both
The added bonus is Jenrick is the biggest loser
I do not know how the polls will react, but today was a start on the long road to relevance
Rabbit out of a hat, or bollocks out of her arse?
Pound shop Liz Truss.
No Kemi identified welfare and spending cuts to fund her tax cut
It wasn't just welfare but cuts in climate change subsidies and increasing north sea production with associated tax income, as well as welcoming back millionaires, entrepreneurs, and wealth creators
She also will scrap IHT on farmers and abolish vat on private school fees
Add in banning doctor strikes
This is conservative policies and is a direct challenge to Labour and Reform
This is pennies BigG. No spending cuts plan is credible without some sort of control on pensioner benefits and health spending. They are are growing so quickly - from a very high base - that any other cut or even steady economic growth is completely overwhelmed by them. Literally by design in the case of the triple lock.
Labour haven't set out a plan either but let's not pretend the Conservative plan is fiscally prudent. DavidL's take on this is correct.
Google tells me that the number of UK civil servants has increased since 2016 by 132,000 and that the median salary is £34k.
That would imply a saving of £4.5bn under the Tory plan.
Not commenting on whether it is feasible or not but it’s not “pennies”
True - but I think the fact the median salary is so low suggests what kinds of roles those civil servants are doing - particularly when you consider how London dominated the civil service is.
If you could cut 130,000 people out of Whitehall or it's equivalent in Scotland, Wales then fair enough. But I think the stats show that increase is primarily agencies like HMRC and DWP. Basically call centres, which would mean a reduced service. AI might be the answer to that but it's not a magic button you can press.
It said that the range was £24 - 84k (from memory - haven’t checked).
The only way to plausibly cuts costs is to stop doing stuff. Governments need to cut verticals rather than horizontally. (Equally I am sure that there are the sort of grinding efficiencies - 1, 2, 3 percent a year - that the private sector makes which government agencies never seem to be able to find)
And that's why, at the moment, this is Potemkin Policy. Tell us which Civil Servants are going to be axed, and what's going to happen to the work they were doing, and it gets interesting. "It won't be done by the state" is a legitimate answer.
Otherwise, Kemi is doing the fun bit without doing the hard work first. Maggie wouldn't have approved.
PB Tories are normally pragmatic people, questioning the symmetry of a Labour or Lib Dem tax cut or spending pledge. "The books don't balance" they will cry.
Yet a welcome Tory £12b tax cut paid by fantasy wastage savings get a free ride.
Fortunately the Tories are not in Government. I am sure if they were the gilt markets might baulk.
They are not “fantasy wastage savings”.
They have said that they will reduce civil service numbers back to 2016 levels. That’s pretty specific - of course they haven’t identified “Me Mexican” or “Ms Pete” as being at risk of being made redundant - but it’s not just a number made up by some spreadsheet jockey.
You had fourteen years in Government. Fourteen years to identify and implement swingeing service cuts to pay for massive tax cuts. You failed. During that 14 years, service provision levels crashed at the same time the tax burden increased.
Posters have quoted Reform fantasy savings in Kent, savings so magnificent that Council tax increases could be suspended, until they found out there were few savings to be made and Council taxes were raised by 5%.
A nice speech offering the Moon on a stick is one thing, shoehorning the contents of that speech into reality is quite another.
Your party and the cheerleaders on here are profoundly unserious.
Good morning
And giveover
Badenoch gave a totally unexpected and successful speech that galvanised her audience and has given her party lots of policies, and of scrapping stamp duty has been well received from think tanks and Paul Johnson formally of the IFS who said yesterday it is the worst of many bad taxes
Your mixture of cynicism and satire is par for the cop* but at least this conservative is pleased to see conservative policies and Jenrick put back in his box
I don't believe I was being remotely cynical or satirical. If you want satire I can write all day about letter boxes and an offensive description of a smile.
You would be the first to criticise ( and justifiably so) an unfunded Reeves pledge. And make no mistake there is nothing in the credit column to match the tax cut in the debit column, except for a nebulous notion of cutting wastage.
If she has done enough to put Jenrick back in his box and take some points from Reform I'll drink to that, but my point stands, her welcome tax cut debit does not demonstrate a corresponding credit.
*If you don't like me posting on here you could always ask TSE politely to transfer me from "member" to " applicant" status, that way I can still access and read your posts but no longer post myself. There, that seems like a neat compromise.
At times you really are very silly as demonstrated by your last paragraph
4.5 billion cost as quoted by the IFS is eminently doable
I do apologise for my figures, I misinterpreted what you were writing. You were claiming that stamp duty only generated the Government £4.5b, I misinterpreted that, not least because I was under the misapprehension that the £11.6b figure was cast iron.
The widely accepted figure for stamp duty credit yesterday was £11.6b down from a little over £12b on the previous measurement timescale. I thought even Kemi accepted the stamp duty saving as £9b, although if you say it is only £4.5b I would be surprised, but £4.5b it is.
Nonetheless, how are you paying for that £4.5b shortfall? Nebulous growth wishcasting and bogus service cost savings don't count.
Thank you for your comments and in the scheme of things 4.5 billion is small beer
LOL! I won't be offering to buy you a pint!
You haven't answered my question. How are you paying for that £4.5b shortfall? Nebulous growth wishcasting and bogus service cost savings don't count.
Badenoch announced the end of ev and heat pump subsidies - that accounts for 2.5 billion alone
Yet another example of Badenoch inventing wild numbers. The EV subsidy is capped at £650 million over three years and the heat pump subsidy at £295 million for just one year, nowhere near £2.5 billion per year. It's so illiterate and lazy. If the Conservatives could spend just five minutes on Google if they wanted to "fully cost" their proposals
If so, I accept your revised figures to circa 1 billion pa, but the abolition of stamp duty is now a top priority for the conservatives endorsed by think tanks and many others
It is a bad tax, but more widely Badenoch has put forward a platform of policies that were previously missing and has energised the party
I doubt it will make a big difference in the immediate polling, but this is a four year trek to the next GE and certainly reducing Jenrick's hopes are an even more positive
I think everyone is on board with dumping stamp duty, but some of us are keen to see how it is being paid for.
Maybe Reeves steals Tory clothes.
After disinfecting them, presumably.
One side effect - or intentional effect - to watch out for would be on the fiscal autonomy of the devolved administrations. The tax is devolved; its replacement might not be.
That may be also be a matter of interest for the funding.
Indeed, especially when Labour don't look like winning outright in Scotland or even in Wales and cuts can be blamed on whatever other party wins (though with coalitions who knows what will happen?)
Conference season ends and I believe the unexpected happened
Kemi Badenoch delivered the best speech, rolled out an array of policies, and stamp duty the 'rabbit out of the hat'
She energised her supporters and have given them something to sell on the doorstep
And she did what I prayed she would, sent out a positive [conservative] message and barely mentioned Starmer or Farage
Labour and Farage fell into the trap of hurling insults at each other to the detriment of both
The added bonus is Jenrick is the biggest loser
I do not know how the polls will react, but today was a start on the long road to relevance
Rabbit out of a hat, or bollocks out of her arse?
Pound shop Liz Truss.
No Kemi identified welfare and spending cuts to fund her tax cut
It wasn't just welfare but cuts in climate change subsidies and increasing north sea production with associated tax income, as well as welcoming back millionaires, entrepreneurs, and wealth creators
She also will scrap IHT on farmers and abolish vat on private school fees
Add in banning doctor strikes
This is conservative policies and is a direct challenge to Labour and Reform
This is pennies BigG. No spending cuts plan is credible without some sort of control on pensioner benefits and health spending. They are are growing so quickly - from a very high base - that any other cut or even steady economic growth is completely overwhelmed by them. Literally by design in the case of the triple lock.
Labour haven't set out a plan either but let's not pretend the Conservative plan is fiscally prudent. DavidL's take on this is correct.
Google tells me that the number of UK civil servants has increased since 2016 by 132,000 and that the median salary is £34k.
That would imply a saving of £4.5bn under the Tory plan.
Not commenting on whether it is feasible or not but it’s not “pennies”
True - but I think the fact the median salary is so low suggests what kinds of roles those civil servants are doing - particularly when you consider how London dominated the civil service is.
If you could cut 130,000 people out of Whitehall or it's equivalent in Scotland, Wales then fair enough. But I think the stats show that increase is primarily agencies like HMRC and DWP. Basically call centres, which would mean a reduced service. AI might be the answer to that but it's not a magic button you can press.
It said that the range was £24 - 84k (from memory - haven’t checked).
The only way to plausibly cuts costs is to stop doing stuff. Governments need to cut verticals rather than horizontally. (Equally I am sure that there are the sort of grinding efficiencies - 1, 2, 3 percent a year - that the private sector makes which government agencies never seem to be able to find)
And that's why, at the moment, this is Potemkin Policy. Tell us which Civil Servants are going to be axed, and what's going to happen to the work they were doing, and it gets interesting. "It won't be done by the state" is a legitimate answer.
Otherwise, Kemi is doing the fun bit without doing the hard work first. Maggie wouldn't have approved.
PB Tories are normally pragmatic people, questioning the symmetry of a Labour or Lib Dem tax cut or spending pledge. "The books don't balance" they will cry.
Yet a welcome Tory £12b tax cut paid by fantasy wastage savings get a free ride.
Fortunately the Tories are not in Government. I am sure if they were the gilt markets might baulk.
They are not “fantasy wastage savings”.
They have said that they will reduce civil service numbers back to 2016 levels. That’s pretty specific - of course they haven’t identified “Me Mexican” or “Ms Pete” as being at risk of being made redundant - but it’s not just a number made up by some spreadsheet jockey.
You had fourteen years in Government. Fourteen years to identify and implement swingeing service cuts to pay for massive tax cuts. You failed. During that 14 years, service provision levels crashed at the same time the tax burden increased.
Posters have quoted Reform fantasy savings in Kent, savings so magnificent that Council tax increases could be suspended, until they found out there were few savings to be made and Council taxes were raised by 5%.
A nice speech offering the Moon on a stick is one thing, shoehorning the contents of that speech into reality is quite another.
Your party and the cheerleaders on here are profoundly unserious.
Good morning
And giveover
Badenoch gave a totally unexpected and successful speech that galvanised her audience and has given her party lots of policies, and of scrapping stamp duty has been well received from think tanks and Paul Johnson formally of the IFS who said yesterday it is the worst of many bad taxes
Your mixture of cynicism and satire is par for the cop* but at least this conservative is pleased to see conservative policies and Jenrick put back in his box
I don't believe I was being remotely cynical or satirical. If you want satire I can write all day about letter boxes and an offensive description of a smile.
You would be the first to criticise ( and justifiably so) an unfunded Reeves pledge. And make no mistake there is nothing in the credit column to match the tax cut in the debit column, except for a nebulous notion of cutting wastage.
If she has done enough to put Jenrick back in his box and take some points from Reform I'll drink to that, but my point stands, her welcome tax cut debit does not demonstrate a corresponding credit.
*If you don't like me posting on here you could always ask TSE politely to transfer me from "member" to " applicant" status, that way I can still access and read your posts but no longer post myself. There, that seems like a neat compromise.
At times you really are very silly as demonstrated by your last paragraph
4.5 billion cost as quoted by the IFS is eminently doable
I do apologise for my figures, I misinterpreted what you were writing. You were claiming that stamp duty only generated the Government £4.5b, I misinterpreted that, not least because I was under the misapprehension that the £11.6b figure was cast iron.
The widely accepted figure for stamp duty credit yesterday was £11.6b down from a little over £12b on the previous measurement timescale. I thought even Kemi accepted the stamp duty saving as £9b, although if you say it is only £4.5b I would be surprised, but £4.5b it is.
Nonetheless, how are you paying for that £4.5b shortfall? Nebulous growth wishcasting and bogus service cost savings don't count.
Thank you for your comments and in the scheme of things 4.5 billion is small beer
LOL! I won't be offering to buy you a pint!
You haven't answered my question. How are you paying for that £4.5b shortfall? Nebulous growth wishcasting and bogus service cost savings don't count.
Badenoch announced the end of ev and heat pump subsidies - that accounts for 2.5 billion alone
Yet another example of Badenoch inventing wild numbers. The EV subsidy is capped at £650 million over three years and the heat pump subsidy at £295 million for just one year, nowhere near £2.5 billion per year. It's so illiterate and lazy. If the Conservatives could spend just five minutes on Google if they wanted to "fully cost" their proposals
If so, I accept your revised figures to circa 1 billion pa, but the abolition of stamp duty is now a top priority for the conservatives endorsed by think tanks and many others
It is a bad tax, but more widely Badenoch has put forward a platform of policies that were previously missing and has energised the party
I doubt it will make a big difference in the immediate polling, but this is a four year trek to the next GE and certainly reducing Jenrick's hopes are an even more positive
I think everyone is on board with dumping stamp duty, but some of us are keen to see how it is being paid for.
Maybe Reeves steals Tory clothes.
If you remove £X stamp duty from a house purchase, the vendor will expect to receive an extra £X on the sale price, as that is the going rate for their property (all-in). More money in the pockets of vendors, buyers no better off. The Tory Chancellor £10 billion a year worse off.
You really are not keeping up with the think tanks and economists who agree stamp duty is the worst of bad taxes and needs to go
When independent bodies endorse the policy, maybe time to accept Badenoch has got this right
Conference season ends and I believe the unexpected happened
Kemi Badenoch delivered the best speech, rolled out an array of policies, and stamp duty the 'rabbit out of the hat'
She energised her supporters and have given them something to sell on the doorstep
And she did what I prayed she would, sent out a positive [conservative] message and barely mentioned Starmer or Farage
Labour and Farage fell into the trap of hurling insults at each other to the detriment of both
The added bonus is Jenrick is the biggest loser
I do not know how the polls will react, but today was a start on the long road to relevance
Rabbit out of a hat, or bollocks out of her arse?
Pound shop Liz Truss.
No Kemi identified welfare and spending cuts to fund her tax cut
It wasn't just welfare but cuts in climate change subsidies and increasing north sea production with associated tax income, as well as welcoming back millionaires, entrepreneurs, and wealth creators
She also will scrap IHT on farmers and abolish vat on private school fees
Add in banning doctor strikes
This is conservative policies and is a direct challenge to Labour and Reform
This is pennies BigG. No spending cuts plan is credible without some sort of control on pensioner benefits and health spending. They are are growing so quickly - from a very high base - that any other cut or even steady economic growth is completely overwhelmed by them. Literally by design in the case of the triple lock.
Labour haven't set out a plan either but let's not pretend the Conservative plan is fiscally prudent. DavidL's take on this is correct.
Google tells me that the number of UK civil servants has increased since 2016 by 132,000 and that the median salary is £34k.
That would imply a saving of £4.5bn under the Tory plan.
Not commenting on whether it is feasible or not but it’s not “pennies”
True - but I think the fact the median salary is so low suggests what kinds of roles those civil servants are doing - particularly when you consider how London dominated the civil service is.
If you could cut 130,000 people out of Whitehall or it's equivalent in Scotland, Wales then fair enough. But I think the stats show that increase is primarily agencies like HMRC and DWP. Basically call centres, which would mean a reduced service. AI might be the answer to that but it's not a magic button you can press.
It said that the range was £24 - 84k (from memory - haven’t checked).
The only way to plausibly cuts costs is to stop doing stuff. Governments need to cut verticals rather than horizontally. (Equally I am sure that there are the sort of grinding efficiencies - 1, 2, 3 percent a year - that the private sector makes which government agencies never seem to be able to find)
And that's why, at the moment, this is Potemkin Policy. Tell us which Civil Servants are going to be axed, and what's going to happen to the work they were doing, and it gets interesting. "It won't be done by the state" is a legitimate answer.
Otherwise, Kemi is doing the fun bit without doing the hard work first. Maggie wouldn't have approved.
PB Tories are normally pragmatic people, questioning the symmetry of a Labour or Lib Dem tax cut or spending pledge. "The books don't balance" they will cry.
Yet a welcome Tory £12b tax cut paid by fantasy wastage savings get a free ride.
Fortunately the Tories are not in Government. I am sure if they were the gilt markets might baulk.
They are not “fantasy wastage savings”.
They have said that they will reduce civil service numbers back to 2016 levels. That’s pretty specific - of course they haven’t identified “Me Mexican” or “Ms Pete” as being at risk of being made redundant - but it’s not just a number made up by some spreadsheet jockey.
You had fourteen years in Government. Fourteen years to identify and implement swingeing service cuts to pay for massive tax cuts. You failed. During that 14 years, service provision levels crashed at the same time the tax burden increased.
Posters have quoted Reform fantasy savings in Kent, savings so magnificent that Council tax increases could be suspended, until they found out there were few savings to be made and Council taxes were raised by 5%.
A nice speech offering the Moon on a stick is one thing, shoehorning the contents of that speech into reality is quite another.
Your party and the cheerleaders on here are profoundly unserious.
Good morning
And giveover
Badenoch gave a totally unexpected and successful speech that galvanised her audience and has given her party lots of policies, and of scrapping stamp duty has been well received from think tanks and Paul Johnson formally of the IFS who said yesterday it is the worst of many bad taxes
Your mixture of cynicism and satire is par for the cop* but at least this conservative is pleased to see conservative policies and Jenrick put back in his box
I don't believe I was being remotely cynical or satirical. If you want satire I can write all day about letter boxes and an offensive description of a smile.
You would be the first to criticise ( and justifiably so) an unfunded Reeves pledge. And make no mistake there is nothing in the credit column to match the tax cut in the debit column, except for a nebulous notion of cutting wastage.
If she has done enough to put Jenrick back in his box and take some points from Reform I'll drink to that, but my point stands, her welcome tax cut debit does not demonstrate a corresponding credit.
*If you don't like me posting on here you could always ask TSE politely to transfer me from "member" to " applicant" status, that way I can still access and read your posts but no longer post myself. There, that seems like a neat compromise.
At times you really are very silly as demonstrated by your last paragraph
4.5 billion cost as quoted by the IFS is eminently doable
I do apologise for my figures, I misinterpreted what you were writing. You were claiming that stamp duty only generated the Government £4.5b, I misinterpreted that, not least because I was under the misapprehension that the £11.6b figure was cast iron.
The widely accepted figure for stamp duty credit yesterday was £11.6b down from a little over £12b on the previous measurement timescale. I thought even Kemi accepted the stamp duty saving as £9b, although if you say it is only £4.5b I would be surprised, but £4.5b it is.
Nonetheless, how are you paying for that £4.5b shortfall? Nebulous growth wishcasting and bogus service cost savings don't count.
Thank you for your comments and in the scheme of things 4.5 billion is small beer
LOL! I won't be offering to buy you a pint!
You haven't answered my question. How are you paying for that £4.5b shortfall? Nebulous growth wishcasting and bogus service cost savings don't count.
Badenoch announced the end of ev and heat pump subsidies - that accounts for 2.5 billion alone
Yet another example of Badenoch inventing wild numbers. The EV subsidy is capped at £650 million over three years and the heat pump subsidy at £295 million for just one year, nowhere near £2.5 billion per year. It's so illiterate and lazy. If the Conservatives could spend just five minutes on Google if they wanted to "fully cost" their proposals
If so, I accept your revised figures to circa 1 billion pa, but the abolition of stamp duty is now a top priority for the conservatives endorsed by think tanks and many others
It is a bad tax, but more widely Badenoch has put forward a platform of policies that were previously missing and has energised the party
I doubt it will make a big difference in the immediate polling, but this is a four year trek to the next GE and certainly reducing Jenrick's hopes are an even more positive
I think everyone is on board with dumping stamp duty, but some of us are keen to see how it is being paid for.
Maybe Reeves steals Tory clothes.
After disinfecting them, presumably.
One side effect - or intentional effect - to watch out for would be on the fiscal autonomy of the devolved administrations. The tax is devolved; its replacement might not be.
Yes and I understand that, and it may well just be England only but the Scottish and Welsh governments would come under pressure to follow
Conference season ends and I believe the unexpected happened
Kemi Badenoch delivered the best speech, rolled out an array of policies, and stamp duty the 'rabbit out of the hat'
She energised her supporters and have given them something to sell on the doorstep
And she did what I prayed she would, sent out a positive [conservative] message and barely mentioned Starmer or Farage
Labour and Farage fell into the trap of hurling insults at each other to the detriment of both
The added bonus is Jenrick is the biggest loser
I do not know how the polls will react, but today was a start on the long road to relevance
Rabbit out of a hat, or bollocks out of her arse?
Pound shop Liz Truss.
No Kemi identified welfare and spending cuts to fund her tax cut
It wasn't just welfare but cuts in climate change subsidies and increasing north sea production with associated tax income, as well as welcoming back millionaires, entrepreneurs, and wealth creators
She also will scrap IHT on farmers and abolish vat on private school fees
Add in banning doctor strikes
This is conservative policies and is a direct challenge to Labour and Reform
This is pennies BigG. No spending cuts plan is credible without some sort of control on pensioner benefits and health spending. They are are growing so quickly - from a very high base - that any other cut or even steady economic growth is completely overwhelmed by them. Literally by design in the case of the triple lock.
Labour haven't set out a plan either but let's not pretend the Conservative plan is fiscally prudent. DavidL's take on this is correct.
Google tells me that the number of UK civil servants has increased since 2016 by 132,000 and that the median salary is £34k.
That would imply a saving of £4.5bn under the Tory plan.
Not commenting on whether it is feasible or not but it’s not “pennies”
True - but I think the fact the median salary is so low suggests what kinds of roles those civil servants are doing - particularly when you consider how London dominated the civil service is.
If you could cut 130,000 people out of Whitehall or it's equivalent in Scotland, Wales then fair enough. But I think the stats show that increase is primarily agencies like HMRC and DWP. Basically call centres, which would mean a reduced service. AI might be the answer to that but it's not a magic button you can press.
It said that the range was £24 - 84k (from memory - haven’t checked).
The only way to plausibly cuts costs is to stop doing stuff. Governments need to cut verticals rather than horizontally. (Equally I am sure that there are the sort of grinding efficiencies - 1, 2, 3 percent a year - that the private sector makes which government agencies never seem to be able to find)
And that's why, at the moment, this is Potemkin Policy. Tell us which Civil Servants are going to be axed, and what's going to happen to the work they were doing, and it gets interesting. "It won't be done by the state" is a legitimate answer.
Otherwise, Kemi is doing the fun bit without doing the hard work first. Maggie wouldn't have approved.
PB Tories are normally pragmatic people, questioning the symmetry of a Labour or Lib Dem tax cut or spending pledge. "The books don't balance" they will cry.
Yet a welcome Tory £12b tax cut paid by fantasy wastage savings get a free ride.
Fortunately the Tories are not in Government. I am sure if they were the gilt markets might baulk.
They are not “fantasy wastage savings”.
They have said that they will reduce civil service numbers back to 2016 levels. That’s pretty specific - of course they haven’t identified “Me Mexican” or “Ms Pete” as being at risk of being made redundant - but it’s not just a number made up by some spreadsheet jockey.
You had fourteen years in Government. Fourteen years to identify and implement swingeing service cuts to pay for massive tax cuts. You failed. During that 14 years, service provision levels crashed at the same time the tax burden increased.
Posters have quoted Reform fantasy savings in Kent, savings so magnificent that Council tax increases could be suspended, until they found out there were few savings to be made and Council taxes were raised by 5%.
A nice speech offering the Moon on a stick is one thing, shoehorning the contents of that speech into reality is quite another.
Your party and the cheerleaders on here are profoundly unserious.
Good morning
And giveover
Badenoch gave a totally unexpected and successful speech that galvanised her audience and has given her party lots of policies, and of scrapping stamp duty has been well received from think tanks and Paul Johnson formally of the IFS who said yesterday it is the worst of many bad taxes
Your mixture of cynicism and satire is par for the cop* but at least this conservative is pleased to see conservative policies and Jenrick put back in his box
I don't believe I was being remotely cynical or satirical. If you want satire I can write all day about letter boxes and an offensive description of a smile.
You would be the first to criticise ( and justifiably so) an unfunded Reeves pledge. And make no mistake there is nothing in the credit column to match the tax cut in the debit column, except for a nebulous notion of cutting wastage.
If she has done enough to put Jenrick back in his box and take some points from Reform I'll drink to that, but my point stands, her welcome tax cut debit does not demonstrate a corresponding credit.
*If you don't like me posting on here you could always ask TSE politely to transfer me from "member" to " applicant" status, that way I can still access and read your posts but no longer post myself. There, that seems like a neat compromise.
At times you really are very silly as demonstrated by your last paragraph
4.5 billion cost as quoted by the IFS is eminently doable
I do apologise for my figures, I misinterpreted what you were writing. You were claiming that stamp duty only generated the Government £4.5b, I misinterpreted that, not least because I was under the misapprehension that the £11.6b figure was cast iron.
The widely accepted figure for stamp duty credit yesterday was £11.6b down from a little over £12b on the previous measurement timescale. I thought even Kemi accepted the stamp duty saving as £9b, although if you say it is only £4.5b I would be surprised, but £4.5b it is.
Nonetheless, how are you paying for that £4.5b shortfall? Nebulous growth wishcasting and bogus service cost savings don't count.
Thank you for your comments and in the scheme of things 4.5 billion is small beer
LOL! I won't be offering to buy you a pint!
You haven't answered my question. How are you paying for that £4.5b shortfall? Nebulous growth wishcasting and bogus service cost savings don't count.
Badenoch announced the end of ev and heat pump subsidies - that accounts for 2.5 billion alone
Yet another example of Badenoch inventing wild numbers. The EV subsidy is capped at £650 million over three years and the heat pump subsidy at £295 million for just one year, nowhere near £2.5 billion per year. It's so illiterate and lazy. If the Conservatives could spend just five minutes on Google if they wanted to "fully cost" their proposals
If so, I accept your revised figures to circa 1 billion pa, but the abolition of stamp duty is now a top priority for the conservatives endorsed by think tanks and many others
It is a bad tax, but more widely Badenoch has put forward a platform of policies that were previously missing and has energised the party
I doubt it will make a big difference in the immediate polling, but this is a four year trek to the next GE and certainly reducing Jenrick's hopes are an even more positive
I think everyone is on board with dumping stamp duty, but some of us are keen to see how it is being paid for.
Maybe Reeves steals Tory clothes.
If you remove £X stamp duty from a house purchase, the vendor will expect to receive an extra £X on the sale price, as that is the going rate for their property (all-in). More money in the pockets of vendors, buyers no better off. The Tory Chancellor £10 billion a year worse off.
You really are not keeping up with the think tanks and economists who agree stamp duty is the worst of bad taxes and needs to go
When independent bodies endorse the policy, maybe time to accept Badenoch has got this right
No she's got it half right. She is disposing of an unwieldy and unhelpful property tax but is not replacing it with a more optimal property tax.
Yougov: Would you support or oppose it being made compulsory for all newly-retired people to serve on a community service placement for a period of one year?” For those 65+, 20% of those support vs 50% of them wanting a similar mandatory national service scheme for young people
Every survey exposes the hypocrisy and entitlement of that generation (refuse to call them baby boomers, thet’s really 50-64 in the uk)
The west has a huge pensioner problem imo.
Lots of interesting polling there. I do note that 65+ are more supportive of the idea than younger groups, and there is lots of support for a voluntary scheme.
A voluntary scheme to volunteer? Confused, why not just volunteer without the scheme? There are loads of volunteering opportunities already.
There can be advantages in having a single, high-profile, govt-supported way into volunteering, that helps people into volunteering and finding a useful role.
Mr Cameron's something something society, redux, no? (Not that it is a bad idea in itself, oh no.)
I have long thought that Cameron's Big Society was a better idea than the sarcasm it received at the time suggested.
It was indeed a good idea, but was written for the time of plenty that was 2007, not the economic situation that prevailed in 2010 when the election was called.
It was a policy for the election that never was, the one that Sion Simon predicted.
I also think that Cameron never really defined it in any great detail and after ten years of Tony Blair people were cynical about meaningless buzz words that didn't have much substance behind them. Of course as a former PR man that was Cameron's MO.
But as you say in the much harsher world of the 2010s and 2020s it was all irrelevant to the main challenge of getting economic growth going again, so, like so much from the Heir to Blair era, it faded away.
It’s worth considering the effect of Lottery money on many, many small community projects.
One sad thing is the tendency, as time goes by, for Lottery money to be spent on bigger projects. Building a small changing room for the schools to use the local park as a sports field may not be sexy. But it’s a real, sensible thing.
John Major’s biggest legacy, although why people make bets where the gross return is 50% is still a wonder. I was working in a shop in 1995 or 96 when it all started, the queues on Saturday afternoons were crazy.
Government spending on sports and arts has over time been replaced by lottery money, and allowed expansion in those areas. There’s now hundreds of Olympic athletes and coaches getting a stipend from the lottery, the crowning grory of which was the London Games.
Conference season ends and I believe the unexpected happened
Kemi Badenoch delivered the best speech, rolled out an array of policies, and stamp duty the 'rabbit out of the hat'
She energised her supporters and have given them something to sell on the doorstep
And she did what I prayed she would, sent out a positive [conservative] message and barely mentioned Starmer or Farage
Labour and Farage fell into the trap of hurling insults at each other to the detriment of both
The added bonus is Jenrick is the biggest loser
I do not know how the polls will react, but today was a start on the long road to relevance
Rabbit out of a hat, or bollocks out of her arse?
Pound shop Liz Truss.
No Kemi identified welfare and spending cuts to fund her tax cut
It wasn't just welfare but cuts in climate change subsidies and increasing north sea production with associated tax income, as well as welcoming back millionaires, entrepreneurs, and wealth creators
She also will scrap IHT on farmers and abolish vat on private school fees
Add in banning doctor strikes
This is conservative policies and is a direct challenge to Labour and Reform
This is pennies BigG. No spending cuts plan is credible without some sort of control on pensioner benefits and health spending. They are are growing so quickly - from a very high base - that any other cut or even steady economic growth is completely overwhelmed by them. Literally by design in the case of the triple lock.
Labour haven't set out a plan either but let's not pretend the Conservative plan is fiscally prudent. DavidL's take on this is correct.
Google tells me that the number of UK civil servants has increased since 2016 by 132,000 and that the median salary is £34k.
That would imply a saving of £4.5bn under the Tory plan.
Not commenting on whether it is feasible or not but it’s not “pennies”
True - but I think the fact the median salary is so low suggests what kinds of roles those civil servants are doing - particularly when you consider how London dominated the civil service is.
If you could cut 130,000 people out of Whitehall or it's equivalent in Scotland, Wales then fair enough. But I think the stats show that increase is primarily agencies like HMRC and DWP. Basically call centres, which would mean a reduced service. AI might be the answer to that but it's not a magic button you can press.
It said that the range was £24 - 84k (from memory - haven’t checked).
The only way to plausibly cuts costs is to stop doing stuff. Governments need to cut verticals rather than horizontally. (Equally I am sure that there are the sort of grinding efficiencies - 1, 2, 3 percent a year - that the private sector makes which government agencies never seem to be able to find)
And that's why, at the moment, this is Potemkin Policy. Tell us which Civil Servants are going to be axed, and what's going to happen to the work they were doing, and it gets interesting. "It won't be done by the state" is a legitimate answer.
Otherwise, Kemi is doing the fun bit without doing the hard work first. Maggie wouldn't have approved.
PB Tories are normally pragmatic people, questioning the symmetry of a Labour or Lib Dem tax cut or spending pledge. "The books don't balance" they will cry.
Yet a welcome Tory £12b tax cut paid by fantasy wastage savings get a free ride.
Fortunately the Tories are not in Government. I am sure if they were the gilt markets might baulk.
They are not “fantasy wastage savings”.
They have said that they will reduce civil service numbers back to 2016 levels. That’s pretty specific - of course they haven’t identified “Me Mexican” or “Ms Pete” as being at risk of being made redundant - but it’s not just a number made up by some spreadsheet jockey.
You had fourteen years in Government. Fourteen years to identify and implement swingeing service cuts to pay for massive tax cuts. You failed. During that 14 years, service provision levels crashed at the same time the tax burden increased.
Posters have quoted Reform fantasy savings in Kent, savings so magnificent that Council tax increases could be suspended, until they found out there were few savings to be made and Council taxes were raised by 5%.
A nice speech offering the Moon on a stick is one thing, shoehorning the contents of that speech into reality is quite another.
Your party and the cheerleaders on here are profoundly unserious.
Good morning
And giveover
Badenoch gave a totally unexpected and successful speech that galvanised her audience and has given her party lots of policies, and of scrapping stamp duty has been well received from think tanks and Paul Johnson formally of the IFS who said yesterday it is the worst of many bad taxes
Your mixture of cynicism and satire is par for the cop* but at least this conservative is pleased to see conservative policies and Jenrick put back in his box
I don't believe I was being remotely cynical or satirical. If you want satire I can write all day about letter boxes and an offensive description of a smile.
You would be the first to criticise ( and justifiably so) an unfunded Reeves pledge. And make no mistake there is nothing in the credit column to match the tax cut in the debit column, except for a nebulous notion of cutting wastage.
If she has done enough to put Jenrick back in his box and take some points from Reform I'll drink to that, but my point stands, her welcome tax cut debit does not demonstrate a corresponding credit.
*If you don't like me posting on here you could always ask TSE politely to transfer me from "member" to " applicant" status, that way I can still access and read your posts but no longer post myself. There, that seems like a neat compromise.
At times you really are very silly as demonstrated by your last paragraph
4.5 billion cost as quoted by the IFS is eminently doable
I do apologise for my figures, I misinterpreted what you were writing. You were claiming that stamp duty only generated the Government £4.5b, I misinterpreted that, not least because I was under the misapprehension that the £11.6b figure was cast iron.
The widely accepted figure for stamp duty credit yesterday was £11.6b down from a little over £12b on the previous measurement timescale. I thought even Kemi accepted the stamp duty saving as £9b, although if you say it is only £4.5b I would be surprised, but £4.5b it is.
Nonetheless, how are you paying for that £4.5b shortfall? Nebulous growth wishcasting and bogus service cost savings don't count.
Thank you for your comments and in the scheme of things 4.5 billion is small beer
LOL! I won't be offering to buy you a pint!
You haven't answered my question. How are you paying for that £4.5b shortfall? Nebulous growth wishcasting and bogus service cost savings don't count.
Badenoch announced the end of ev and heat pump subsidies - that accounts for 2.5 billion alone
Yet another example of Badenoch inventing wild numbers. The EV subsidy is capped at £650 million over three years and the heat pump subsidy at £295 million for just one year, nowhere near £2.5 billion per year. It's so illiterate and lazy. If the Conservatives could spend just five minutes on Google if they wanted to "fully cost" their proposals
If so, I accept your revised figures to circa 1 billion pa, but the abolition of stamp duty is now a top priority for the conservatives endorsed by think tanks and many others
It is a bad tax, but more widely Badenoch has put forward a platform of policies that were previously missing and has energised the party
I doubt it will make a big difference in the immediate polling, but this is a four year trek to the next GE and certainly reducing Jenrick's hopes are an even more positive
I think everyone is on board with dumping stamp duty, but some of us are keen to see how it is being paid for.
Maybe Reeves steals Tory clothes.
If you remove £X stamp duty from a house purchase, the vendor will expect to receive an extra £X on the sale price, as that is the going rate for their property (all-in). More money in the pockets of vendors, buyers no better off. The Tory Chancellor £10 billion a year worse off.
I can't see how it helps people get on the housing ladder either. No stamp duty is payable up to 300k.
Conference season ends and I believe the unexpected happened
Kemi Badenoch delivered the best speech, rolled out an array of policies, and stamp duty the 'rabbit out of the hat'
She energised her supporters and have given them something to sell on the doorstep
And she did what I prayed she would, sent out a positive [conservative] message and barely mentioned Starmer or Farage
Labour and Farage fell into the trap of hurling insults at each other to the detriment of both
The added bonus is Jenrick is the biggest loser
I do not know how the polls will react, but today was a start on the long road to relevance
Rabbit out of a hat, or bollocks out of her arse?
Pound shop Liz Truss.
No Kemi identified welfare and spending cuts to fund her tax cut
It wasn't just welfare but cuts in climate change subsidies and increasing north sea production with associated tax income, as well as welcoming back millionaires, entrepreneurs, and wealth creators
She also will scrap IHT on farmers and abolish vat on private school fees
Add in banning doctor strikes
This is conservative policies and is a direct challenge to Labour and Reform
This is pennies BigG. No spending cuts plan is credible without some sort of control on pensioner benefits and health spending. They are are growing so quickly - from a very high base - that any other cut or even steady economic growth is completely overwhelmed by them. Literally by design in the case of the triple lock.
Labour haven't set out a plan either but let's not pretend the Conservative plan is fiscally prudent. DavidL's take on this is correct.
Google tells me that the number of UK civil servants has increased since 2016 by 132,000 and that the median salary is £34k.
That would imply a saving of £4.5bn under the Tory plan.
Not commenting on whether it is feasible or not but it’s not “pennies”
True - but I think the fact the median salary is so low suggests what kinds of roles those civil servants are doing - particularly when you consider how London dominated the civil service is.
If you could cut 130,000 people out of Whitehall or it's equivalent in Scotland, Wales then fair enough. But I think the stats show that increase is primarily agencies like HMRC and DWP. Basically call centres, which would mean a reduced service. AI might be the answer to that but it's not a magic button you can press.
It said that the range was £24 - 84k (from memory - haven’t checked).
The only way to plausibly cuts costs is to stop doing stuff. Governments need to cut verticals rather than horizontally. (Equally I am sure that there are the sort of grinding efficiencies - 1, 2, 3 percent a year - that the private sector makes which government agencies never seem to be able to find)
And that's why, at the moment, this is Potemkin Policy. Tell us which Civil Servants are going to be axed, and what's going to happen to the work they were doing, and it gets interesting. "It won't be done by the state" is a legitimate answer.
Otherwise, Kemi is doing the fun bit without doing the hard work first. Maggie wouldn't have approved.
PB Tories are normally pragmatic people, questioning the symmetry of a Labour or Lib Dem tax cut or spending pledge. "The books don't balance" they will cry.
Yet a welcome Tory £12b tax cut paid by fantasy wastage savings get a free ride.
Fortunately the Tories are not in Government. I am sure if they were the gilt markets might baulk.
They are not “fantasy wastage savings”.
They have said that they will reduce civil service numbers back to 2016 levels. That’s pretty specific - of course they haven’t identified “Me Mexican” or “Ms Pete” as being at risk of being made redundant - but it’s not just a number made up by some spreadsheet jockey.
You had fourteen years in Government. Fourteen years to identify and implement swingeing service cuts to pay for massive tax cuts. You failed. During that 14 years, service provision levels crashed at the same time the tax burden increased.
Posters have quoted Reform fantasy savings in Kent, savings so magnificent that Council tax increases could be suspended, until they found out there were few savings to be made and Council taxes were raised by 5%.
A nice speech offering the Moon on a stick is one thing, shoehorning the contents of that speech into reality is quite another.
Your party and the cheerleaders on here are profoundly unserious.
Good morning
And giveover
Badenoch gave a totally unexpected and successful speech that galvanised her audience and has given her party lots of policies, and of scrapping stamp duty has been well received from think tanks and Paul Johnson formally of the IFS who said yesterday it is the worst of many bad taxes
Your mixture of cynicism and satire is par for the cop* but at least this conservative is pleased to see conservative policies and Jenrick put back in his box
I don't believe I was being remotely cynical or satirical. If you want satire I can write all day about letter boxes and an offensive description of a smile.
You would be the first to criticise ( and justifiably so) an unfunded Reeves pledge. And make no mistake there is nothing in the credit column to match the tax cut in the debit column, except for a nebulous notion of cutting wastage.
If she has done enough to put Jenrick back in his box and take some points from Reform I'll drink to that, but my point stands, her welcome tax cut debit does not demonstrate a corresponding credit.
*If you don't like me posting on here you could always ask TSE politely to transfer me from "member" to " applicant" status, that way I can still access and read your posts but no longer post myself. There, that seems like a neat compromise.
At times you really are very silly as demonstrated by your last paragraph
4.5 billion cost as quoted by the IFS is eminently doable
I do apologise for my figures, I misinterpreted what you were writing. You were claiming that stamp duty only generated the Government £4.5b, I misinterpreted that, not least because I was under the misapprehension that the £11.6b figure was cast iron.
The widely accepted figure for stamp duty credit yesterday was £11.6b down from a little over £12b on the previous measurement timescale. I thought even Kemi accepted the stamp duty saving as £9b, although if you say it is only £4.5b I would be surprised, but £4.5b it is.
Nonetheless, how are you paying for that £4.5b shortfall? Nebulous growth wishcasting and bogus service cost savings don't count.
Thank you for your comments and in the scheme of things 4.5 billion is small beer
LOL! I won't be offering to buy you a pint!
You haven't answered my question. How are you paying for that £4.5b shortfall? Nebulous growth wishcasting and bogus service cost savings don't count.
Badenoch announced the end of ev and heat pump subsidies - that accounts for 2.5 billion alone
Yet another example of Badenoch inventing wild numbers. The EV subsidy is capped at £650 million over three years and the heat pump subsidy at £295 million for just one year, nowhere near £2.5 billion per year. It's so illiterate and lazy. If the Conservatives could spend just five minutes on Google if they wanted to "fully cost" their proposals
If so, I accept your revised figures to circa 1 billion pa, but the abolition of stamp duty is now a top priority for the conservatives endorsed by think tanks and many others
It is a bad tax, but more widely Badenoch has put forward a platform of policies that were previously missing and has energised the party
I doubt it will make a big difference in the immediate polling, but this is a four year trek to the next GE and certainly reducing Jenrick's hopes are an even more positive
I think everyone is on board with dumping stamp duty, but some of us are keen to see how it is being paid for.
Maybe Reeves steals Tory clothes.
If you remove £X stamp duty from a house purchase, the vendor will expect to receive an extra £X on the sale price, as that is the going rate for their property (all-in). More money in the pockets of vendors, buyers no better off. The Tory Chancellor £10 billion a year worse off.
I can't see how it helps people get on the housing ladder either. No stamp duty is payable up to 300k.
It frees houses up the ladder and gets the market moving. Theoretically.
Over a third of the boomer retired generation say no party represents them says new YouGov poll.
As Stephen Bush points out - these are the guys that "takes up most government spending".
Frankly, they are being handed ever increasing state largesse on a massive silver plate!
One can make an argument that the group most undeserving of state largesse are people in their late 60s who are still fit and healthy, but getting pensions and other benefits. Should the pension age be further raised?
Pension age should be graduated. Starting at a lower age than current, 63?,at maybe £2k or £3k per year then increasing til maybe 73 to the current rate.
What's the rationale here? That people are expected to be moving to part-time working?
People do move to work part time. And some people retire at 55, others at 80. The days of a single retirement age for everyone are long gone.
People who retire at 55 tend to be very rich people who can afford to, but others need to retire early for health reasons. People who retire at 80 tend to have better paying white collar jobs. So, how does the system handle all these differences? Putting everyone on a graduated system going from 63 to 73 is still a one size fits all solution.
Do we instead need more means testing and/or health status testing?
Be useful and don't abuse your body and you'll have to work longer will be a hard sell.
All testing for benefits runs an equivalent risk. I don't believe many people are going to abuse their bodies just to get a pension sooner!
Maybe UBI solves all this?
Where does the money come from for it ?
@Taz, @bondegezou gave the most concise answer. UBI should be tax neutral. It is not a magic money tree. You get a basic payment and you hopefully earn on top of that. There is no longer a personal allowance and tax rates are adjusted so the net effect is neutral. So what are the benefits:
a) You eliminate the need for 99% of state benefits including the state pension b) Those that deserve benefits and don't claim them or fall through the cracks no longer will c) Those that abuse the system really can't anymore. Yep they get the basic amount, but that is it. They probably abuse it by far more currently d) It encourage people to take a risk starting a business because they at least get a minimum amount to tide them over during the set up time when they have no income e) You can scrap 90+% of the DWP and a bit of HMRC
All good and makes sense. What level would it be set at ?
Has there been a study on it in detail to see what the savings would be so the money could be repurposed.
With the growth of A.I. and the impact on jobs, delivery drivers and cabbies for instance, there is a risk to employment and the tax take.
@Taz, now you are asking the difficult questions. I can only do the easy ones So here is my gut feeling:
As to the level, I don't know, but obviously it can't be too high. The higher it is the higher the tax bands will have to be and nobody likes that and also it may encourage some to not work. However it has to be high enough so that benefits do not have to be reintroduced. Suspect one needs a few mathematicians/economists and spreadsheets on that one.
Regarding savings I suspect one treats them as a bonus. In the grand scheme of things they will be a small percentage, but for once when a politician says he can save money on bureaucratic wastage it will be true (unlike every other politician at every election).
Over a third of the boomer retired generation say no party represents them says new YouGov poll.
As Stephen Bush points out - these are the guys that "takes up most government spending".
Frankly, they are being handed ever increasing state largesse on a massive silver plate!
One can make an argument that the group most undeserving of state largesse are people in their late 60s who are still fit and healthy, but getting pensions and other benefits. Should the pension age be further raised?
Pension age should be graduated. Starting at a lower age than current, 63?,at maybe £2k or £3k per year then increasing til maybe 73 to the current rate.
What's the rationale here? That people are expected to be moving to part-time working?
People do move to work part time. And some people retire at 55, others at 80. The days of a single retirement age for everyone are long gone.
People who retire at 55 tend to be very rich people who can afford to, but others need to retire early for health reasons. People who retire at 80 tend to have better paying white collar jobs. So, how does the system handle all these differences? Putting everyone on a graduated system going from 63 to 73 is still a one size fits all solution.
Do we instead need more means testing and/or health status testing?
Be useful and don't abuse your body and you'll have to work longer will be a hard sell.
All testing for benefits runs an equivalent risk. I don't believe many people are going to abuse their bodies just to get a pension sooner!
Maybe UBI solves all this?
Where does the money come from for it ?
@Taz, @bondegezou gave the most concise answer. UBI should be tax neutral. It is not a magic money tree. You get a basic payment and you hopefully earn on top of that. There is no longer a personal allowance and tax rates are adjusted so the net effect is neutral. So what are the benefits:
a) You eliminate the need for 99% of state benefits including the state pension b) Those that deserve benefits and don't claim them or fall through the cracks no longer will c) Those that abuse the system really can't anymore. Yep they get the basic amount, but that is it. They probably abuse it by far more currently d) It encourage people to take a risk starting a business because they at least get a minimum amount to tide them over during the set up time when they have no income e) You can scrap 90+% of the DWP and a bit of HMRC
I am pulling figures out of the air here because it makes the maths easier. If UBI was £600 a month and a reasonable amount of hours to work each month is 120, there would be a case for reducing the minimum wage by £5 a hour.
Conference season ends and I believe the unexpected happened
Kemi Badenoch delivered the best speech, rolled out an array of policies, and stamp duty the 'rabbit out of the hat'
She energised her supporters and have given them something to sell on the doorstep
And she did what I prayed she would, sent out a positive [conservative] message and barely mentioned Starmer or Farage
Labour and Farage fell into the trap of hurling insults at each other to the detriment of both
The added bonus is Jenrick is the biggest loser
I do not know how the polls will react, but today was a start on the long road to relevance
Rabbit out of a hat, or bollocks out of her arse?
Pound shop Liz Truss.
No Kemi identified welfare and spending cuts to fund her tax cut
It wasn't just welfare but cuts in climate change subsidies and increasing north sea production with associated tax income, as well as welcoming back millionaires, entrepreneurs, and wealth creators
She also will scrap IHT on farmers and abolish vat on private school fees
Add in banning doctor strikes
This is conservative policies and is a direct challenge to Labour and Reform
This is pennies BigG. No spending cuts plan is credible without some sort of control on pensioner benefits and health spending. They are are growing so quickly - from a very high base - that any other cut or even steady economic growth is completely overwhelmed by them. Literally by design in the case of the triple lock.
Labour haven't set out a plan either but let's not pretend the Conservative plan is fiscally prudent. DavidL's take on this is correct.
Google tells me that the number of UK civil servants has increased since 2016 by 132,000 and that the median salary is £34k.
That would imply a saving of £4.5bn under the Tory plan.
Not commenting on whether it is feasible or not but it’s not “pennies”
True - but I think the fact the median salary is so low suggests what kinds of roles those civil servants are doing - particularly when you consider how London dominated the civil service is.
If you could cut 130,000 people out of Whitehall or it's equivalent in Scotland, Wales then fair enough. But I think the stats show that increase is primarily agencies like HMRC and DWP. Basically call centres, which would mean a reduced service. AI might be the answer to that but it's not a magic button you can press.
It said that the range was £24 - 84k (from memory - haven’t checked).
The only way to plausibly cuts costs is to stop doing stuff. Governments need to cut verticals rather than horizontally. (Equally I am sure that there are the sort of grinding efficiencies - 1, 2, 3 percent a year - that the private sector makes which government agencies never seem to be able to find)
And that's why, at the moment, this is Potemkin Policy. Tell us which Civil Servants are going to be axed, and what's going to happen to the work they were doing, and it gets interesting. "It won't be done by the state" is a legitimate answer.
Otherwise, Kemi is doing the fun bit without doing the hard work first. Maggie wouldn't have approved.
PB Tories are normally pragmatic people, questioning the symmetry of a Labour or Lib Dem tax cut or spending pledge. "The books don't balance" they will cry.
Yet a welcome Tory £12b tax cut paid by fantasy wastage savings get a free ride.
Fortunately the Tories are not in Government. I am sure if they were the gilt markets might baulk.
They are not “fantasy wastage savings”.
They have said that they will reduce civil service numbers back to 2016 levels. That’s pretty specific - of course they haven’t identified “Me Mexican” or “Ms Pete” as being at risk of being made redundant - but it’s not just a number made up by some spreadsheet jockey.
You had fourteen years in Government. Fourteen years to identify and implement swingeing service cuts to pay for massive tax cuts. You failed. During that 14 years, service provision levels crashed at the same time the tax burden increased.
Posters have quoted Reform fantasy savings in Kent, savings so magnificent that Council tax increases could be suspended, until they found out there were few savings to be made and Council taxes were raised by 5%.
A nice speech offering the Moon on a stick is one thing, shoehorning the contents of that speech into reality is quite another.
Your party and the cheerleaders on here are profoundly unserious.
Good morning
And giveover
Badenoch gave a totally unexpected and successful speech that galvanised her audience and has given her party lots of policies, and of scrapping stamp duty has been well received from think tanks and Paul Johnson formally of the IFS who said yesterday it is the worst of many bad taxes
Your mixture of cynicism and satire is par for the cop* but at least this conservative is pleased to see conservative policies and Jenrick put back in his box
I don't believe I was being remotely cynical or satirical. If you want satire I can write all day about letter boxes and an offensive description of a smile.
You would be the first to criticise ( and justifiably so) an unfunded Reeves pledge. And make no mistake there is nothing in the credit column to match the tax cut in the debit column, except for a nebulous notion of cutting wastage.
If she has done enough to put Jenrick back in his box and take some points from Reform I'll drink to that, but my point stands, her welcome tax cut debit does not demonstrate a corresponding credit.
*If you don't like me posting on here you could always ask TSE politely to transfer me from "member" to " applicant" status, that way I can still access and read your posts but no longer post myself. There, that seems like a neat compromise.
At times you really are very silly as demonstrated by your last paragraph
4.5 billion cost as quoted by the IFS is eminently doable
I do apologise for my figures, I misinterpreted what you were writing. You were claiming that stamp duty only generated the Government £4.5b, I misinterpreted that, not least because I was under the misapprehension that the £11.6b figure was cast iron.
The widely accepted figure for stamp duty credit yesterday was £11.6b down from a little over £12b on the previous measurement timescale. I thought even Kemi accepted the stamp duty saving as £9b, although if you say it is only £4.5b I would be surprised, but £4.5b it is.
Nonetheless, how are you paying for that £4.5b shortfall? Nebulous growth wishcasting and bogus service cost savings don't count.
Thank you for your comments and in the scheme of things 4.5 billion is small beer
LOL! I won't be offering to buy you a pint!
You haven't answered my question. How are you paying for that £4.5b shortfall? Nebulous growth wishcasting and bogus service cost savings don't count.
Badenoch announced the end of ev and heat pump subsidies - that accounts for 2.5 billion alone
Yet another example of Badenoch inventing wild numbers. The EV subsidy is capped at £650 million over three years and the heat pump subsidy at £295 million for just one year, nowhere near £2.5 billion per year. It's so illiterate and lazy. If the Conservatives could spend just five minutes on Google if they wanted to "fully cost" their proposals
If so, I accept your revised figures to circa 1 billion pa, but the abolition of stamp duty is now a top priority for the conservatives endorsed by think tanks and many others
It is a bad tax, but more widely Badenoch has put forward a platform of policies that were previously missing and has energised the party
I doubt it will make a big difference in the immediate polling, but this is a four year trek to the next GE and certainly reducing Jenrick's hopes are an even more positive
I think everyone is on board with dumping stamp duty, but some of us are keen to see how it is being paid for.
Maybe Reeves steals Tory clothes.
If you remove £X stamp duty from a house purchase, the vendor will expect to receive an extra £X on the sale price, as that is the going rate for their property (all-in). More money in the pockets of vendors, buyers no better off. The Tory Chancellor £10 billion a year worse off.
I can't see how it helps people get on the housing ladder either. No stamp duty is payable up to 300k.
I see that Nottingham, London and Birmingham are taking, or planning to take, unofficial flags down.
Does anyone have a wider knowledge?
They have to take them down. Otherwise they are inviting everyone and anyone to hijack the public realm with their own pet causes. If people want to plaster their own property with England flags that's their prerogative, but they can't do it on public property.
Over a third of the boomer retired generation say no party represents them says new YouGov poll.
As Stephen Bush points out - these are the guys that "takes up most government spending".
Frankly, they are being handed ever increasing state largesse on a massive silver plate!
One can make an argument that the group most undeserving of state largesse are people in their late 60s who are still fit and healthy, but getting pensions and other benefits. Should the pension age be further raised?
Pension age should be graduated. Starting at a lower age than current, 63?,at maybe £2k or £3k per year then increasing til maybe 73 to the current rate.
What's the rationale here? That people are expected to be moving to part-time working?
People do move to work part time. And some people retire at 55, others at 80. The days of a single retirement age for everyone are long gone.
People who retire at 55 tend to be very rich people who can afford to, but others need to retire early for health reasons. People who retire at 80 tend to have better paying white collar jobs. So, how does the system handle all these differences? Putting everyone on a graduated system going from 63 to 73 is still a one size fits all solution.
Do we instead need more means testing and/or health status testing?
Be useful and don't abuse your body and you'll have to work longer will be a hard sell.
All testing for benefits runs an equivalent risk. I don't believe many people are going to abuse their bodies just to get a pension sooner!
Maybe UBI solves all this?
Where does the money come from for it ?
@Taz, @bondegezou gave the most concise answer. UBI should be tax neutral. It is not a magic money tree. You get a basic payment and you hopefully earn on top of that. There is no longer a personal allowance and tax rates are adjusted so the net effect is neutral. So what are the benefits:
a) You eliminate the need for 99% of state benefits including the state pension b) Those that deserve benefits and don't claim them or fall through the cracks no longer will c) Those that abuse the system really can't anymore. Yep they get the basic amount, but that is it. They probably abuse it by far more currently d) It encourage people to take a risk starting a business because they at least get a minimum amount to tide them over during the set up time when they have no income e) You can scrap 90+% of the DWP and a bit of HMRC
Anyone asking "how do we pay for it" doesn't understand the idea.
Conference season ends and I believe the unexpected happened
Kemi Badenoch delivered the best speech, rolled out an array of policies, and stamp duty the 'rabbit out of the hat'
She energised her supporters and have given them something to sell on the doorstep
And she did what I prayed she would, sent out a positive [conservative] message and barely mentioned Starmer or Farage
Labour and Farage fell into the trap of hurling insults at each other to the detriment of both
The added bonus is Jenrick is the biggest loser
I do not know how the polls will react, but today was a start on the long road to relevance
Rabbit out of a hat, or bollocks out of her arse?
Pound shop Liz Truss.
No Kemi identified welfare and spending cuts to fund her tax cut
It wasn't just welfare but cuts in climate change subsidies and increasing north sea production with associated tax income, as well as welcoming back millionaires, entrepreneurs, and wealth creators
She also will scrap IHT on farmers and abolish vat on private school fees
Add in banning doctor strikes
This is conservative policies and is a direct challenge to Labour and Reform
This is pennies BigG. No spending cuts plan is credible without some sort of control on pensioner benefits and health spending. They are are growing so quickly - from a very high base - that any other cut or even steady economic growth is completely overwhelmed by them. Literally by design in the case of the triple lock.
Labour haven't set out a plan either but let's not pretend the Conservative plan is fiscally prudent. DavidL's take on this is correct.
Google tells me that the number of UK civil servants has increased since 2016 by 132,000 and that the median salary is £34k.
That would imply a saving of £4.5bn under the Tory plan.
Not commenting on whether it is feasible or not but it’s not “pennies”
True - but I think the fact the median salary is so low suggests what kinds of roles those civil servants are doing - particularly when you consider how London dominated the civil service is.
If you could cut 130,000 people out of Whitehall or it's equivalent in Scotland, Wales then fair enough. But I think the stats show that increase is primarily agencies like HMRC and DWP. Basically call centres, which would mean a reduced service. AI might be the answer to that but it's not a magic button you can press.
It said that the range was £24 - 84k (from memory - haven’t checked).
The only way to plausibly cuts costs is to stop doing stuff. Governments need to cut verticals rather than horizontally. (Equally I am sure that there are the sort of grinding efficiencies - 1, 2, 3 percent a year - that the private sector makes which government agencies never seem to be able to find)
And that's why, at the moment, this is Potemkin Policy. Tell us which Civil Servants are going to be axed, and what's going to happen to the work they were doing, and it gets interesting. "It won't be done by the state" is a legitimate answer.
Otherwise, Kemi is doing the fun bit without doing the hard work first. Maggie wouldn't have approved.
PB Tories are normally pragmatic people, questioning the symmetry of a Labour or Lib Dem tax cut or spending pledge. "The books don't balance" they will cry.
Yet a welcome Tory £12b tax cut paid by fantasy wastage savings get a free ride.
Fortunately the Tories are not in Government. I am sure if they were the gilt markets might baulk.
They are not “fantasy wastage savings”.
They have said that they will reduce civil service numbers back to 2016 levels. That’s pretty specific - of course they haven’t identified “Me Mexican” or “Ms Pete” as being at risk of being made redundant - but it’s not just a number made up by some spreadsheet jockey.
You had fourteen years in Government. Fourteen years to identify and implement swingeing service cuts to pay for massive tax cuts. You failed. During that 14 years, service provision levels crashed at the same time the tax burden increased.
Posters have quoted Reform fantasy savings in Kent, savings so magnificent that Council tax increases could be suspended, until they found out there were few savings to be made and Council taxes were raised by 5%.
A nice speech offering the Moon on a stick is one thing, shoehorning the contents of that speech into reality is quite another.
Your party and the cheerleaders on here are profoundly unserious.
Good morning
And giveover
Badenoch gave a totally unexpected and successful speech that galvanised her audience and has given her party lots of policies, and of scrapping stamp duty has been well received from think tanks and Paul Johnson formally of the IFS who said yesterday it is the worst of many bad taxes
Your mixture of cynicism and satire is par for the cop* but at least this conservative is pleased to see conservative policies and Jenrick put back in his box
I don't believe I was being remotely cynical or satirical. If you want satire I can write all day about letter boxes and an offensive description of a smile.
You would be the first to criticise ( and justifiably so) an unfunded Reeves pledge. And make no mistake there is nothing in the credit column to match the tax cut in the debit column, except for a nebulous notion of cutting wastage.
If she has done enough to put Jenrick back in his box and take some points from Reform I'll drink to that, but my point stands, her welcome tax cut debit does not demonstrate a corresponding credit.
*If you don't like me posting on here you could always ask TSE politely to transfer me from "member" to " applicant" status, that way I can still access and read your posts but no longer post myself. There, that seems like a neat compromise.
At times you really are very silly as demonstrated by your last paragraph
4.5 billion cost as quoted by the IFS is eminently doable
I do apologise for my figures, I misinterpreted what you were writing. You were claiming that stamp duty only generated the Government £4.5b, I misinterpreted that, not least because I was under the misapprehension that the £11.6b figure was cast iron.
The widely accepted figure for stamp duty credit yesterday was £11.6b down from a little over £12b on the previous measurement timescale. I thought even Kemi accepted the stamp duty saving as £9b, although if you say it is only £4.5b I would be surprised, but £4.5b it is.
Nonetheless, how are you paying for that £4.5b shortfall? Nebulous growth wishcasting and bogus service cost savings don't count.
Thank you for your comments and in the scheme of things 4.5 billion is small beer
LOL! I won't be offering to buy you a pint!
You haven't answered my question. How are you paying for that £4.5b shortfall? Nebulous growth wishcasting and bogus service cost savings don't count.
Badenoch announced the end of ev and heat pump subsidies - that accounts for 2.5 billion alone
Yet another example of Badenoch inventing wild numbers. The EV subsidy is capped at £650 million over three years and the heat pump subsidy at £295 million for just one year, nowhere near £2.5 billion per year. It's so illiterate and lazy. If the Conservatives could spend just five minutes on Google if they wanted to "fully cost" their proposals
If so, I accept your revised figures to circa 1 billion pa, but the abolition of stamp duty is now a top priority for the conservatives endorsed by think tanks and many others
It is a bad tax, but more widely Badenoch has put forward a platform of policies that were previously missing and has energised the party
I doubt it will make a big difference in the immediate polling, but this is a four year trek to the next GE and certainly reducing Jenrick's hopes are an even more positive
Actually £0.5 billion pa. Badenoch's speech may actually be good news, in a strange way, despite being utter bollocks. It's not just yourself - lots of Conservative partisans somehow think she's onto something. Maybe there's life in the old Tory corpse yet. It shows there are people who care about the party, who might stay around to make it work and not defect to Reform, which is much worse. We need a functional centre right party
Over a third of the boomer retired generation say no party represents them says new YouGov poll.
As Stephen Bush points out - these are the guys that "takes up most government spending".
Frankly, they are being handed ever increasing state largesse on a massive silver plate!
One can make an argument that the group most undeserving of state largesse are people in their late 60s who are still fit and healthy, but getting pensions and other benefits. Should the pension age be further raised?
Pension age should be graduated. Starting at a lower age than current, 63?,at maybe £2k or £3k per year then increasing til maybe 73 to the current rate.
What's the rationale here? That people are expected to be moving to part-time working?
People do move to work part time. And some people retire at 55, others at 80. The days of a single retirement age for everyone are long gone.
People who retire at 55 tend to be very rich people who can afford to, but others need to retire early for health reasons. People who retire at 80 tend to have better paying white collar jobs. So, how does the system handle all these differences? Putting everyone on a graduated system going from 63 to 73 is still a one size fits all solution.
Do we instead need more means testing and/or health status testing?
Be useful and don't abuse your body and you'll have to work longer will be a hard sell.
All testing for benefits runs an equivalent risk. I don't believe many people are going to abuse their bodies just to get a pension sooner!
Maybe UBI solves all this?
Where does the money come from for it ?
@Taz, @bondegezou gave the most concise answer. UBI should be tax neutral. It is not a magic money tree. You get a basic payment and you hopefully earn on top of that. There is no longer a personal allowance and tax rates are adjusted so the net effect is neutral. So what are the benefits:
a) You eliminate the need for 99% of state benefits including the state pension b) Those that deserve benefits and don't claim them or fall through the cracks no longer will c) Those that abuse the system really can't anymore. Yep they get the basic amount, but that is it. They probably abuse it by far more currently d) It encourage people to take a risk starting a business because they at least get a minimum amount to tide them over during the set up time when they have no income e) You can scrap 90+% of the DWP and a bit of HMRC
Anyone asking "how do we pay for it" doesn't understand the idea.
Conference season ends and I believe the unexpected happened
Kemi Badenoch delivered the best speech, rolled out an array of policies, and stamp duty the 'rabbit out of the hat'
She energised her supporters and have given them something to sell on the doorstep
And she did what I prayed she would, sent out a positive [conservative] message and barely mentioned Starmer or Farage
Labour and Farage fell into the trap of hurling insults at each other to the detriment of both
The added bonus is Jenrick is the biggest loser
I do not know how the polls will react, but today was a start on the long road to relevance
Rabbit out of a hat, or bollocks out of her arse?
Pound shop Liz Truss.
No Kemi identified welfare and spending cuts to fund her tax cut
It wasn't just welfare but cuts in climate change subsidies and increasing north sea production with associated tax income, as well as welcoming back millionaires, entrepreneurs, and wealth creators
She also will scrap IHT on farmers and abolish vat on private school fees
Add in banning doctor strikes
This is conservative policies and is a direct challenge to Labour and Reform
This is pennies BigG. No spending cuts plan is credible without some sort of control on pensioner benefits and health spending. They are are growing so quickly - from a very high base - that any other cut or even steady economic growth is completely overwhelmed by them. Literally by design in the case of the triple lock.
Labour haven't set out a plan either but let's not pretend the Conservative plan is fiscally prudent. DavidL's take on this is correct.
Google tells me that the number of UK civil servants has increased since 2016 by 132,000 and that the median salary is £34k.
That would imply a saving of £4.5bn under the Tory plan.
Not commenting on whether it is feasible or not but it’s not “pennies”
True - but I think the fact the median salary is so low suggests what kinds of roles those civil servants are doing - particularly when you consider how London dominated the civil service is.
If you could cut 130,000 people out of Whitehall or it's equivalent in Scotland, Wales then fair enough. But I think the stats show that increase is primarily agencies like HMRC and DWP. Basically call centres, which would mean a reduced service. AI might be the answer to that but it's not a magic button you can press.
It said that the range was £24 - 84k (from memory - haven’t checked).
The only way to plausibly cuts costs is to stop doing stuff. Governments need to cut verticals rather than horizontally. (Equally I am sure that there are the sort of grinding efficiencies - 1, 2, 3 percent a year - that the private sector makes which government agencies never seem to be able to find)
And that's why, at the moment, this is Potemkin Policy. Tell us which Civil Servants are going to be axed, and what's going to happen to the work they were doing, and it gets interesting. "It won't be done by the state" is a legitimate answer.
Otherwise, Kemi is doing the fun bit without doing the hard work first. Maggie wouldn't have approved.
PB Tories are normally pragmatic people, questioning the symmetry of a Labour or Lib Dem tax cut or spending pledge. "The books don't balance" they will cry.
Yet a welcome Tory £12b tax cut paid by fantasy wastage savings get a free ride.
Fortunately the Tories are not in Government. I am sure if they were the gilt markets might baulk.
They are not “fantasy wastage savings”.
They have said that they will reduce civil service numbers back to 2016 levels. That’s pretty specific - of course they haven’t identified “Me Mexican” or “Ms Pete” as being at risk of being made redundant - but it’s not just a number made up by some spreadsheet jockey.
You had fourteen years in Government. Fourteen years to identify and implement swingeing service cuts to pay for massive tax cuts. You failed. During that 14 years, service provision levels crashed at the same time the tax burden increased.
Posters have quoted Reform fantasy savings in Kent, savings so magnificent that Council tax increases could be suspended, until they found out there were few savings to be made and Council taxes were raised by 5%.
A nice speech offering the Moon on a stick is one thing, shoehorning the contents of that speech into reality is quite another.
Your party and the cheerleaders on here are profoundly unserious.
Good morning
And giveover
Badenoch gave a totally unexpected and successful speech that galvanised her audience and has given her party lots of policies, and of scrapping stamp duty has been well received from think tanks and Paul Johnson formally of the IFS who said yesterday it is the worst of many bad taxes
Your mixture of cynicism and satire is par for the cop* but at least this conservative is pleased to see conservative policies and Jenrick put back in his box
I don't believe I was being remotely cynical or satirical. If you want satire I can write all day about letter boxes and an offensive description of a smile.
You would be the first to criticise ( and justifiably so) an unfunded Reeves pledge. And make no mistake there is nothing in the credit column to match the tax cut in the debit column, except for a nebulous notion of cutting wastage.
If she has done enough to put Jenrick back in his box and take some points from Reform I'll drink to that, but my point stands, her welcome tax cut debit does not demonstrate a corresponding credit.
*If you don't like me posting on here you could always ask TSE politely to transfer me from "member" to " applicant" status, that way I can still access and read your posts but no longer post myself. There, that seems like a neat compromise.
At times you really are very silly as demonstrated by your last paragraph
4.5 billion cost as quoted by the IFS is eminently doable
I do apologise for my figures, I misinterpreted what you were writing. You were claiming that stamp duty only generated the Government £4.5b, I misinterpreted that, not least because I was under the misapprehension that the £11.6b figure was cast iron.
The widely accepted figure for stamp duty credit yesterday was £11.6b down from a little over £12b on the previous measurement timescale. I thought even Kemi accepted the stamp duty saving as £9b, although if you say it is only £4.5b I would be surprised, but £4.5b it is.
Nonetheless, how are you paying for that £4.5b shortfall? Nebulous growth wishcasting and bogus service cost savings don't count.
Thank you for your comments and in the scheme of things 4.5 billion is small beer
LOL! I won't be offering to buy you a pint!
You haven't answered my question. How are you paying for that £4.5b shortfall? Nebulous growth wishcasting and bogus service cost savings don't count.
Badenoch announced the end of ev and heat pump subsidies - that accounts for 2.5 billion alone
Yet another example of Badenoch inventing wild numbers. The EV subsidy is capped at £650 million over three years and the heat pump subsidy at £295 million for just one year, nowhere near £2.5 billion per year. It's so illiterate and lazy. If the Conservatives could spend just five minutes on Google if they wanted to "fully cost" their proposals
If so, I accept your revised figures to circa 1 billion pa, but the abolition of stamp duty is now a top priority for the conservatives endorsed by think tanks and many others
It is a bad tax, but more widely Badenoch has put forward a platform of policies that were previously missing and has energised the party
I doubt it will make a big difference in the immediate polling, but this is a four year trek to the next GE and certainly reducing Jenrick's hopes are an even more positive
I think everyone is on board with dumping stamp duty, but some of us are keen to see how it is being paid for.
Maybe Reeves steals Tory clothes.
If you remove £X stamp duty from a house purchase, the vendor will expect to receive an extra £X on the sale price, as that is the going rate for their property (all-in). More money in the pockets of vendors, buyers no better off. The Tory Chancellor £10 billion a year worse off.
I can't see how it helps people get on the housing ladder either. No stamp duty is payable up to 300k.
The £300k is a special time-limited exemption for “first time buyers”.
Much of the thinking on this is far too micro. You've got to think about the broader effects on the housing market.
Listening to the radio and you have people just calling it a tax break for the wealthy - that's true but infuriating that people can't or won't see the broader benefits.
Isn’t Starmer in India at the moment? He really needs to tell Modi that buying russian oil is unacceptable and will result in consequences.
I think most of the oil India buys it buys to refine and sell to Europe. Fairly easy to stop this happening (ISTR Europe is not buying Indian refined oil from January if India continues to buy raw oil from Russia, though I can't remember the details).
Over a third of the boomer retired generation say no party represents them says new YouGov poll.
As Stephen Bush points out - these are the guys that "takes up most government spending".
Frankly, they are being handed ever increasing state largesse on a massive silver plate!
Lol. Every party represents these people!
As a comfortably off boomer retired, the big reasons no party really represents me are:
No party has a platform of running what the state takes to itself to run really brilliantly well but no stunts. All parties tend to appeal to a sectional interest. No party has spokespeople who answer questions. You get too old for the waffle. Boomers like me have children and grandchildren and know all sorts and conditions of people, rich and poor, only 'one nation' approaches are any use. All parties go in for short termism.
We either get the comfortably off boomer retired to recognise that allowing things they don’t like is a necessary prerequisite to growing GDP which they ultimately rely on for their own welfare or this country is pretty much doomed to a no GDP growth future with ever increasing strife driven by inter-generational conflict over resource allocation.
Yes. This comfortably off boomer retired thinks that NI should be abolished and pensioners pay tax at the same rate as working people. That employed, under age 66, working is the highest taxed form of activity is scandalous.
However, comfortably off boomers retireds' capacity to 'allow things they don't like' is less than you think. We all have exactly one vote, like all adults, and most people with the vote are much younger than comfortably off boomers retired. Remarkably few of them use it. It is insane to expect old people to do all the voting for them, though I am doing my best.
Over a third of the boomer retired generation say no party represents them says new YouGov poll.
As Stephen Bush points out - these are the guys that "takes up most government spending".
Frankly, they are being handed ever increasing state largesse on a massive silver plate!
Lol. Every party represents these people!
As a comfortably off boomer retired, the big reasons no party really represents me are:
No party has a platform of running what the state takes to itself to run really brilliantly well but no stunts. All parties tend to appeal to a sectional interest. No party has spokespeople who answer questions. You get too old for the waffle. Boomers like me have children and grandchildren and know all sorts and conditions of people, rich and poor, only 'one nation' approaches are any use. All parties go in for short termism.
We either get the comfortably off boomer retired to recognise that allowing things they don’t like is a necessary prerequisite to growing GDP which they ultimately rely on for their own welfare or this country is pretty much doomed to a no GDP growth future with ever increasing strife driven by inter-generational conflict over resource allocation.
Yes. This comfortably off boomer retired thinks that NI should be abolished and pensioners pay tax at the same rate as working people. That employed, under age 66, working is the highest taxed form of activity is scandalous.
However, comfortably off boomers retireds' capacity to 'allow things they don't like' is less than you think. We all have exactly one vote, like all adults, and most people with the vote are much younger than comfortably off boomers retired. Remarkably few of them use it. It is insane to expect old people to do all the voting for them, though I am doing my best.
Isn’t chain smoking the highest taxed form of activity?
Conference season ends and I believe the unexpected happened
Kemi Badenoch delivered the best speech, rolled out an array of policies, and stamp duty the 'rabbit out of the hat'
She energised her supporters and have given them something to sell on the doorstep
And she did what I prayed she would, sent out a positive [conservative] message and barely mentioned Starmer or Farage
Labour and Farage fell into the trap of hurling insults at each other to the detriment of both
The added bonus is Jenrick is the biggest loser
I do not know how the polls will react, but today was a start on the long road to relevance
Rabbit out of a hat, or bollocks out of her arse?
Pound shop Liz Truss.
No Kemi identified welfare and spending cuts to fund her tax cut
It wasn't just welfare but cuts in climate change subsidies and increasing north sea production with associated tax income, as well as welcoming back millionaires, entrepreneurs, and wealth creators
She also will scrap IHT on farmers and abolish vat on private school fees
Add in banning doctor strikes
This is conservative policies and is a direct challenge to Labour and Reform
This is pennies BigG. No spending cuts plan is credible without some sort of control on pensioner benefits and health spending. They are are growing so quickly - from a very high base - that any other cut or even steady economic growth is completely overwhelmed by them. Literally by design in the case of the triple lock.
Labour haven't set out a plan either but let's not pretend the Conservative plan is fiscally prudent. DavidL's take on this is correct.
Google tells me that the number of UK civil servants has increased since 2016 by 132,000 and that the median salary is £34k.
That would imply a saving of £4.5bn under the Tory plan.
Not commenting on whether it is feasible or not but it’s not “pennies”
True - but I think the fact the median salary is so low suggests what kinds of roles those civil servants are doing - particularly when you consider how London dominated the civil service is.
If you could cut 130,000 people out of Whitehall or it's equivalent in Scotland, Wales then fair enough. But I think the stats show that increase is primarily agencies like HMRC and DWP. Basically call centres, which would mean a reduced service. AI might be the answer to that but it's not a magic button you can press.
It said that the range was £24 - 84k (from memory - haven’t checked).
The only way to plausibly cuts costs is to stop doing stuff. Governments need to cut verticals rather than horizontally. (Equally I am sure that there are the sort of grinding efficiencies - 1, 2, 3 percent a year - that the private sector makes which government agencies never seem to be able to find)
And that's why, at the moment, this is Potemkin Policy. Tell us which Civil Servants are going to be axed, and what's going to happen to the work they were doing, and it gets interesting. "It won't be done by the state" is a legitimate answer.
Otherwise, Kemi is doing the fun bit without doing the hard work first. Maggie wouldn't have approved.
PB Tories are normally pragmatic people, questioning the symmetry of a Labour or Lib Dem tax cut or spending pledge. "The books don't balance" they will cry.
Yet a welcome Tory £12b tax cut paid by fantasy wastage savings get a free ride.
Fortunately the Tories are not in Government. I am sure if they were the gilt markets might baulk.
They are not “fantasy wastage savings”.
They have said that they will reduce civil service numbers back to 2016 levels. That’s pretty specific - of course they haven’t identified “Me Mexican” or “Ms Pete” as being at risk of being made redundant - but it’s not just a number made up by some spreadsheet jockey.
You had fourteen years in Government. Fourteen years to identify and implement swingeing service cuts to pay for massive tax cuts. You failed. During that 14 years, service provision levels crashed at the same time the tax burden increased.
Posters have quoted Reform fantasy savings in Kent, savings so magnificent that Council tax increases could be suspended, until they found out there were few savings to be made and Council taxes were raised by 5%.
A nice speech offering the Moon on a stick is one thing, shoehorning the contents of that speech into reality is quite another.
Your party and the cheerleaders on here are profoundly unserious.
Good morning
And giveover
Badenoch gave a totally unexpected and successful speech that galvanised her audience and has given her party lots of policies, and of scrapping stamp duty has been well received from think tanks and Paul Johnson formally of the IFS who said yesterday it is the worst of many bad taxes
Your mixture of cynicism and satire is par for the cop* but at least this conservative is pleased to see conservative policies and Jenrick put back in his box
I don't believe I was being remotely cynical or satirical. If you want satire I can write all day about letter boxes and an offensive description of a smile.
You would be the first to criticise ( and justifiably so) an unfunded Reeves pledge. And make no mistake there is nothing in the credit column to match the tax cut in the debit column, except for a nebulous notion of cutting wastage.
If she has done enough to put Jenrick back in his box and take some points from Reform I'll drink to that, but my point stands, her welcome tax cut debit does not demonstrate a corresponding credit.
*If you don't like me posting on here you could always ask TSE politely to transfer me from "member" to " applicant" status, that way I can still access and read your posts but no longer post myself. There, that seems like a neat compromise.
At times you really are very silly as demonstrated by your last paragraph
4.5 billion cost as quoted by the IFS is eminently doable
I do apologise for my figures, I misinterpreted what you were writing. You were claiming that stamp duty only generated the Government £4.5b, I misinterpreted that, not least because I was under the misapprehension that the £11.6b figure was cast iron.
The widely accepted figure for stamp duty credit yesterday was £11.6b down from a little over £12b on the previous measurement timescale. I thought even Kemi accepted the stamp duty saving as £9b, although if you say it is only £4.5b I would be surprised, but £4.5b it is.
Nonetheless, how are you paying for that £4.5b shortfall? Nebulous growth wishcasting and bogus service cost savings don't count.
Thank you for your comments and in the scheme of things 4.5 billion is small beer
LOL! I won't be offering to buy you a pint!
You haven't answered my question. How are you paying for that £4.5b shortfall? Nebulous growth wishcasting and bogus service cost savings don't count.
Badenoch announced the end of ev and heat pump subsidies - that accounts for 2.5 billion alone
Yet another example of Badenoch inventing wild numbers. The EV subsidy is capped at £650 million over three years and the heat pump subsidy at £295 million for just one year, nowhere near £2.5 billion per year. It's so illiterate and lazy. If the Conservatives could spend just five minutes on Google if they wanted to "fully cost" their proposals
If so, I accept your revised figures to circa 1 billion pa, but the abolition of stamp duty is now a top priority for the conservatives endorsed by think tanks and many others
It is a bad tax, but more widely Badenoch has put forward a platform of policies that were previously missing and has energised the party
I doubt it will make a big difference in the immediate polling, but this is a four year trek to the next GE and certainly reducing Jenrick's hopes are an even more positive
I think everyone is on board with dumping stamp duty, but some of us are keen to see how it is being paid for.
Maybe Reeves steals Tory clothes.
If you remove £X stamp duty from a house purchase, the vendor will expect to receive an extra £X on the sale price, as that is the going rate for their property (all-in). More money in the pockets of vendors, buyers no better off. The Tory Chancellor £10 billion a year worse off.
Not necessarily. People have an idea of what they want to spend on a house, that’s generally as little as possible for as much house as possible. So the idea of people thinking of the house in a simplistic “all-in” price isn’t so. It’s very much a case of there are the costs of the property and there are the costs of admin (tax, legal,survey).
As it is People know there is a pain in the arse tax that they have to pay regardless and so have to factor it into their budget.
If you remove that tax it’s doesn’t make people suddenly think “great, I’ve got an extra fifty grand so happy to hand it over to this guy on top of what I think the house is worth”, they are pleased they don’t have to hand over the fifty grand to the tax man but they aren’t suddenly giving it to someone else and are more likely to find a house that’s up in a different bracket as that money is free for them to use not for the tax man.
If people try and add on the old stamp duty amount then people just won’t buy so the seller will drop their price. Nobody says their house is worth £x (where x= house cost+stamp+legal+survey).
I see that Nottingham, London and Birmingham are taking, or planning to take, unofficial flags down.
Does anyone have a wider knowledge?
They have to take them down. Otherwise they are inviting everyone and anyone to hijack the public realm with their own pet causes. If people want to plaster their own property with England flags that's their prerogative, but they can't do it on public property.
The local council took down the Welsh flags over the Little Orme for them to be replaced with larger Welsh and Union Jacks flags higher up and social media telling the council 'You take them down, we will put them back up' !!!!
Over a third of the boomer retired generation say no party represents them says new YouGov poll.
As Stephen Bush points out - these are the guys that "takes up most government spending".
Frankly, they are being handed ever increasing state largesse on a massive silver plate!
One can make an argument that the group most undeserving of state largesse are people in their late 60s who are still fit and healthy, but getting pensions and other benefits. Should the pension age be further raised?
Pension age should be graduated. Starting at a lower age than current, 63?,at maybe £2k or £3k per year then increasing til maybe 73 to the current rate.
What's the rationale here? That people are expected to be moving to part-time working?
People do move to work part time. And some people retire at 55, others at 80. The days of a single retirement age for everyone are long gone.
People who retire at 55 tend to be very rich people who can afford to, but others need to retire early for health reasons. People who retire at 80 tend to have better paying white collar jobs. So, how does the system handle all these differences? Putting everyone on a graduated system going from 63 to 73 is still a one size fits all solution.
Do we instead need more means testing and/or health status testing?
Be useful and don't abuse your body and you'll have to work longer will be a hard sell.
All testing for benefits runs an equivalent risk. I don't believe many people are going to abuse their bodies just to get a pension sooner!
Maybe UBI solves all this?
Where does the money come from for it ?
@Taz, @bondegezou gave the most concise answer. UBI should be tax neutral. It is not a magic money tree. You get a basic payment and you hopefully earn on top of that. There is no longer a personal allowance and tax rates are adjusted so the net effect is neutral. So what are the benefits:
a) You eliminate the need for 99% of state benefits including the state pension b) Those that deserve benefits and don't claim them or fall through the cracks no longer will c) Those that abuse the system really can't anymore. Yep they get the basic amount, but that is it. They probably abuse it by far more currently d) It encourage people to take a risk starting a business because they at least get a minimum amount to tide them over during the set up time when they have no income e) You can scrap 90+% of the DWP and a bit of HMRC
Anyone asking "how do we pay for it" doesn't understand the idea.
Not true. It is perfectly reasonable to ask for some basics costings because it involves the reallocation of hundreds of billions, and massively readjusted tax rates. To ask for ball park figures aqnd %s is basic.
Personally I don't believe that it would eliminate 99% of state benefits, so that needs a bit of explainingtoo.
Over a third of the boomer retired generation say no party represents them says new YouGov poll.
As Stephen Bush points out - these are the guys that "takes up most government spending".
Frankly, they are being handed ever increasing state largesse on a massive silver plate!
One can make an argument that the group most undeserving of state largesse are people in their late 60s who are still fit and healthy, but getting pensions and other benefits. Should the pension age be further raised?
Pension age should be graduated. Starting at a lower age than current, 63?,at maybe £2k or £3k per year then increasing til maybe 73 to the current rate.
What's the rationale here? That people are expected to be moving to part-time working?
People do move to work part time. And some people retire at 55, others at 80. The days of a single retirement age for everyone are long gone.
People who retire at 55 tend to be very rich people who can afford to, but others need to retire early for health reasons. People who retire at 80 tend to have better paying white collar jobs. So, how does the system handle all these differences? Putting everyone on a graduated system going from 63 to 73 is still a one size fits all solution.
Do we instead need more means testing and/or health status testing?
Be useful and don't abuse your body and you'll have to work longer will be a hard sell.
All testing for benefits runs an equivalent risk. I don't believe many people are going to abuse their bodies just to get a pension sooner!
Maybe UBI solves all this?
Where does the money come from for it ?
@Taz, @bondegezou gave the most concise answer. UBI should be tax neutral. It is not a magic money tree. You get a basic payment and you hopefully earn on top of that. There is no longer a personal allowance and tax rates are adjusted so the net effect is neutral. So what are the benefits:
a) You eliminate the need for 99% of state benefits including the state pension b) Those that deserve benefits and don't claim them or fall through the cracks no longer will c) Those that abuse the system really can't anymore. Yep they get the basic amount, but that is it. They probably abuse it by far more currently d) It encourage people to take a risk starting a business because they at least get a minimum amount to tide them over during the set up time when they have no income e) You can scrap 90+% of the DWP and a bit of HMRC
Anyone asking "how do we pay for it" doesn't understand the idea.
It doesn't pay for itself, it is eyewateringly expensive. There are around 55mn adults in the UK so paying them all £12k a year (the state pension) would cost £660bn a year. Government spending on social benefits including pensions is currently less than 60% of that amount. Admin costs are a small saving and you wouldnt eliminate all of the existing welfare payments. You would have to raise taxes significantly to pay for it, with all the disincentive effects that come with it. We need all the workers we can because of population ageing so paying people to do nothing while disincentivising work is not a great idea.
I see that Nottingham, London and Birmingham are taking, or planning to take, unofficial flags down.
Does anyone have a wider knowledge?
They have to take them down. Otherwise they are inviting everyone and anyone to hijack the public realm with their own pet causes. If people want to plaster their own property with England flags that's their prerogative, but they can't do it on public property.
The local council took down the Welsh flags over the Little Orme for them to be replaced with larger Welsh and Union Jacks flags higher up and social media telling the council 'You take them down, we will put them back up' !!!!
Shame people are willing to waste council taxpayers money on these silly displays of nationalism (often organised by far right activists, who know exactly what they are doing).
Over a third of the boomer retired generation say no party represents them says new YouGov poll.
As Stephen Bush points out - these are the guys that "takes up most government spending".
Frankly, they are being handed ever increasing state largesse on a massive silver plate!
One can make an argument that the group most undeserving of state largesse are people in their late 60s who are still fit and healthy, but getting pensions and other benefits. Should the pension age be further raised?
Pension age should be graduated. Starting at a lower age than current, 63?,at maybe £2k or £3k per year then increasing til maybe 73 to the current rate.
What's the rationale here? That people are expected to be moving to part-time working?
People do move to work part time. And some people retire at 55, others at 80. The days of a single retirement age for everyone are long gone.
People who retire at 55 tend to be very rich people who can afford to, but others need to retire early for health reasons. People who retire at 80 tend to have better paying white collar jobs. So, how does the system handle all these differences? Putting everyone on a graduated system going from 63 to 73 is still a one size fits all solution.
Do we instead need more means testing and/or health status testing?
Be useful and don't abuse your body and you'll have to work longer will be a hard sell.
All testing for benefits runs an equivalent risk. I don't believe many people are going to abuse their bodies just to get a pension sooner!
Maybe UBI solves all this?
Where does the money come from for it ?
@Taz, @bondegezou gave the most concise answer. UBI should be tax neutral. It is not a magic money tree. You get a basic payment and you hopefully earn on top of that. There is no longer a personal allowance and tax rates are adjusted so the net effect is neutral. So what are the benefits:
a) You eliminate the need for 99% of state benefits including the state pension b) Those that deserve benefits and don't claim them or fall through the cracks no longer will c) Those that abuse the system really can't anymore. Yep they get the basic amount, but that is it. They probably abuse it by far more currently d) It encourage people to take a risk starting a business because they at least get a minimum amount to tide them over during the set up time when they have no income e) You can scrap 90+% of the DWP and a bit of HMRC
Anyone asking "how do we pay for it" doesn't understand the idea.
It doesn't pay for itself, it is eyewateringly expensive. There are around 55mn adults in the UK so paying them all £12k a year (the state pension) would cost £660bn a year. Government spending on social benefits including pensions is currently less than 60% of that amount. Admin costs are a small saving and you wouldnt eliminate all of the existing welfare payments. You would have to raise taxes significantly to pay for it, with all the disincentive effects that come with it. We need all the workers we can because of population ageing so paying people to do nothing while disincentivising work is not a great idea.
Flat tax of c 50% on all income.
Total income in the UK is about 1.4tn I think? Revenue: £700bn
Over a third of the boomer retired generation say no party represents them says new YouGov poll.
As Stephen Bush points out - these are the guys that "takes up most government spending".
Frankly, they are being handed ever increasing state largesse on a massive silver plate!
One can make an argument that the group most undeserving of state largesse are people in their late 60s who are still fit and healthy, but getting pensions and other benefits. Should the pension age be further raised?
Pension age should be graduated. Starting at a lower age than current, 63?,at maybe £2k or £3k per year then increasing til maybe 73 to the current rate.
What's the rationale here? That people are expected to be moving to part-time working?
People do move to work part time. And some people retire at 55, others at 80. The days of a single retirement age for everyone are long gone.
People who retire at 55 tend to be very rich people who can afford to, but others need to retire early for health reasons. People who retire at 80 tend to have better paying white collar jobs. So, how does the system handle all these differences? Putting everyone on a graduated system going from 63 to 73 is still a one size fits all solution.
Do we instead need more means testing and/or health status testing?
Be useful and don't abuse your body and you'll have to work longer will be a hard sell.
All testing for benefits runs an equivalent risk. I don't believe many people are going to abuse their bodies just to get a pension sooner!
Maybe UBI solves all this?
Where does the money come from for it ?
@Taz, @bondegezou gave the most concise answer. UBI should be tax neutral. It is not a magic money tree. You get a basic payment and you hopefully earn on top of that. There is no longer a personal allowance and tax rates are adjusted so the net effect is neutral. So what are the benefits:
a) You eliminate the need for 99% of state benefits including the state pension b) Those that deserve benefits and don't claim them or fall through the cracks no longer will c) Those that abuse the system really can't anymore. Yep they get the basic amount, but that is it. They probably abuse it by far more currently d) It encourage people to take a risk starting a business because they at least get a minimum amount to tide them over during the set up time when they have no income e) You can scrap 90+% of the DWP and a bit of HMRC
Anyone asking "how do we pay for it" doesn't understand the idea.
Not true. It is perfectly reasonable to ask for some basics costings because it involves the reallocation of hundreds of billions, and massively readjusted tax rates. To ask for ball park figures aqnd %s is basic.
Personally I don't believe that it would eliminate 99% of state benefits, so that needs a bit of explainingtoo.
No it doesn’t. Start with my friend of the last couple of days, the firefighter who lives in central London, and who really has to live in central London. His salary won’t cover his “1% Property Tax”, and definitely won’t cover his regular housing costs either.
So there has to some sort of a government scheme for people on low pay who need to live in expensive places, and that’s where it all starts to go wrong.
Then you look at people who are economically inactive but living in some of the most expensive housing in the country, how do they afford to “stay close to their family”?
Over a third of the boomer retired generation say no party represents them says new YouGov poll.
As Stephen Bush points out - these are the guys that "takes up most government spending".
Frankly, they are being handed ever increasing state largesse on a massive silver plate!
One can make an argument that the group most undeserving of state largesse are people in their late 60s who are still fit and healthy, but getting pensions and other benefits. Should the pension age be further raised?
Pension age should be graduated. Starting at a lower age than current, 63?,at maybe £2k or £3k per year then increasing til maybe 73 to the current rate.
What's the rationale here? That people are expected to be moving to part-time working?
People do move to work part time. And some people retire at 55, others at 80. The days of a single retirement age for everyone are long gone.
People who retire at 55 tend to be very rich people who can afford to, but others need to retire early for health reasons. People who retire at 80 tend to have better paying white collar jobs. So, how does the system handle all these differences? Putting everyone on a graduated system going from 63 to 73 is still a one size fits all solution.
Do we instead need more means testing and/or health status testing?
Be useful and don't abuse your body and you'll have to work longer will be a hard sell.
All testing for benefits runs an equivalent risk. I don't believe many people are going to abuse their bodies just to get a pension sooner!
Maybe UBI solves all this?
Where does the money come from for it ?
@Taz, @bondegezou gave the most concise answer. UBI should be tax neutral. It is not a magic money tree. You get a basic payment and you hopefully earn on top of that. There is no longer a personal allowance and tax rates are adjusted so the net effect is neutral. So what are the benefits:
a) You eliminate the need for 99% of state benefits including the state pension b) Those that deserve benefits and don't claim them or fall through the cracks no longer will c) Those that abuse the system really can't anymore. Yep they get the basic amount, but that is it. They probably abuse it by far more currently d) It encourage people to take a risk starting a business because they at least get a minimum amount to tide them over during the set up time when they have no income e) You can scrap 90+% of the DWP and a bit of HMRC
Anyone asking "how do we pay for it" doesn't understand the idea.
It doesn't pay for itself, it is eyewateringly expensive. There are around 55mn adults in the UK so paying them all £12k a year (the state pension) would cost £660bn a year. Government spending on social benefits including pensions is currently less than 60% of that amount. Admin costs are a small saving and you wouldnt eliminate all of the existing welfare payments. You would have to raise taxes significantly to pay for it, with all the disincentive effects that come with it. We need all the workers we can because of population ageing so paying people to do nothing while disincentivising work is not a great idea.
Flat tax of c 50% on all income.
Total income in the UK is about 1.4tn I think? Revenue: £700bn
Over a third of the boomer retired generation say no party represents them says new YouGov poll.
As Stephen Bush points out - these are the guys that "takes up most government spending".
Frankly, they are being handed ever increasing state largesse on a massive silver plate!
One can make an argument that the group most undeserving of state largesse are people in their late 60s who are still fit and healthy, but getting pensions and other benefits. Should the pension age be further raised?
Pension age should be graduated. Starting at a lower age than current, 63?,at maybe £2k or £3k per year then increasing til maybe 73 to the current rate.
What's the rationale here? That people are expected to be moving to part-time working?
People do move to work part time. And some people retire at 55, others at 80. The days of a single retirement age for everyone are long gone.
People who retire at 55 tend to be very rich people who can afford to, but others need to retire early for health reasons. People who retire at 80 tend to have better paying white collar jobs. So, how does the system handle all these differences? Putting everyone on a graduated system going from 63 to 73 is still a one size fits all solution.
Do we instead need more means testing and/or health status testing?
Be useful and don't abuse your body and you'll have to work longer will be a hard sell.
All testing for benefits runs an equivalent risk. I don't believe many people are going to abuse their bodies just to get a pension sooner!
Maybe UBI solves all this?
Where does the money come from for it ?
@Taz, @bondegezou gave the most concise answer. UBI should be tax neutral. It is not a magic money tree. You get a basic payment and you hopefully earn on top of that. There is no longer a personal allowance and tax rates are adjusted so the net effect is neutral. So what are the benefits:
a) You eliminate the need for 99% of state benefits including the state pension b) Those that deserve benefits and don't claim them or fall through the cracks no longer will c) Those that abuse the system really can't anymore. Yep they get the basic amount, but that is it. They probably abuse it by far more currently d) It encourage people to take a risk starting a business because they at least get a minimum amount to tide them over during the set up time when they have no income e) You can scrap 90+% of the DWP and a bit of HMRC
Anyone asking "how do we pay for it" doesn't understand the idea.
Not true. It is perfectly reasonable to ask for some basics costings because it involves the reallocation of hundreds of billions, and massively readjusted tax rates. To ask for ball park figures aqnd %s is basic.
Personally I don't believe that it would eliminate 99% of state benefits, so that needs a bit of explainingtoo.
Sure, there'd be a complicated readjustment of the tax and benefit system. But that doesn't necessarily require an increased (effective) tax burden.
It's a very old idea with the likes of Milton Friedman arguing for it. And Elon Musk, come to think of it. It's a bit sad that the lines are being drawn on Left/Right axis.
Over a third of the boomer retired generation say no party represents them says new YouGov poll.
As Stephen Bush points out - these are the guys that "takes up most government spending".
Frankly, they are being handed ever increasing state largesse on a massive silver plate!
One can make an argument that the group most undeserving of state largesse are people in their late 60s who are still fit and healthy, but getting pensions and other benefits. Should the pension age be further raised?
Pension age should be graduated. Starting at a lower age than current, 63?,at maybe £2k or £3k per year then increasing til maybe 73 to the current rate.
What's the rationale here? That people are expected to be moving to part-time working?
People do move to work part time. And some people retire at 55, others at 80. The days of a single retirement age for everyone are long gone.
People who retire at 55 tend to be very rich people who can afford to, but others need to retire early for health reasons. People who retire at 80 tend to have better paying white collar jobs. So, how does the system handle all these differences? Putting everyone on a graduated system going from 63 to 73 is still a one size fits all solution.
Do we instead need more means testing and/or health status testing?
Be useful and don't abuse your body and you'll have to work longer will be a hard sell.
All testing for benefits runs an equivalent risk. I don't believe many people are going to abuse their bodies just to get a pension sooner!
Maybe UBI solves all this?
Where does the money come from for it ?
@Taz, @bondegezou gave the most concise answer. UBI should be tax neutral. It is not a magic money tree. You get a basic payment and you hopefully earn on top of that. There is no longer a personal allowance and tax rates are adjusted so the net effect is neutral. So what are the benefits:
a) You eliminate the need for 99% of state benefits including the state pension b) Those that deserve benefits and don't claim them or fall through the cracks no longer will c) Those that abuse the system really can't anymore. Yep they get the basic amount, but that is it. They probably abuse it by far more currently d) It encourage people to take a risk starting a business because they at least get a minimum amount to tide them over during the set up time when they have no income e) You can scrap 90+% of the DWP and a bit of HMRC
Anyone asking "how do we pay for it" doesn't understand the idea.
It doesn't pay for itself, it is eyewateringly expensive. There are around 55mn adults in the UK so paying them all £12k a year (the state pension) would cost £660bn a year. Government spending on social benefits including pensions is currently less than 60% of that amount. Admin costs are a small saving and you wouldnt eliminate all of the existing welfare payments. You would have to raise taxes significantly to pay for it, with all the disincentive effects that come with it. We need all the workers we can because of population ageing so paying people to do nothing while disincentivising work is not a great idea.
Flat tax of c 50% on all income.
Total income in the UK is about 1.4tn I think? Revenue: £700bn
Impossible to define 'all income' really. Does your picture by Turner get revalued every year, or your sketch by me?
Yougov: Would you support or oppose it being made compulsory for all newly-retired people to serve on a community service placement for a period of one year?” For those 65+, 20% of those support vs 50% of them wanting a similar mandatory national service scheme for young people
Every survey exposes the hypocrisy and entitlement of that generation (refuse to call them baby boomers, thet’s really 50-64 in the uk)
The west has a huge pensioner problem imo.
Lots of interesting polling there. I do note that 65+ are more supportive of the idea than younger groups, and there is lots of support for a voluntary scheme.
A voluntary scheme to volunteer? Confused, why not just volunteer without the scheme? There are loads of volunteering opportunities already.
There can be advantages in having a single, high-profile, govt-supported way into volunteering, that helps people into volunteering and finding a useful role.
Mr Cameron's something something society, redux, no? (Not that it is a bad idea in itself, oh no.)
I have long thought that Cameron's Big Society was a better idea than the sarcasm it received at the time suggested.
It was indeed a good idea, but was written for the time of plenty that was 2007, not the economic situation that prevailed in 2010 when the election was called.
It was a policy for the election that never was, the one that Sion Simon predicted.
I also think that Cameron never really defined it in any great detail and after ten years of Tony Blair people were cynical about meaningless buzz words that didn't have much substance behind them. Of course as a former PR man that was Cameron's MO.
But as you say in the much harsher world of the 2010s and 2020s it was all irrelevant to the main challenge of getting economic growth going again, so, like so much from the Heir to Blair era, it faded away.
It’s worth considering the effect of Lottery money on many, many small community projects.
One sad thing is the tendency, as time goes by, for Lottery money to be spent on bigger projects. Building a small changing room for the schools to use the local park as a sports field may not be sexy. But it’s a real, sensible thing.
John Major’s biggest legacy, although why people make bets where the gross return is 50% is still a wonder. I was working in a shop in 1995 or 96 when it all started, the queues on Saturday afternoons were crazy.
Government spending on sports and arts has over time been replaced by lottery money, and allowed expansion in those areas. There’s now hundreds of Olympic athletes and coaches getting a stipend from the lottery, the crowning grory of which was the London Games.
We know that people are attracted to long-odds bets, such that bookies can offer shorter odds than warranted and still attract enough bets.
The lottery offers very long-odds bets. There's no other opportunity, albeit a slim one, of transforming a few pounds into many millions of pounds.
Even a large winning bet at 100/1 is not going to return enough money to change your life in the way a lottery jackpot win would.
I don't find it so illogical, viewed from a game theory point of view, rather than a purely numerical one.
Over a third of the boomer retired generation say no party represents them says new YouGov poll.
As Stephen Bush points out - these are the guys that "takes up most government spending".
Frankly, they are being handed ever increasing state largesse on a massive silver plate!
One can make an argument that the group most undeserving of state largesse are people in their late 60s who are still fit and healthy, but getting pensions and other benefits. Should the pension age be further raised?
Pension age should be graduated. Starting at a lower age than current, 63?,at maybe £2k or £3k per year then increasing til maybe 73 to the current rate.
What's the rationale here? That people are expected to be moving to part-time working?
People do move to work part time. And some people retire at 55, others at 80. The days of a single retirement age for everyone are long gone.
People who retire at 55 tend to be very rich people who can afford to, but others need to retire early for health reasons. People who retire at 80 tend to have better paying white collar jobs. So, how does the system handle all these differences? Putting everyone on a graduated system going from 63 to 73 is still a one size fits all solution.
Do we instead need more means testing and/or health status testing?
Be useful and don't abuse your body and you'll have to work longer will be a hard sell.
All testing for benefits runs an equivalent risk. I don't believe many people are going to abuse their bodies just to get a pension sooner!
Maybe UBI solves all this?
Where does the money come from for it ?
@Taz, @bondegezou gave the most concise answer. UBI should be tax neutral. It is not a magic money tree. You get a basic payment and you hopefully earn on top of that. There is no longer a personal allowance and tax rates are adjusted so the net effect is neutral. So what are the benefits:
a) You eliminate the need for 99% of state benefits including the state pension b) Those that deserve benefits and don't claim them or fall through the cracks no longer will c) Those that abuse the system really can't anymore. Yep they get the basic amount, but that is it. They probably abuse it by far more currently d) It encourage people to take a risk starting a business because they at least get a minimum amount to tide them over during the set up time when they have no income e) You can scrap 90+% of the DWP and a bit of HMRC
I am pulling figures out of the air here because it makes the maths easier. If UBI was £600 a month and a reasonable amount of hours to work each month is 120, there would be a case for reducing the minimum wage by £5 a hour.
A UBI would allow you to abolish the minimum wage. That would be one of the benefits.
Over a third of the boomer retired generation say no party represents them says new YouGov poll.
As Stephen Bush points out - these are the guys that "takes up most government spending".
Frankly, they are being handed ever increasing state largesse on a massive silver plate!
One can make an argument that the group most undeserving of state largesse are people in their late 60s who are still fit and healthy, but getting pensions and other benefits. Should the pension age be further raised?
Pension age should be graduated. Starting at a lower age than current, 63?,at maybe £2k or £3k per year then increasing til maybe 73 to the current rate.
What's the rationale here? That people are expected to be moving to part-time working?
People do move to work part time. And some people retire at 55, others at 80. The days of a single retirement age for everyone are long gone.
People who retire at 55 tend to be very rich people who can afford to, but others need to retire early for health reasons. People who retire at 80 tend to have better paying white collar jobs. So, how does the system handle all these differences? Putting everyone on a graduated system going from 63 to 73 is still a one size fits all solution.
Do we instead need more means testing and/or health status testing?
Be useful and don't abuse your body and you'll have to work longer will be a hard sell.
All testing for benefits runs an equivalent risk. I don't believe many people are going to abuse their bodies just to get a pension sooner!
Maybe UBI solves all this?
Where does the money come from for it ?
@Taz, @bondegezou gave the most concise answer. UBI should be tax neutral. It is not a magic money tree. You get a basic payment and you hopefully earn on top of that. There is no longer a personal allowance and tax rates are adjusted so the net effect is neutral. So what are the benefits:
a) You eliminate the need for 99% of state benefits including the state pension b) Those that deserve benefits and don't claim them or fall through the cracks no longer will c) Those that abuse the system really can't anymore. Yep they get the basic amount, but that is it. They probably abuse it by far more currently d) It encourage people to take a risk starting a business because they at least get a minimum amount to tide them over during the set up time when they have no income e) You can scrap 90+% of the DWP and a bit of HMRC
Anyone asking "how do we pay for it" doesn't understand the idea.
It doesn't pay for itself, it is eyewateringly expensive. There are around 55mn adults in the UK so paying them all £12k a year (the state pension) would cost £660bn a year. Government spending on social benefits including pensions is currently less than 60% of that amount. Admin costs are a small saving and you wouldnt eliminate all of the existing welfare payments. You would have to raise taxes significantly to pay for it, with all the disincentive effects that come with it. We need all the workers we can because of population ageing so paying people to do nothing while disincentivising work is not a great idea.
Flat tax of c 50% on all income.
Total income in the UK is about 1.4tn I think? Revenue: £700bn
So UBI would be the tax free allowance ?
No. Tax on everything. Your effective tax allowance would effectively be 3 times UBI at at 50% tax rate, because you'd be net negative until that point.
I agree with all the questions on welfare though. It isn't that simple once you start looking at individual cases and circumstances.
As the sort of nice model physicists like though, its fine.
Over a third of the boomer retired generation say no party represents them says new YouGov poll.
As Stephen Bush points out - these are the guys that "takes up most government spending".
Frankly, they are being handed ever increasing state largesse on a massive silver plate!
One can make an argument that the group most undeserving of state largesse are people in their late 60s who are still fit and healthy, but getting pensions and other benefits. Should the pension age be further raised?
Pension age should be graduated. Starting at a lower age than current, 63?,at maybe £2k or £3k per year then increasing til maybe 73 to the current rate.
What's the rationale here? That people are expected to be moving to part-time working?
People do move to work part time. And some people retire at 55, others at 80. The days of a single retirement age for everyone are long gone.
People who retire at 55 tend to be very rich people who can afford to, but others need to retire early for health reasons. People who retire at 80 tend to have better paying white collar jobs. So, how does the system handle all these differences? Putting everyone on a graduated system going from 63 to 73 is still a one size fits all solution.
Do we instead need more means testing and/or health status testing?
Be useful and don't abuse your body and you'll have to work longer will be a hard sell.
All testing for benefits runs an equivalent risk. I don't believe many people are going to abuse their bodies just to get a pension sooner!
Maybe UBI solves all this?
Where does the money come from for it ?
@Taz, @bondegezou gave the most concise answer. UBI should be tax neutral. It is not a magic money tree. You get a basic payment and you hopefully earn on top of that. There is no longer a personal allowance and tax rates are adjusted so the net effect is neutral. So what are the benefits:
a) You eliminate the need for 99% of state benefits including the state pension b) Those that deserve benefits and don't claim them or fall through the cracks no longer will c) Those that abuse the system really can't anymore. Yep they get the basic amount, but that is it. They probably abuse it by far more currently d) It encourage people to take a risk starting a business because they at least get a minimum amount to tide them over during the set up time when they have no income e) You can scrap 90+% of the DWP and a bit of HMRC
Anyone asking "how do we pay for it" doesn't understand the idea.
It doesn't pay for itself, it is eyewateringly expensive. There are around 55mn adults in the UK so paying them all £12k a year (the state pension) would cost £660bn a year. Government spending on social benefits including pensions is currently less than 60% of that amount. Admin costs are a small saving and you wouldnt eliminate all of the existing welfare payments. You would have to raise taxes significantly to pay for it, with all the disincentive effects that come with it. We need all the workers we can because of population ageing so paying people to do nothing while disincentivising work is not a great idea.
Flat tax of c 50% on all income.
Total income in the UK is about 1.4tn I think? Revenue: £700bn
Impossible to define 'all income' really. Does your picture by Turner get revalued every year, or your sketch by me?
Would a picture not be an asset, rather than income ?
Conference season ends and I believe the unexpected happened
Kemi Badenoch delivered the best speech, rolled out an array of policies, and stamp duty the 'rabbit out of the hat'
She energised her supporters and have given them something to sell on the doorstep
And she did what I prayed she would, sent out a positive [conservative] message and barely mentioned Starmer or Farage
Labour and Farage fell into the trap of hurling insults at each other to the detriment of both
The added bonus is Jenrick is the biggest loser
I do not know how the polls will react, but today was a start on the long road to relevance
Rabbit out of a hat, or bollocks out of her arse?
Pound shop Liz Truss.
No Kemi identified welfare and spending cuts to fund her tax cut
It wasn't just welfare but cuts in climate change subsidies and increasing north sea production with associated tax income, as well as welcoming back millionaires, entrepreneurs, and wealth creators
She also will scrap IHT on farmers and abolish vat on private school fees
Add in banning doctor strikes
This is conservative policies and is a direct challenge to Labour and Reform
This is pennies BigG. No spending cuts plan is credible without some sort of control on pensioner benefits and health spending. They are are growing so quickly - from a very high base - that any other cut or even steady economic growth is completely overwhelmed by them. Literally by design in the case of the triple lock.
Labour haven't set out a plan either but let's not pretend the Conservative plan is fiscally prudent. DavidL's take on this is correct.
Google tells me that the number of UK civil servants has increased since 2016 by 132,000 and that the median salary is £34k.
That would imply a saving of £4.5bn under the Tory plan.
Not commenting on whether it is feasible or not but it’s not “pennies”
True - but I think the fact the median salary is so low suggests what kinds of roles those civil servants are doing - particularly when you consider how London dominated the civil service is.
If you could cut 130,000 people out of Whitehall or it's equivalent in Scotland, Wales then fair enough. But I think the stats show that increase is primarily agencies like HMRC and DWP. Basically call centres, which would mean a reduced service. AI might be the answer to that but it's not a magic button you can press.
It said that the range was £24 - 84k (from memory - haven’t checked).
The only way to plausibly cuts costs is to stop doing stuff. Governments need to cut verticals rather than horizontally. (Equally I am sure that there are the sort of grinding efficiencies - 1, 2, 3 percent a year - that the private sector makes which government agencies never seem to be able to find)
And that's why, at the moment, this is Potemkin Policy. Tell us which Civil Servants are going to be axed, and what's going to happen to the work they were doing, and it gets interesting. "It won't be done by the state" is a legitimate answer.
Otherwise, Kemi is doing the fun bit without doing the hard work first. Maggie wouldn't have approved.
PB Tories are normally pragmatic people, questioning the symmetry of a Labour or Lib Dem tax cut or spending pledge. "The books don't balance" they will cry.
Yet a welcome Tory £12b tax cut paid by fantasy wastage savings get a free ride.
Fortunately the Tories are not in Government. I am sure if they were the gilt markets might baulk.
They are not “fantasy wastage savings”.
They have said that they will reduce civil service numbers back to 2016 levels. That’s pretty specific - of course they haven’t identified “Me Mexican” or “Ms Pete” as being at risk of being made redundant - but it’s not just a number made up by some spreadsheet jockey.
You had fourteen years in Government. Fourteen years to identify and implement swingeing service cuts to pay for massive tax cuts. You failed. During that 14 years, service provision levels crashed at the same time the tax burden increased.
Posters have quoted Reform fantasy savings in Kent, savings so magnificent that Council tax increases could be suspended, until they found out there were few savings to be made and Council taxes were raised by 5%.
A nice speech offering the Moon on a stick is one thing, shoehorning the contents of that speech into reality is quite another.
Your party and the cheerleaders on here are profoundly unserious.
Good morning
And giveover
Badenoch gave a totally unexpected and successful speech that galvanised her audience and has given her party lots of policies, and of scrapping stamp duty has been well received from think tanks and Paul Johnson formally of the IFS who said yesterday it is the worst of many bad taxes
Your mixture of cynicism and satire is par for the cop* but at least this conservative is pleased to see conservative policies and Jenrick put back in his box
I don't believe I was being remotely cynical or satirical. If you want satire I can write all day about letter boxes and an offensive description of a smile.
You would be the first to criticise ( and justifiably so) an unfunded Reeves pledge. And make no mistake there is nothing in the credit column to match the tax cut in the debit column, except for a nebulous notion of cutting wastage.
If she has done enough to put Jenrick back in his box and take some points from Reform I'll drink to that, but my point stands, her welcome tax cut debit does not demonstrate a corresponding credit.
*If you don't like me posting on here you could always ask TSE politely to transfer me from "member" to " applicant" status, that way I can still access and read your posts but no longer post myself. There, that seems like a neat compromise.
At times you really are very silly as demonstrated by your last paragraph
4.5 billion cost as quoted by the IFS is eminently doable
I do apologise for my figures, I misinterpreted what you were writing. You were claiming that stamp duty only generated the Government £4.5b, I misinterpreted that, not least because I was under the misapprehension that the £11.6b figure was cast iron.
The widely accepted figure for stamp duty credit yesterday was £11.6b down from a little over £12b on the previous measurement timescale. I thought even Kemi accepted the stamp duty saving as £9b, although if you say it is only £4.5b I would be surprised, but £4.5b it is.
Nonetheless, how are you paying for that £4.5b shortfall? Nebulous growth wishcasting and bogus service cost savings don't count.
Thank you for your comments and in the scheme of things 4.5 billion is small beer
LOL! I won't be offering to buy you a pint!
You haven't answered my question. How are you paying for that £4.5b shortfall? Nebulous growth wishcasting and bogus service cost savings don't count.
Badenoch announced the end of ev and heat pump subsidies - that accounts for 2.5 billion alone
Yet another example of Badenoch inventing wild numbers. The EV subsidy is capped at £650 million over three years and the heat pump subsidy at £295 million for just one year, nowhere near £2.5 billion per year. It's so illiterate and lazy. If the Conservatives could spend just five minutes on Google if they wanted to "fully cost" their proposals
If so, I accept your revised figures to circa 1 billion pa, but the abolition of stamp duty is now a top priority for the conservatives endorsed by think tanks and many others
It is a bad tax, but more widely Badenoch has put forward a platform of policies that were previously missing and has energised the party
I doubt it will make a big difference in the immediate polling, but this is a four year trek to the next GE and certainly reducing Jenrick's hopes are an even more positive
I think everyone is on board with dumping stamp duty, but some of us are keen to see how it is being paid for.
Maybe Reeves steals Tory clothes.
If you remove £X stamp duty from a house purchase, the vendor will expect to receive an extra £X on the sale price, as that is the going rate for their property (all-in). More money in the pockets of vendors, buyers no better off. The Tory Chancellor £10 billion a year worse off.
You could not be more completely wrong. The money received depends upon the scarcity of the asset. Shortage of the asset cost goes up, sufficient of the asset cost goes down. Removing Stamp Duty affects the relationship between price and cost it does not affect value or worth self-evidently.
Over a third of the boomer retired generation say no party represents them says new YouGov poll.
As Stephen Bush points out - these are the guys that "takes up most government spending".
Frankly, they are being handed ever increasing state largesse on a massive silver plate!
One can make an argument that the group most undeserving of state largesse are people in their late 60s who are still fit and healthy, but getting pensions and other benefits. Should the pension age be further raised?
Pension age should be graduated. Starting at a lower age than current, 63?,at maybe £2k or £3k per year then increasing til maybe 73 to the current rate.
What's the rationale here? That people are expected to be moving to part-time working?
People do move to work part time. And some people retire at 55, others at 80. The days of a single retirement age for everyone are long gone.
People who retire at 55 tend to be very rich people who can afford to, but others need to retire early for health reasons. People who retire at 80 tend to have better paying white collar jobs. So, how does the system handle all these differences? Putting everyone on a graduated system going from 63 to 73 is still a one size fits all solution.
Do we instead need more means testing and/or health status testing?
Be useful and don't abuse your body and you'll have to work longer will be a hard sell.
All testing for benefits runs an equivalent risk. I don't believe many people are going to abuse their bodies just to get a pension sooner!
Maybe UBI solves all this?
Where does the money come from for it ?
@Taz, @bondegezou gave the most concise answer. UBI should be tax neutral. It is not a magic money tree. You get a basic payment and you hopefully earn on top of that. There is no longer a personal allowance and tax rates are adjusted so the net effect is neutral. So what are the benefits:
a) You eliminate the need for 99% of state benefits including the state pension b) Those that deserve benefits and don't claim them or fall through the cracks no longer will c) Those that abuse the system really can't anymore. Yep they get the basic amount, but that is it. They probably abuse it by far more currently d) It encourage people to take a risk starting a business because they at least get a minimum amount to tide them over during the set up time when they have no income e) You can scrap 90+% of the DWP and a bit of HMRC
Anyone asking "how do we pay for it" doesn't understand the idea.
It doesn't pay for itself, it is eyewateringly expensive. There are around 55mn adults in the UK so paying them all £12k a year (the state pension) would cost £660bn a year. Government spending on social benefits including pensions is currently less than 60% of that amount. Admin costs are a small saving and you wouldnt eliminate all of the existing welfare payments. You would have to raise taxes significantly to pay for it, with all the disincentive effects that come with it. We need all the workers we can because of population ageing so paying people to do nothing while disincentivising work is not a great idea.
Flat tax of c 50% on all income.
Total income in the UK is about 1.4tn I think? Revenue: £700bn
Impossible to define 'all income' really. Does your picture by Turner get revalued every year, or your sketch by me?
Conference season ends and I believe the unexpected happened
Kemi Badenoch delivered the best speech, rolled out an array of policies, and stamp duty the 'rabbit out of the hat'
She energised her supporters and have given them something to sell on the doorstep
And she did what I prayed she would, sent out a positive [conservative] message and barely mentioned Starmer or Farage
Labour and Farage fell into the trap of hurling insults at each other to the detriment of both
The added bonus is Jenrick is the biggest loser
I do not know how the polls will react, but today was a start on the long road to relevance
Rabbit out of a hat, or bollocks out of her arse?
Pound shop Liz Truss.
No Kemi identified welfare and spending cuts to fund her tax cut
It wasn't just welfare but cuts in climate change subsidies and increasing north sea production with associated tax income, as well as welcoming back millionaires, entrepreneurs, and wealth creators
She also will scrap IHT on farmers and abolish vat on private school fees
Add in banning doctor strikes
This is conservative policies and is a direct challenge to Labour and Reform
This is pennies BigG. No spending cuts plan is credible without some sort of control on pensioner benefits and health spending. They are are growing so quickly - from a very high base - that any other cut or even steady economic growth is completely overwhelmed by them. Literally by design in the case of the triple lock.
Labour haven't set out a plan either but let's not pretend the Conservative plan is fiscally prudent. DavidL's take on this is correct.
Google tells me that the number of UK civil servants has increased since 2016 by 132,000 and that the median salary is £34k.
That would imply a saving of £4.5bn under the Tory plan.
Not commenting on whether it is feasible or not but it’s not “pennies”
True - but I think the fact the median salary is so low suggests what kinds of roles those civil servants are doing - particularly when you consider how London dominated the civil service is.
If you could cut 130,000 people out of Whitehall or it's equivalent in Scotland, Wales then fair enough. But I think the stats show that increase is primarily agencies like HMRC and DWP. Basically call centres, which would mean a reduced service. AI might be the answer to that but it's not a magic button you can press.
It said that the range was £24 - 84k (from memory - haven’t checked).
The only way to plausibly cuts costs is to stop doing stuff. Governments need to cut verticals rather than horizontally. (Equally I am sure that there are the sort of grinding efficiencies - 1, 2, 3 percent a year - that the private sector makes which government agencies never seem to be able to find)
And that's why, at the moment, this is Potemkin Policy. Tell us which Civil Servants are going to be axed, and what's going to happen to the work they were doing, and it gets interesting. "It won't be done by the state" is a legitimate answer.
Otherwise, Kemi is doing the fun bit without doing the hard work first. Maggie wouldn't have approved.
PB Tories are normally pragmatic people, questioning the symmetry of a Labour or Lib Dem tax cut or spending pledge. "The books don't balance" they will cry.
Yet a welcome Tory £12b tax cut paid by fantasy wastage savings get a free ride.
Fortunately the Tories are not in Government. I am sure if they were the gilt markets might baulk.
They are not “fantasy wastage savings”.
They have said that they will reduce civil service numbers back to 2016 levels. That’s pretty specific - of course they haven’t identified “Me Mexican” or “Ms Pete” as being at risk of being made redundant - but it’s not just a number made up by some spreadsheet jockey.
You had fourteen years in Government. Fourteen years to identify and implement swingeing service cuts to pay for massive tax cuts. You failed. During that 14 years, service provision levels crashed at the same time the tax burden increased.
Posters have quoted Reform fantasy savings in Kent, savings so magnificent that Council tax increases could be suspended, until they found out there were few savings to be made and Council taxes were raised by 5%.
A nice speech offering the Moon on a stick is one thing, shoehorning the contents of that speech into reality is quite another.
Your party and the cheerleaders on here are profoundly unserious.
In 2009-10 the uk government spent £739 billion. In 2025-6 they are budgeted to spend £1,335 billion.
According to the Bank of England, £739 billion in 2009/10 is equivalent to £1,077 billion today.
So in real terms the government is spending £258 billion more than the Brown government (which was not known for fiscal rectitude).
The only “profoundly unserious” people on here are those who claim that every penny of that is wisely spent and absolutely no savings are possible
Over a third of the boomer retired generation say no party represents them says new YouGov poll.
As Stephen Bush points out - these are the guys that "takes up most government spending".
Frankly, they are being handed ever increasing state largesse on a massive silver plate!
One can make an argument that the group most undeserving of state largesse are people in their late 60s who are still fit and healthy, but getting pensions and other benefits. Should the pension age be further raised?
Pension age should be graduated. Starting at a lower age than current, 63?,at maybe £2k or £3k per year then increasing til maybe 73 to the current rate.
What's the rationale here? That people are expected to be moving to part-time working?
People do move to work part time. And some people retire at 55, others at 80. The days of a single retirement age for everyone are long gone.
People who retire at 55 tend to be very rich people who can afford to, but others need to retire early for health reasons. People who retire at 80 tend to have better paying white collar jobs. So, how does the system handle all these differences? Putting everyone on a graduated system going from 63 to 73 is still a one size fits all solution.
Do we instead need more means testing and/or health status testing?
Be useful and don't abuse your body and you'll have to work longer will be a hard sell.
All testing for benefits runs an equivalent risk. I don't believe many people are going to abuse their bodies just to get a pension sooner!
Maybe UBI solves all this?
Where does the money come from for it ?
@Taz, @bondegezou gave the most concise answer. UBI should be tax neutral. It is not a magic money tree. You get a basic payment and you hopefully earn on top of that. There is no longer a personal allowance and tax rates are adjusted so the net effect is neutral. So what are the benefits:
a) You eliminate the need for 99% of state benefits including the state pension b) Those that deserve benefits and don't claim them or fall through the cracks no longer will c) Those that abuse the system really can't anymore. Yep they get the basic amount, but that is it. They probably abuse it by far more currently d) It encourage people to take a risk starting a business because they at least get a minimum amount to tide them over during the set up time when they have no income e) You can scrap 90+% of the DWP and a bit of HMRC
Anyone asking "how do we pay for it" doesn't understand the idea.
It doesn't pay for itself, it is eyewateringly expensive. There are around 55mn adults in the UK so paying them all £12k a year (the state pension) would cost £660bn a year. Government spending on social benefits including pensions is currently less than 60% of that amount. Admin costs are a small saving and you wouldnt eliminate all of the existing welfare payments. You would have to raise taxes significantly to pay for it, with all the disincentive effects that come with it. We need all the workers we can because of population ageing so paying people to do nothing while disincentivising work is not a great idea.
Flat tax of c 50% on all income.
Total income in the UK is about 1.4tn I think? Revenue: £700bn
So UBI would be the tax free allowance ?
No. Tax on everything. Your effective tax allowance would effectively be 3 times UBI at at 50% tax rate, because you'd be net negative until that point.
I agree with all the questions on welfare though. It isn't that simple once you start looking at individual cases and circumstances.
As the sort of nice model physicists like though, its fine.
It's a spherical cow in a vacuum.
Every group will lobby for top-ups for their own and withdrawal for their enemies and we'll end up with the same level of form filling and administration but with a big lump called UBI running on top of that.
Over a third of the boomer retired generation say no party represents them says new YouGov poll.
As Stephen Bush points out - these are the guys that "takes up most government spending".
Frankly, they are being handed ever increasing state largesse on a massive silver plate!
One can make an argument that the group most undeserving of state largesse are people in their late 60s who are still fit and healthy, but getting pensions and other benefits. Should the pension age be further raised?
Pension age should be graduated. Starting at a lower age than current, 63?,at maybe £2k or £3k per year then increasing til maybe 73 to the current rate.
What's the rationale here? That people are expected to be moving to part-time working?
People do move to work part time. And some people retire at 55, others at 80. The days of a single retirement age for everyone are long gone.
People who retire at 55 tend to be very rich people who can afford to, but others need to retire early for health reasons. People who retire at 80 tend to have better paying white collar jobs. So, how does the system handle all these differences? Putting everyone on a graduated system going from 63 to 73 is still a one size fits all solution.
Do we instead need more means testing and/or health status testing?
Be useful and don't abuse your body and you'll have to work longer will be a hard sell.
All testing for benefits runs an equivalent risk. I don't believe many people are going to abuse their bodies just to get a pension sooner!
Maybe UBI solves all this?
Where does the money come from for it ?
@Taz, @bondegezou gave the most concise answer. UBI should be tax neutral. It is not a magic money tree. You get a basic payment and you hopefully earn on top of that. There is no longer a personal allowance and tax rates are adjusted so the net effect is neutral. So what are the benefits:
a) You eliminate the need for 99% of state benefits including the state pension b) Those that deserve benefits and don't claim them or fall through the cracks no longer will c) Those that abuse the system really can't anymore. Yep they get the basic amount, but that is it. They probably abuse it by far more currently d) It encourage people to take a risk starting a business because they at least get a minimum amount to tide them over during the set up time when they have no income e) You can scrap 90+% of the DWP and a bit of HMRC
Anyone asking "how do we pay for it" doesn't understand the idea.
It doesn't pay for itself, it is eyewateringly expensive. There are around 55mn adults in the UK so paying them all £12k a year (the state pension) would cost £660bn a year. Government spending on social benefits including pensions is currently less than 60% of that amount. Admin costs are a small saving and you wouldnt eliminate all of the existing welfare payments. You would have to raise taxes significantly to pay for it, with all the disincentive effects that come with it. We need all the workers we can because of population ageing so paying people to do nothing while disincentivising work is not a great idea.
Flat tax of c 50% on all income.
Total income in the UK is about 1.4tn I think? Revenue: £700bn
So UBI would be the tax free allowance ?
No. Tax on everything. Your effective tax allowance would effectively be 3 times UBI at at 50% tax rate, because you'd be net negative until that point.
I agree with all the questions on welfare though. It isn't that simple once you start looking at individual cases and circumstances.
As the sort of nice model physicists like though, its fine.
It's a spherical cow in a vacuum.
Every group will lobby for top-ups for their own and withdrawal for their enemies and we'll end up with the same level of form filling and administration but with a big lump called UBI running on top of that.
I fear you are right. I still think it could be made to work as an idea, and it may turn out to be necessary.
The spherical cow does sometimes tell us things about the world.
You could fake it without calling it UBI by having unemployment benefits tapered at 50% and a non-linear tax rate (it isn't as if we don't have calculators now).
Conference season ends and I believe the unexpected happened
Kemi Badenoch delivered the best speech, rolled out an array of policies, and stamp duty the 'rabbit out of the hat'
She energised her supporters and have given them something to sell on the doorstep
And she did what I prayed she would, sent out a positive [conservative] message and barely mentioned Starmer or Farage
Labour and Farage fell into the trap of hurling insults at each other to the detriment of both
The added bonus is Jenrick is the biggest loser
I do not know how the polls will react, but today was a start on the long road to relevance
Rabbit out of a hat, or bollocks out of her arse?
Pound shop Liz Truss.
No Kemi identified welfare and spending cuts to fund her tax cut
It wasn't just welfare but cuts in climate change subsidies and increasing north sea production with associated tax income, as well as welcoming back millionaires, entrepreneurs, and wealth creators
She also will scrap IHT on farmers and abolish vat on private school fees
Add in banning doctor strikes
This is conservative policies and is a direct challenge to Labour and Reform
This is pennies BigG. No spending cuts plan is credible without some sort of control on pensioner benefits and health spending. They are are growing so quickly - from a very high base - that any other cut or even steady economic growth is completely overwhelmed by them. Literally by design in the case of the triple lock.
Labour haven't set out a plan either but let's not pretend the Conservative plan is fiscally prudent. DavidL's take on this is correct.
Google tells me that the number of UK civil servants has increased since 2016 by 132,000 and that the median salary is £34k.
That would imply a saving of £4.5bn under the Tory plan.
Not commenting on whether it is feasible or not but it’s not “pennies”
True - but I think the fact the median salary is so low suggests what kinds of roles those civil servants are doing - particularly when you consider how London dominated the civil service is.
If you could cut 130,000 people out of Whitehall or it's equivalent in Scotland, Wales then fair enough. But I think the stats show that increase is primarily agencies like HMRC and DWP. Basically call centres, which would mean a reduced service. AI might be the answer to that but it's not a magic button you can press.
It said that the range was £24 - 84k (from memory - haven’t checked).
The only way to plausibly cuts costs is to stop doing stuff. Governments need to cut verticals rather than horizontally. (Equally I am sure that there are the sort of grinding efficiencies - 1, 2, 3 percent a year - that the private sector makes which government agencies never seem to be able to find)
And that's why, at the moment, this is Potemkin Policy. Tell us which Civil Servants are going to be axed, and what's going to happen to the work they were doing, and it gets interesting. "It won't be done by the state" is a legitimate answer.
Otherwise, Kemi is doing the fun bit without doing the hard work first. Maggie wouldn't have approved.
PB Tories are normally pragmatic people, questioning the symmetry of a Labour or Lib Dem tax cut or spending pledge. "The books don't balance" they will cry.
Yet a welcome Tory £12b tax cut paid by fantasy wastage savings get a free ride.
Fortunately the Tories are not in Government. I am sure if they were the gilt markets might baulk.
They are not “fantasy wastage savings”.
They have said that they will reduce civil service numbers back to 2016 levels. That’s pretty specific - of course they haven’t identified “Me Mexican” or “Ms Pete” as being at risk of being made redundant - but it’s not just a number made up by some spreadsheet jockey.
You had fourteen years in Government. Fourteen years to identify and implement swingeing service cuts to pay for massive tax cuts. You failed. During that 14 years, service provision levels crashed at the same time the tax burden increased.
Posters have quoted Reform fantasy savings in Kent, savings so magnificent that Council tax increases could be suspended, until they found out there were few savings to be made and Council taxes were raised by 5%.
A nice speech offering the Moon on a stick is one thing, shoehorning the contents of that speech into reality is quite another.
Your party and the cheerleaders on here are profoundly unserious.
In 2009-10 the uk government spent £739 billion. In 2025-6 they are budgeted to spend £1,335 billion.
According to the Bank of England, £739 billion in 2009/10 is equivalent to £1,077 billion today.
So in real terms the government is spending £258 billion more than the Brown government (which was not known for fiscal rectitude).
The only “profoundly unserious” people on here are those who claim that every penny of that is wisely spent and absolutely no savings are possible
We know that most of that £258bn is being spent on pensions, debt interest and the health service.
Savings are always possible, but making them in such a way that money is genuinely saved, and you don't end up incurring unexpected extra costs elsewhere as a result, is hard. We know it is hard, because if it was easy it would have been done already. Everyone always talks about cutting down on waste.
Gordon Brown talked about it. He capped public sector pay increases and had a review into NHS spending to find efficiencies. Obviously it's the sort of thing that you need to have constant vigilance on, because otherwise waste can grow over time, but it's not a get out of jail free card that enables you to cut the deficit and taxes at the same time and avoid any difficult choices on which public services you're going to stop providing.
Over a third of the boomer retired generation say no party represents them says new YouGov poll.
As Stephen Bush points out - these are the guys that "takes up most government spending".
Frankly, they are being handed ever increasing state largesse on a massive silver plate!
One can make an argument that the group most undeserving of state largesse are people in their late 60s who are still fit and healthy, but getting pensions and other benefits. Should the pension age be further raised?
Pension age should be graduated. Starting at a lower age than current, 63?,at maybe £2k or £3k per year then increasing til maybe 73 to the current rate.
What's the rationale here? That people are expected to be moving to part-time working?
People do move to work part time. And some people retire at 55, others at 80. The days of a single retirement age for everyone are long gone.
People who retire at 55 tend to be very rich people who can afford to, but others need to retire early for health reasons. People who retire at 80 tend to have better paying white collar jobs. So, how does the system handle all these differences? Putting everyone on a graduated system going from 63 to 73 is still a one size fits all solution.
Do we instead need more means testing and/or health status testing?
Be useful and don't abuse your body and you'll have to work longer will be a hard sell.
All testing for benefits runs an equivalent risk. I don't believe many people are going to abuse their bodies just to get a pension sooner!
Maybe UBI solves all this?
Where does the money come from for it ?
@Taz, @bondegezou gave the most concise answer. UBI should be tax neutral. It is not a magic money tree. You get a basic payment and you hopefully earn on top of that. There is no longer a personal allowance and tax rates are adjusted so the net effect is neutral. So what are the benefits:
a) You eliminate the need for 99% of state benefits including the state pension b) Those that deserve benefits and don't claim them or fall through the cracks no longer will c) Those that abuse the system really can't anymore. Yep they get the basic amount, but that is it. They probably abuse it by far more currently d) It encourage people to take a risk starting a business because they at least get a minimum amount to tide them over during the set up time when they have no income e) You can scrap 90+% of the DWP and a bit of HMRC
Anyone asking "how do we pay for it" doesn't understand the idea.
It doesn't pay for itself, it is eyewateringly expensive. There are around 55mn adults in the UK so paying them all £12k a year (the state pension) would cost £660bn a year. Government spending on social benefits including pensions is currently less than 60% of that amount. Admin costs are a small saving and you wouldnt eliminate all of the existing welfare payments. You would have to raise taxes significantly to pay for it, with all the disincentive effects that come with it. We need all the workers we can because of population ageing so paying people to do nothing while disincentivising work is not a great idea.
Flat tax of c 50% on all income.
Total income in the UK is about 1.4tn I think? Revenue: £700bn
So UBI would be the tax free allowance ?
No. Tax on everything. Your effective tax allowance would effectively be 3 times UBI at at 50% tax rate, because you'd be net negative until that point.
I agree with all the questions on welfare though. It isn't that simple once you start looking at individual cases and circumstances.
As the sort of nice model physicists like though, its fine.
It's a spherical cow in a vacuum.
Every group will lobby for top-ups for their own and withdrawal for their enemies and we'll end up with the same level of form filling and administration but with a big lump called UBI running on top of that.
The benefit system will be guaranteed by the one-million-three-hundred-fifty-five-thousand-three-hundred-fifty-seventuple lock. It’s a bit like the triple lock. But a lot more so.
Over a third of the boomer retired generation say no party represents them says new YouGov poll.
As Stephen Bush points out - these are the guys that "takes up most government spending".
Frankly, they are being handed ever increasing state largesse on a massive silver plate!
One can make an argument that the group most undeserving of state largesse are people in their late 60s who are still fit and healthy, but getting pensions and other benefits. Should the pension age be further raised?
Pension age should be graduated. Starting at a lower age than current, 63?,at maybe £2k or £3k per year then increasing til maybe 73 to the current rate.
What's the rationale here? That people are expected to be moving to part-time working?
People do move to work part time. And some people retire at 55, others at 80. The days of a single retirement age for everyone are long gone.
People who retire at 55 tend to be very rich people who can afford to, but others need to retire early for health reasons. People who retire at 80 tend to have better paying white collar jobs. So, how does the system handle all these differences? Putting everyone on a graduated system going from 63 to 73 is still a one size fits all solution.
Do we instead need more means testing and/or health status testing?
Be useful and don't abuse your body and you'll have to work longer will be a hard sell.
All testing for benefits runs an equivalent risk. I don't believe many people are going to abuse their bodies just to get a pension sooner!
Maybe UBI solves all this?
Where does the money come from for it ?
@Taz, @bondegezou gave the most concise answer. UBI should be tax neutral. It is not a magic money tree. You get a basic payment and you hopefully earn on top of that. There is no longer a personal allowance and tax rates are adjusted so the net effect is neutral. So what are the benefits:
a) You eliminate the need for 99% of state benefits including the state pension b) Those that deserve benefits and don't claim them or fall through the cracks no longer will c) Those that abuse the system really can't anymore. Yep they get the basic amount, but that is it. They probably abuse it by far more currently d) It encourage people to take a risk starting a business because they at least get a minimum amount to tide them over during the set up time when they have no income e) You can scrap 90+% of the DWP and a bit of HMRC
Anyone asking "how do we pay for it" doesn't understand the idea.
It doesn't pay for itself, it is eyewateringly expensive. There are around 55mn adults in the UK so paying them all £12k a year (the state pension) would cost £660bn a year. Government spending on social benefits including pensions is currently less than 60% of that amount. Admin costs are a small saving and you wouldnt eliminate all of the existing welfare payments. You would have to raise taxes significantly to pay for it, with all the disincentive effects that come with it. We need all the workers we can because of population ageing so paying people to do nothing while disincentivising work is not a great idea.
Flat tax of c 50% on all income.
Total income in the UK is about 1.4tn I think? Revenue: £700bn
So UBI would be the tax free allowance ?
No. Tax on everything. Your effective tax allowance would effectively be 3 times UBI at at 50% tax rate, because you'd be net negative until that point.
I agree with all the questions on welfare though. It isn't that simple once you start looking at individual cases and circumstances.
As the sort of nice model physicists like though, its fine.
It's a spherical cow in a vacuum.
Every group will lobby for top-ups for their own and withdrawal for their enemies and we'll end up with the same level of form filling and administration but with a big lump called UBI running on top of that.
The benefit system will be guaranteed by the one-million-three-hundred-fifty-five-thousand-three-hundred-fifty-seventuple lock. It’s a bit like the triple lock. But a lot more so.
One looks forward to someone pitching the Graham's number-lock.
Conference season ends and I believe the unexpected happened
Kemi Badenoch delivered the best speech, rolled out an array of policies, and stamp duty the 'rabbit out of the hat'
She energised her supporters and have given them something to sell on the doorstep
And she did what I prayed she would, sent out a positive [conservative] message and barely mentioned Starmer or Farage
Labour and Farage fell into the trap of hurling insults at each other to the detriment of both
The added bonus is Jenrick is the biggest loser
I do not know how the polls will react, but today was a start on the long road to relevance
Rabbit out of a hat, or bollocks out of her arse?
Pound shop Liz Truss.
No Kemi identified welfare and spending cuts to fund her tax cut
It wasn't just welfare but cuts in climate change subsidies and increasing north sea production with associated tax income, as well as welcoming back millionaires, entrepreneurs, and wealth creators
She also will scrap IHT on farmers and abolish vat on private school fees
Add in banning doctor strikes
This is conservative policies and is a direct challenge to Labour and Reform
This is pennies BigG. No spending cuts plan is credible without some sort of control on pensioner benefits and health spending. They are are growing so quickly - from a very high base - that any other cut or even steady economic growth is completely overwhelmed by them. Literally by design in the case of the triple lock.
Labour haven't set out a plan either but let's not pretend the Conservative plan is fiscally prudent. DavidL's take on this is correct.
Google tells me that the number of UK civil servants has increased since 2016 by 132,000 and that the median salary is £34k.
That would imply a saving of £4.5bn under the Tory plan.
Not commenting on whether it is feasible or not but it’s not “pennies”
True - but I think the fact the median salary is so low suggests what kinds of roles those civil servants are doing - particularly when you consider how London dominated the civil service is.
If you could cut 130,000 people out of Whitehall or it's equivalent in Scotland, Wales then fair enough. But I think the stats show that increase is primarily agencies like HMRC and DWP. Basically call centres, which would mean a reduced service. AI might be the answer to that but it's not a magic button you can press.
It said that the range was £24 - 84k (from memory - haven’t checked).
The only way to plausibly cuts costs is to stop doing stuff. Governments need to cut verticals rather than horizontally. (Equally I am sure that there are the sort of grinding efficiencies - 1, 2, 3 percent a year - that the private sector makes which government agencies never seem to be able to find)
And that's why, at the moment, this is Potemkin Policy. Tell us which Civil Servants are going to be axed, and what's going to happen to the work they were doing, and it gets interesting. "It won't be done by the state" is a legitimate answer.
Otherwise, Kemi is doing the fun bit without doing the hard work first. Maggie wouldn't have approved.
PB Tories are normally pragmatic people, questioning the symmetry of a Labour or Lib Dem tax cut or spending pledge. "The books don't balance" they will cry.
Yet a welcome Tory £12b tax cut paid by fantasy wastage savings get a free ride.
Fortunately the Tories are not in Government. I am sure if they were the gilt markets might baulk.
They are not “fantasy wastage savings”.
They have said that they will reduce civil service numbers back to 2016 levels. That’s pretty specific - of course they haven’t identified “Me Mexican” or “Ms Pete” as being at risk of being made redundant - but it’s not just a number made up by some spreadsheet jockey.
You had fourteen years in Government. Fourteen years to identify and implement swingeing service cuts to pay for massive tax cuts. You failed. During that 14 years, service provision levels crashed at the same time the tax burden increased.
Posters have quoted Reform fantasy savings in Kent, savings so magnificent that Council tax increases could be suspended, until they found out there were few savings to be made and Council taxes were raised by 5%.
A nice speech offering the Moon on a stick is one thing, shoehorning the contents of that speech into reality is quite another.
Your party and the cheerleaders on here are profoundly unserious.
In 2009-10 the uk government spent £739 billion. In 2025-6 they are budgeted to spend £1,335 billion.
According to the Bank of England, £739 billion in 2009/10 is equivalent to £1,077 billion today.
So in real terms the government is spending £258 billion more than the Brown government (which was not known for fiscal rectitude).
The only “profoundly unserious” people on here are those who claim that every penny of that is wisely spent and absolutely no savings are possible
Of course not every penny is wisely spent and of course savings are possible, but it's a fantasy to imagine that there are large savings to made from "cutting waste".
Why are we spending £258 billon more? It's not because waste has suddenly multiplied. It's because we have a larger population, an ageing population (more pensions, more healthcare costs), we're paying for COVID-19 (interest on debt + ongoing increased health and disability payments), more generous pensions, we're paying the costs of a war in Ukraine (increased energy costs, aid to Ukraine, increase military spending), and Brexit.
Over a third of the boomer retired generation say no party represents them says new YouGov poll.
As Stephen Bush points out - these are the guys that "takes up most government spending".
Frankly, they are being handed ever increasing state largesse on a massive silver plate!
One can make an argument that the group most undeserving of state largesse are people in their late 60s who are still fit and healthy, but getting pensions and other benefits. Should the pension age be further raised?
Pension age should be graduated. Starting at a lower age than current, 63?,at maybe £2k or £3k per year then increasing til maybe 73 to the current rate.
What's the rationale here? That people are expected to be moving to part-time working?
People do move to work part time. And some people retire at 55, others at 80. The days of a single retirement age for everyone are long gone.
People who retire at 55 tend to be very rich people who can afford to, but others need to retire early for health reasons. People who retire at 80 tend to have better paying white collar jobs. So, how does the system handle all these differences? Putting everyone on a graduated system going from 63 to 73 is still a one size fits all solution.
Do we instead need more means testing and/or health status testing?
Be useful and don't abuse your body and you'll have to work longer will be a hard sell.
All testing for benefits runs an equivalent risk. I don't believe many people are going to abuse their bodies just to get a pension sooner!
Maybe UBI solves all this?
Where does the money come from for it ?
@Taz, @bondegezou gave the most concise answer. UBI should be tax neutral. It is not a magic money tree. You get a basic payment and you hopefully earn on top of that. There is no longer a personal allowance and tax rates are adjusted so the net effect is neutral. So what are the benefits:
a) You eliminate the need for 99% of state benefits including the state pension b) Those that deserve benefits and don't claim them or fall through the cracks no longer will c) Those that abuse the system really can't anymore. Yep they get the basic amount, but that is it. They probably abuse it by far more currently d) It encourage people to take a risk starting a business because they at least get a minimum amount to tide them over during the set up time when they have no income e) You can scrap 90+% of the DWP and a bit of HMRC
Anyone asking "how do we pay for it" doesn't understand the idea.
It doesn't pay for itself, it is eyewateringly expensive. There are around 55mn adults in the UK so paying them all £12k a year (the state pension) would cost £660bn a year. Government spending on social benefits including pensions is currently less than 60% of that amount. Admin costs are a small saving and you wouldnt eliminate all of the existing welfare payments. You would have to raise taxes significantly to pay for it, with all the disincentive effects that come with it. We need all the workers we can because of population ageing so paying people to do nothing while disincentivising work is not a great idea.
Flat tax of c 50% on all income.
Total income in the UK is about 1.4tn I think? Revenue: £700bn
So UBI would be the tax free allowance ?
No. Tax on everything. Your effective tax allowance would effectively be 3 times UBI at at 50% tax rate, because you'd be net negative until that point.
I agree with all the questions on welfare though. It isn't that simple once you start looking at individual cases and circumstances.
As the sort of nice model physicists like though, its fine.
It's a spherical cow in a vacuum.
Every group will lobby for top-ups for their own and withdrawal for their enemies and we'll end up with the same level of form filling and administration but with a big lump called UBI running on top of that.
The benefit system will be guaranteed by the one-million-three-hundred-fifty-five-thousand-three-hundred-fifty-seventuple lock. It’s a bit like the triple lock. But a lot more so.
One looks forward to someone pitching the Graham's number-lock.
The countable infinity lock isn't good enough. What we need is an uncountable infinity lock.
Conference season ends and I believe the unexpected happened
Kemi Badenoch delivered the best speech, rolled out an array of policies, and stamp duty the 'rabbit out of the hat'
She energised her supporters and have given them something to sell on the doorstep
And she did what I prayed she would, sent out a positive [conservative] message and barely mentioned Starmer or Farage
Labour and Farage fell into the trap of hurling insults at each other to the detriment of both
The added bonus is Jenrick is the biggest loser
I do not know how the polls will react, but today was a start on the long road to relevance
Rabbit out of a hat, or bollocks out of her arse?
Pound shop Liz Truss.
No Kemi identified welfare and spending cuts to fund her tax cut
It wasn't just welfare but cuts in climate change subsidies and increasing north sea production with associated tax income, as well as welcoming back millionaires, entrepreneurs, and wealth creators
She also will scrap IHT on farmers and abolish vat on private school fees
Add in banning doctor strikes
This is conservative policies and is a direct challenge to Labour and Reform
This is pennies BigG. No spending cuts plan is credible without some sort of control on pensioner benefits and health spending. They are are growing so quickly - from a very high base - that any other cut or even steady economic growth is completely overwhelmed by them. Literally by design in the case of the triple lock.
Labour haven't set out a plan either but let's not pretend the Conservative plan is fiscally prudent. DavidL's take on this is correct.
Google tells me that the number of UK civil servants has increased since 2016 by 132,000 and that the median salary is £34k.
That would imply a saving of £4.5bn under the Tory plan.
Not commenting on whether it is feasible or not but it’s not “pennies”
True - but I think the fact the median salary is so low suggests what kinds of roles those civil servants are doing - particularly when you consider how London dominated the civil service is.
If you could cut 130,000 people out of Whitehall or it's equivalent in Scotland, Wales then fair enough. But I think the stats show that increase is primarily agencies like HMRC and DWP. Basically call centres, which would mean a reduced service. AI might be the answer to that but it's not a magic button you can press.
It said that the range was £24 - 84k (from memory - haven’t checked).
The only way to plausibly cuts costs is to stop doing stuff. Governments need to cut verticals rather than horizontally. (Equally I am sure that there are the sort of grinding efficiencies - 1, 2, 3 percent a year - that the private sector makes which government agencies never seem to be able to find)
And that's why, at the moment, this is Potemkin Policy. Tell us which Civil Servants are going to be axed, and what's going to happen to the work they were doing, and it gets interesting. "It won't be done by the state" is a legitimate answer.
Otherwise, Kemi is doing the fun bit without doing the hard work first. Maggie wouldn't have approved.
PB Tories are normally pragmatic people, questioning the symmetry of a Labour or Lib Dem tax cut or spending pledge. "The books don't balance" they will cry.
Yet a welcome Tory £12b tax cut paid by fantasy wastage savings get a free ride.
Fortunately the Tories are not in Government. I am sure if they were the gilt markets might baulk.
They are not “fantasy wastage savings”.
They have said that they will reduce civil service numbers back to 2016 levels. That’s pretty specific - of course they haven’t identified “Me Mexican” or “Ms Pete” as being at risk of being made redundant - but it’s not just a number made up by some spreadsheet jockey.
You had fourteen years in Government. Fourteen years to identify and implement swingeing service cuts to pay for massive tax cuts. You failed. During that 14 years, service provision levels crashed at the same time the tax burden increased.
Posters have quoted Reform fantasy savings in Kent, savings so magnificent that Council tax increases could be suspended, until they found out there were few savings to be made and Council taxes were raised by 5%.
A nice speech offering the Moon on a stick is one thing, shoehorning the contents of that speech into reality is quite another.
Your party and the cheerleaders on here are profoundly unserious.
In 2009-10 the uk government spent £739 billion. In 2025-6 they are budgeted to spend £1,335 billion.
According to the Bank of England, £739 billion in 2009/10 is equivalent to £1,077 billion today.
So in real terms the government is spending £258 billion more than the Brown government (which was not known for fiscal rectitude).
The only “profoundly unserious” people on here are those who claim that every penny of that is wisely spent and absolutely no savings are possible
And Kemi is proposing to make those savings through fiscally sound measures like not touching the triple lock and abolishing Private School VAT…
Conference season ends and I believe the unexpected happened
Kemi Badenoch delivered the best speech, rolled out an array of policies, and stamp duty the 'rabbit out of the hat'
She energised her supporters and have given them something to sell on the doorstep
And she did what I prayed she would, sent out a positive [conservative] message and barely mentioned Starmer or Farage
Labour and Farage fell into the trap of hurling insults at each other to the detriment of both
The added bonus is Jenrick is the biggest loser
I do not know how the polls will react, but today was a start on the long road to relevance
Rabbit out of a hat, or bollocks out of her arse?
Pound shop Liz Truss.
No Kemi identified welfare and spending cuts to fund her tax cut
It wasn't just welfare but cuts in climate change subsidies and increasing north sea production with associated tax income, as well as welcoming back millionaires, entrepreneurs, and wealth creators
She also will scrap IHT on farmers and abolish vat on private school fees
Add in banning doctor strikes
This is conservative policies and is a direct challenge to Labour and Reform
This is pennies BigG. No spending cuts plan is credible without some sort of control on pensioner benefits and health spending. They are are growing so quickly - from a very high base - that any other cut or even steady economic growth is completely overwhelmed by them. Literally by design in the case of the triple lock.
Labour haven't set out a plan either but let's not pretend the Conservative plan is fiscally prudent. DavidL's take on this is correct.
Google tells me that the number of UK civil servants has increased since 2016 by 132,000 and that the median salary is £34k.
That would imply a saving of £4.5bn under the Tory plan.
Not commenting on whether it is feasible or not but it’s not “pennies”
True - but I think the fact the median salary is so low suggests what kinds of roles those civil servants are doing - particularly when you consider how London dominated the civil service is.
If you could cut 130,000 people out of Whitehall or it's equivalent in Scotland, Wales then fair enough. But I think the stats show that increase is primarily agencies like HMRC and DWP. Basically call centres, which would mean a reduced service. AI might be the answer to that but it's not a magic button you can press.
It said that the range was £24 - 84k (from memory - haven’t checked).
The only way to plausibly cuts costs is to stop doing stuff. Governments need to cut verticals rather than horizontally. (Equally I am sure that there are the sort of grinding efficiencies - 1, 2, 3 percent a year - that the private sector makes which government agencies never seem to be able to find)
And that's why, at the moment, this is Potemkin Policy. Tell us which Civil Servants are going to be axed, and what's going to happen to the work they were doing, and it gets interesting. "It won't be done by the state" is a legitimate answer.
Otherwise, Kemi is doing the fun bit without doing the hard work first. Maggie wouldn't have approved.
PB Tories are normally pragmatic people, questioning the symmetry of a Labour or Lib Dem tax cut or spending pledge. "The books don't balance" they will cry.
Yet a welcome Tory £12b tax cut paid by fantasy wastage savings get a free ride.
Fortunately the Tories are not in Government. I am sure if they were the gilt markets might baulk.
They are not “fantasy wastage savings”.
They have said that they will reduce civil service numbers back to 2016 levels. That’s pretty specific - of course they haven’t identified “Me Mexican” or “Ms Pete” as being at risk of being made redundant - but it’s not just a number made up by some spreadsheet jockey.
You had fourteen years in Government. Fourteen years to identify and implement swingeing service cuts to pay for massive tax cuts. You failed. During that 14 years, service provision levels crashed at the same time the tax burden increased.
Posters have quoted Reform fantasy savings in Kent, savings so magnificent that Council tax increases could be suspended, until they found out there were few savings to be made and Council taxes were raised by 5%.
A nice speech offering the Moon on a stick is one thing, shoehorning the contents of that speech into reality is quite another.
Your party and the cheerleaders on here are profoundly unserious.
In 2009-10 the uk government spent £739 billion. In 2025-6 they are budgeted to spend £1,335 billion.
According to the Bank of England, £739 billion in 2009/10 is equivalent to £1,077 billion today.
So in real terms the government is spending £258 billion more than the Brown government (which was not known for fiscal rectitude).
The only “profoundly unserious” people on here are those who claim that every penny of that is wisely spent and absolutely no savings are possible
Of course not every penny is wisely spent and of course savings are possible, but it's a fantasy to imagine that there are large savings to made from "cutting waste".
Why are we spending £258 billon more? It's not because waste has suddenly multiplied. It's because we have a larger population, an ageing population (more pensions, more healthcare costs), we're paying for COVID-19 (interest on debt + ongoing increased health and disability payments), more generous pensions, we're paying the costs of a war in Ukraine (increased energy costs, aid to Ukraine, increase military spending), and Brexit.
I’ve never said “cutting waste” (and neither did Kemi). She wants to reduce civil servant numbers and cut various programmes. I suggested the state needs to stop doing stuff
Over a third of the boomer retired generation say no party represents them says new YouGov poll.
As Stephen Bush points out - these are the guys that "takes up most government spending".
Frankly, they are being handed ever increasing state largesse on a massive silver plate!
One can make an argument that the group most undeserving of state largesse are people in their late 60s who are still fit and healthy, but getting pensions and other benefits. Should the pension age be further raised?
Pension age should be graduated. Starting at a lower age than current, 63?,at maybe £2k or £3k per year then increasing til maybe 73 to the current rate.
What's the rationale here? That people are expected to be moving to part-time working?
People do move to work part time. And some people retire at 55, others at 80. The days of a single retirement age for everyone are long gone.
People who retire at 55 tend to be very rich people who can afford to, but others need to retire early for health reasons. People who retire at 80 tend to have better paying white collar jobs. So, how does the system handle all these differences? Putting everyone on a graduated system going from 63 to 73 is still a one size fits all solution.
Do we instead need more means testing and/or health status testing?
Be useful and don't abuse your body and you'll have to work longer will be a hard sell.
All testing for benefits runs an equivalent risk. I don't believe many people are going to abuse their bodies just to get a pension sooner!
Maybe UBI solves all this?
Where does the money come from for it ?
@Taz, @bondegezou gave the most concise answer. UBI should be tax neutral. It is not a magic money tree. You get a basic payment and you hopefully earn on top of that. There is no longer a personal allowance and tax rates are adjusted so the net effect is neutral. So what are the benefits:
a) You eliminate the need for 99% of state benefits including the state pension b) Those that deserve benefits and don't claim them or fall through the cracks no longer will c) Those that abuse the system really can't anymore. Yep they get the basic amount, but that is it. They probably abuse it by far more currently d) It encourage people to take a risk starting a business because they at least get a minimum amount to tide them over during the set up time when they have no income e) You can scrap 90+% of the DWP and a bit of HMRC
Anyone asking "how do we pay for it" doesn't understand the idea.
It doesn't pay for itself, it is eyewateringly expensive. There are around 55mn adults in the UK so paying them all £12k a year (the state pension) would cost £660bn a year. Government spending on social benefits including pensions is currently less than 60% of that amount. Admin costs are a small saving and you wouldnt eliminate all of the existing welfare payments. You would have to raise taxes significantly to pay for it, with all the disincentive effects that come with it. We need all the workers we can because of population ageing so paying people to do nothing while disincentivising work is not a great idea.
Flat tax of c 50% on all income.
Total income in the UK is about 1.4tn I think? Revenue: £700bn
Impossible to define 'all income' really. Does your picture by Turner get revalued every year, or your sketch by me?
Would a picture not be an asset, rather than income ?
Sure. But the 'income' that I guess that you'd want to tax is the gain in your assets of whatever type.
Conference season ends and I believe the unexpected happened
Kemi Badenoch delivered the best speech, rolled out an array of policies, and stamp duty the 'rabbit out of the hat'
She energised her supporters and have given them something to sell on the doorstep
And she did what I prayed she would, sent out a positive [conservative] message and barely mentioned Starmer or Farage
Labour and Farage fell into the trap of hurling insults at each other to the detriment of both
The added bonus is Jenrick is the biggest loser
I do not know how the polls will react, but today was a start on the long road to relevance
Rabbit out of a hat, or bollocks out of her arse?
Pound shop Liz Truss.
No Kemi identified welfare and spending cuts to fund her tax cut
It wasn't just welfare but cuts in climate change subsidies and increasing north sea production with associated tax income, as well as welcoming back millionaires, entrepreneurs, and wealth creators
She also will scrap IHT on farmers and abolish vat on private school fees
Add in banning doctor strikes
This is conservative policies and is a direct challenge to Labour and Reform
This is pennies BigG. No spending cuts plan is credible without some sort of control on pensioner benefits and health spending. They are are growing so quickly - from a very high base - that any other cut or even steady economic growth is completely overwhelmed by them. Literally by design in the case of the triple lock.
Labour haven't set out a plan either but let's not pretend the Conservative plan is fiscally prudent. DavidL's take on this is correct.
Google tells me that the number of UK civil servants has increased since 2016 by 132,000 and that the median salary is £34k.
That would imply a saving of £4.5bn under the Tory plan.
Not commenting on whether it is feasible or not but it’s not “pennies”
True - but I think the fact the median salary is so low suggests what kinds of roles those civil servants are doing - particularly when you consider how London dominated the civil service is.
If you could cut 130,000 people out of Whitehall or it's equivalent in Scotland, Wales then fair enough. But I think the stats show that increase is primarily agencies like HMRC and DWP. Basically call centres, which would mean a reduced service. AI might be the answer to that but it's not a magic button you can press.
It said that the range was £24 - 84k (from memory - haven’t checked).
The only way to plausibly cuts costs is to stop doing stuff. Governments need to cut verticals rather than horizontally. (Equally I am sure that there are the sort of grinding efficiencies - 1, 2, 3 percent a year - that the private sector makes which government agencies never seem to be able to find)
And that's why, at the moment, this is Potemkin Policy. Tell us which Civil Servants are going to be axed, and what's going to happen to the work they were doing, and it gets interesting. "It won't be done by the state" is a legitimate answer.
Otherwise, Kemi is doing the fun bit without doing the hard work first. Maggie wouldn't have approved.
PB Tories are normally pragmatic people, questioning the symmetry of a Labour or Lib Dem tax cut or spending pledge. "The books don't balance" they will cry.
Yet a welcome Tory £12b tax cut paid by fantasy wastage savings get a free ride.
Fortunately the Tories are not in Government. I am sure if they were the gilt markets might baulk.
They are not “fantasy wastage savings”.
They have said that they will reduce civil service numbers back to 2016 levels. That’s pretty specific - of course they haven’t identified “Me Mexican” or “Ms Pete” as being at risk of being made redundant - but it’s not just a number made up by some spreadsheet jockey.
You had fourteen years in Government. Fourteen years to identify and implement swingeing service cuts to pay for massive tax cuts. You failed. During that 14 years, service provision levels crashed at the same time the tax burden increased.
Posters have quoted Reform fantasy savings in Kent, savings so magnificent that Council tax increases could be suspended, until they found out there were few savings to be made and Council taxes were raised by 5%.
A nice speech offering the Moon on a stick is one thing, shoehorning the contents of that speech into reality is quite another.
Your party and the cheerleaders on here are profoundly unserious.
In 2009-10 the uk government spent £739 billion. In 2025-6 they are budgeted to spend £1,335 billion.
According to the Bank of England, £739 billion in 2009/10 is equivalent to £1,077 billion today.
So in real terms the government is spending £258 billion more than the Brown government (which was not known for fiscal rectitude).
The only “profoundly unserious” people on here are those who claim that every penny of that is wisely spent and absolutely no savings are possible
Where did I say Government money is wisely spent? Central and local government are profligate. I can give you one of manifold examples of each. From central government we have the PPE scandal and from local government we have the £63m invisible Garden Bridge over the Thames.
Those savings Badenoch has claimed to have in mind I would question; why was the saving not implemented up to July 2024?
The experience with DOGE in the US should be the death of the argument that you can fund large tax cuts with large cuts to wasteful government spending.
If you want to cut large amounts of government spending you have to do one of a small number of things.
You can cut large amounts of fiscal transfers from the state, which mostly comes down to pensions.
You can cut the pay of people who work for the state. Ireland did this in the exceptional circumstances of being functionality bankrupt and having the Troika imposed on them.
You can cut the number of people who work for the state, and do without the work that they did. We see how well that is working with the Coalition cuts to the Courts Service.
Conference season ends and I believe the unexpected happened
Kemi Badenoch delivered the best speech, rolled out an array of policies, and stamp duty the 'rabbit out of the hat'
She energised her supporters and have given them something to sell on the doorstep
And she did what I prayed she would, sent out a positive [conservative] message and barely mentioned Starmer or Farage
Labour and Farage fell into the trap of hurling insults at each other to the detriment of both
The added bonus is Jenrick is the biggest loser
I do not know how the polls will react, but today was a start on the long road to relevance
Rabbit out of a hat, or bollocks out of her arse?
Pound shop Liz Truss.
No Kemi identified welfare and spending cuts to fund her tax cut
It wasn't just welfare but cuts in climate change subsidies and increasing north sea production with associated tax income, as well as welcoming back millionaires, entrepreneurs, and wealth creators
She also will scrap IHT on farmers and abolish vat on private school fees
Add in banning doctor strikes
This is conservative policies and is a direct challenge to Labour and Reform
This is pennies BigG. No spending cuts plan is credible without some sort of control on pensioner benefits and health spending. They are are growing so quickly - from a very high base - that any other cut or even steady economic growth is completely overwhelmed by them. Literally by design in the case of the triple lock.
Labour haven't set out a plan either but let's not pretend the Conservative plan is fiscally prudent. DavidL's take on this is correct.
Google tells me that the number of UK civil servants has increased since 2016 by 132,000 and that the median salary is £34k.
That would imply a saving of £4.5bn under the Tory plan.
Not commenting on whether it is feasible or not but it’s not “pennies”
True - but I think the fact the median salary is so low suggests what kinds of roles those civil servants are doing - particularly when you consider how London dominated the civil service is.
If you could cut 130,000 people out of Whitehall or it's equivalent in Scotland, Wales then fair enough. But I think the stats show that increase is primarily agencies like HMRC and DWP. Basically call centres, which would mean a reduced service. AI might be the answer to that but it's not a magic button you can press.
It said that the range was £24 - 84k (from memory - haven’t checked).
The only way to plausibly cuts costs is to stop doing stuff. Governments need to cut verticals rather than horizontally. (Equally I am sure that there are the sort of grinding efficiencies - 1, 2, 3 percent a year - that the private sector makes which government agencies never seem to be able to find)
And that's why, at the moment, this is Potemkin Policy. Tell us which Civil Servants are going to be axed, and what's going to happen to the work they were doing, and it gets interesting. "It won't be done by the state" is a legitimate answer.
Otherwise, Kemi is doing the fun bit without doing the hard work first. Maggie wouldn't have approved.
PB Tories are normally pragmatic people, questioning the symmetry of a Labour or Lib Dem tax cut or spending pledge. "The books don't balance" they will cry.
Yet a welcome Tory £12b tax cut paid by fantasy wastage savings get a free ride.
Fortunately the Tories are not in Government. I am sure if they were the gilt markets might baulk.
They are not “fantasy wastage savings”.
They have said that they will reduce civil service numbers back to 2016 levels. That’s pretty specific - of course they haven’t identified “Me Mexican” or “Ms Pete” as being at risk of being made redundant - but it’s not just a number made up by some spreadsheet jockey.
You had fourteen years in Government. Fourteen years to identify and implement swingeing service cuts to pay for massive tax cuts. You failed. During that 14 years, service provision levels crashed at the same time the tax burden increased.
Posters have quoted Reform fantasy savings in Kent, savings so magnificent that Council tax increases could be suspended, until they found out there were few savings to be made and Council taxes were raised by 5%.
A nice speech offering the Moon on a stick is one thing, shoehorning the contents of that speech into reality is quite another.
Your party and the cheerleaders on here are profoundly unserious.
Good morning
And giveover
Badenoch gave a totally unexpected and successful speech that galvanised her audience and has given her party lots of policies, and of scrapping stamp duty has been well received from think tanks and Paul Johnson formally of the IFS who said yesterday it is the worst of many bad taxes
Your mixture of cynicism and satire is par for the cop* but at least this conservative is pleased to see conservative policies and Jenrick put back in his box
I don't believe I was being remotely cynical or satirical. If you want satire I can write all day about letter boxes and an offensive description of a smile.
You would be the first to criticise ( and justifiably so) an unfunded Reeves pledge. And make no mistake there is nothing in the credit column to match the tax cut in the debit column, except for a nebulous notion of cutting wastage.
If she has done enough to put Jenrick back in his box and take some points from Reform I'll drink to that, but my point stands, her welcome tax cut debit does not demonstrate a corresponding credit.
*If you don't like me posting on here you could always ask TSE politely to transfer me from "member" to " applicant" status, that way I can still access and read your posts but no longer post myself. There, that seems like a neat compromise.
At times you really are very silly as demonstrated by your last paragraph
4.5 billion cost as quoted by the IFS is eminently doable
I do apologise for my figures, I misinterpreted what you were writing. You were claiming that stamp duty only generated the Government £4.5b, I misinterpreted that, not least because I was under the misapprehension that the £11.6b figure was cast iron.
The widely accepted figure for stamp duty credit yesterday was £11.6b down from a little over £12b on the previous measurement timescale. I thought even Kemi accepted the stamp duty saving as £9b, although if you say it is only £4.5b I would be surprised, but £4.5b it is.
Nonetheless, how are you paying for that £4.5b shortfall? Nebulous growth wishcasting and bogus service cost savings don't count.
Thank you for your comments and in the scheme of things 4.5 billion is small beer
LOL! I won't be offering to buy you a pint!
You haven't answered my question. How are you paying for that £4.5b shortfall? Nebulous growth wishcasting and bogus service cost savings don't count.
Badenoch announced the end of ev and heat pump subsidies - that accounts for 2.5 billion alone
Yet another example of Badenoch inventing wild numbers. The EV subsidy is capped at £650 million over three years and the heat pump subsidy at £295 million for just one year, nowhere near £2.5 billion per year. It's so illiterate and lazy. If the Conservatives could spend just five minutes on Google if they wanted to "fully cost" their proposals
If so, I accept your revised figures to circa 1 billion pa, but the abolition of stamp duty is now a top priority for the conservatives endorsed by think tanks and many others
It is a bad tax, but more widely Badenoch has put forward a platform of policies that were previously missing and has energised the party
I doubt it will make a big difference in the immediate polling, but this is a four year trek to the next GE and certainly reducing Jenrick's hopes are an even more positive
I think everyone is on board with dumping stamp duty, but some of us are keen to see how it is being paid for.
Maybe Reeves steals Tory clothes.
After disinfecting them, presumably.
One side effect - or intentional effect - to watch out for would be on the fiscal autonomy of the devolved administrations. The tax is devolved; its replacement might not be.
Yes and I understand that, and it may well just be England only but the Scottish and Welsh governments would come under pressure to follow
I hadn't realised that stamp duty was devolved, and how much higher it is for more valuable properties in Scotland. Just check out the difference for, say, a £700K property. £25k in England. £42k in Scotland. Absolutely insane.
If you remove £X stamp duty from a house purchase, the vendor will expect to receive an extra £X on the sale price, as that is the going rate for their property (all-in). More money in the pockets of vendors, buyers no better off. The Tory Chancellor £10 billion a year worse off.
You could not be more completely wrong. The money received depends upon the scarcity of the asset. Shortage of the asset cost goes up, sufficient of the asset cost goes down. Removing Stamp Duty affects the relationship between price and cost it does not affect value or worth self-evidently.
No. If we imagine a more extreme example - a stamp duty Y of £100 million per property at price X, say - it becomes obvious that the stamp duty reduces demand, and people will invest their money in something else. At the actual level it depresses demand a bit, starting with the people who could just afford the X and moving on to the people who can afford up to X+Y-£1. Removing it creates a space equal to Y which could be given entirely to the buyer (by leaving the price at X) or shared with the seller (who will probably reset the price at, say, X+Y/2). The primary effect of removing stamp duty is therefore to transfer more money from other investments into property, thus benefiting people in the housing market. Whether these are buyers or sellers depends on individual decisions, but realistically it will help them both a bit, at the expense of everyone else (who might have benefited from the tax revenue going elsewhere - e.g. people with moderate mental difficulties, who see their support removed to help pay for it). That's why the measure is of most interest to people who can afford relatively expensive property.
Conference season ends and I believe the unexpected happened
Kemi Badenoch delivered the best speech, rolled out an array of policies, and stamp duty the 'rabbit out of the hat'
She energised her supporters and have given them something to sell on the doorstep
And she did what I prayed she would, sent out a positive [conservative] message and barely mentioned Starmer or Farage
Labour and Farage fell into the trap of hurling insults at each other to the detriment of both
The added bonus is Jenrick is the biggest loser
I do not know how the polls will react, but today was a start on the long road to relevance
Rabbit out of a hat, or bollocks out of her arse?
Pound shop Liz Truss.
No Kemi identified welfare and spending cuts to fund her tax cut
It wasn't just welfare but cuts in climate change subsidies and increasing north sea production with associated tax income, as well as welcoming back millionaires, entrepreneurs, and wealth creators
She also will scrap IHT on farmers and abolish vat on private school fees
Add in banning doctor strikes
This is conservative policies and is a direct challenge to Labour and Reform
This is pennies BigG. No spending cuts plan is credible without some sort of control on pensioner benefits and health spending. They are are growing so quickly - from a very high base - that any other cut or even steady economic growth is completely overwhelmed by them. Literally by design in the case of the triple lock.
Labour haven't set out a plan either but let's not pretend the Conservative plan is fiscally prudent. DavidL's take on this is correct.
Google tells me that the number of UK civil servants has increased since 2016 by 132,000 and that the median salary is £34k.
That would imply a saving of £4.5bn under the Tory plan.
Not commenting on whether it is feasible or not but it’s not “pennies”
True - but I think the fact the median salary is so low suggests what kinds of roles those civil servants are doing - particularly when you consider how London dominated the civil service is.
If you could cut 130,000 people out of Whitehall or it's equivalent in Scotland, Wales then fair enough. But I think the stats show that increase is primarily agencies like HMRC and DWP. Basically call centres, which would mean a reduced service. AI might be the answer to that but it's not a magic button you can press.
It said that the range was £24 - 84k (from memory - haven’t checked).
The only way to plausibly cuts costs is to stop doing stuff. Governments need to cut verticals rather than horizontally. (Equally I am sure that there are the sort of grinding efficiencies - 1, 2, 3 percent a year - that the private sector makes which government agencies never seem to be able to find)
And that's why, at the moment, this is Potemkin Policy. Tell us which Civil Servants are going to be axed, and what's going to happen to the work they were doing, and it gets interesting. "It won't be done by the state" is a legitimate answer.
Otherwise, Kemi is doing the fun bit without doing the hard work first. Maggie wouldn't have approved.
PB Tories are normally pragmatic people, questioning the symmetry of a Labour or Lib Dem tax cut or spending pledge. "The books don't balance" they will cry.
Yet a welcome Tory £12b tax cut paid by fantasy wastage savings get a free ride.
Fortunately the Tories are not in Government. I am sure if they were the gilt markets might baulk.
They are not “fantasy wastage savings”.
They have said that they will reduce civil service numbers back to 2016 levels. That’s pretty specific - of course they haven’t identified “Me Mexican” or “Ms Pete” as being at risk of being made redundant - but it’s not just a number made up by some spreadsheet jockey.
You had fourteen years in Government. Fourteen years to identify and implement swingeing service cuts to pay for massive tax cuts. You failed. During that 14 years, service provision levels crashed at the same time the tax burden increased.
Posters have quoted Reform fantasy savings in Kent, savings so magnificent that Council tax increases could be suspended, until they found out there were few savings to be made and Council taxes were raised by 5%.
A nice speech offering the Moon on a stick is one thing, shoehorning the contents of that speech into reality is quite another.
Your party and the cheerleaders on here are profoundly unserious.
In 2009-10 the uk government spent £739 billion. In 2025-6 they are budgeted to spend £1,335 billion.
According to the Bank of England, £739 billion in 2009/10 is equivalent to £1,077 billion today.
So in real terms the government is spending £258 billion more than the Brown government (which was not known for fiscal rectitude).
The only “profoundly unserious” people on here are those who claim that every penny of that is wisely spent and absolutely no savings are possible
Of course not every penny is wisely spent and of course savings are possible, but it's a fantasy to imagine that there are large savings to made from "cutting waste".
Why are we spending £258 billon more? It's not because waste has suddenly multiplied. It's because we have a larger population, an ageing population (more pensions, more healthcare costs), we're paying for COVID-19 (interest on debt + ongoing increased health and disability payments), more generous pensions, we're paying the costs of a war in Ukraine (increased energy costs, aid to Ukraine, increase military spending), and Brexit.
About a third of that is debt interest alone.
And note the choice of 2009/10 as a baseline - the following year debt interest jumped quite sharply, starting its decade and a half rise.
So turning back the clock is going to be massively harder than the comparison implies.
The "we will cut civil service numbers to 2016 levels" also blithely ignores the changes in the civil service consequent on Brexit.
The road back to fiscal rectitude is likely to be a very rocky one, and politicians pretending otherwise are some combination of stupid and dishonest.
Over a third of the boomer retired generation say no party represents them says new YouGov poll.
As Stephen Bush points out - these are the guys that "takes up most government spending".
Frankly, they are being handed ever increasing state largesse on a massive silver plate!
One can make an argument that the group most undeserving of state largesse are people in their late 60s who are still fit and healthy, but getting pensions and other benefits. Should the pension age be further raised?
Pension age should be graduated. Starting at a lower age than current, 63?,at maybe £2k or £3k per year then increasing til maybe 73 to the current rate.
What's the rationale here? That people are expected to be moving to part-time working?
People do move to work part time. And some people retire at 55, others at 80. The days of a single retirement age for everyone are long gone.
People who retire at 55 tend to be very rich people who can afford to, but others need to retire early for health reasons. People who retire at 80 tend to have better paying white collar jobs. So, how does the system handle all these differences? Putting everyone on a graduated system going from 63 to 73 is still a one size fits all solution.
Do we instead need more means testing and/or health status testing?
Be useful and don't abuse your body and you'll have to work longer will be a hard sell.
All testing for benefits runs an equivalent risk. I don't believe many people are going to abuse their bodies just to get a pension sooner!
Maybe UBI solves all this?
Where does the money come from for it ?
@Taz, @bondegezou gave the most concise answer. UBI should be tax neutral. It is not a magic money tree. You get a basic payment and you hopefully earn on top of that. There is no longer a personal allowance and tax rates are adjusted so the net effect is neutral. So what are the benefits:
a) You eliminate the need for 99% of state benefits including the state pension b) Those that deserve benefits and don't claim them or fall through the cracks no longer will c) Those that abuse the system really can't anymore. Yep they get the basic amount, but that is it. They probably abuse it by far more currently d) It encourage people to take a risk starting a business because they at least get a minimum amount to tide them over during the set up time when they have no income e) You can scrap 90+% of the DWP and a bit of HMRC
Anyone asking "how do we pay for it" doesn't understand the idea.
It doesn't pay for itself, it is eyewateringly expensive. There are around 55mn adults in the UK so paying them all £12k a year (the state pension) would cost £660bn a year. Government spending on social benefits including pensions is currently less than 60% of that amount. Admin costs are a small saving and you wouldnt eliminate all of the existing welfare payments. You would have to raise taxes significantly to pay for it, with all the disincentive effects that come with it. We need all the workers we can because of population ageing so paying people to do nothing while disincentivising work is not a great idea.
Flat tax of c 50% on all income.
Total income in the UK is about 1.4tn I think? Revenue: £700bn
So UBI would be the tax free allowance ?
No. Tax on everything. Your effective tax allowance would effectively be 3 times UBI at at 50% tax rate, because you'd be net negative until that point.
I agree with all the questions on welfare though. It isn't that simple once you start looking at individual cases and circumstances.
As the sort of nice model physicists like though, its fine.
It's a spherical cow in a vacuum.
Every group will lobby for top-ups for their own and withdrawal for their enemies and we'll end up with the same level of form filling and administration but with a big lump called UBI running on top of that.
UBI and 'on top of' should not be in the same sentence.
I'm fairly strongly in favour of UBI, but only if it completely replaces a whole load of other benefits and tax reliefs, and removes the burden of managing that bureaucracy from the system entirely.
The whole point of UBI is that it's universal, not some sort of qualifiable add-on. Many Libertarians view it as a great opportunity to vastly streamline and simplify. But I worry that there are people in favour for entirely the wrong reasons....
Conference season ends and I believe the unexpected happened
Kemi Badenoch delivered the best speech, rolled out an array of policies, and stamp duty the 'rabbit out of the hat'
She energised her supporters and have given them something to sell on the doorstep
And she did what I prayed she would, sent out a positive [conservative] message and barely mentioned Starmer or Farage
Labour and Farage fell into the trap of hurling insults at each other to the detriment of both
The added bonus is Jenrick is the biggest loser
I do not know how the polls will react, but today was a start on the long road to relevance
Rabbit out of a hat, or bollocks out of her arse?
Pound shop Liz Truss.
No Kemi identified welfare and spending cuts to fund her tax cut
It wasn't just welfare but cuts in climate change subsidies and increasing north sea production with associated tax income, as well as welcoming back millionaires, entrepreneurs, and wealth creators
She also will scrap IHT on farmers and abolish vat on private school fees
Add in banning doctor strikes
This is conservative policies and is a direct challenge to Labour and Reform
This is pennies BigG. No spending cuts plan is credible without some sort of control on pensioner benefits and health spending. They are are growing so quickly - from a very high base - that any other cut or even steady economic growth is completely overwhelmed by them. Literally by design in the case of the triple lock.
Labour haven't set out a plan either but let's not pretend the Conservative plan is fiscally prudent. DavidL's take on this is correct.
Google tells me that the number of UK civil servants has increased since 2016 by 132,000 and that the median salary is £34k.
That would imply a saving of £4.5bn under the Tory plan.
Not commenting on whether it is feasible or not but it’s not “pennies”
True - but I think the fact the median salary is so low suggests what kinds of roles those civil servants are doing - particularly when you consider how London dominated the civil service is.
If you could cut 130,000 people out of Whitehall or it's equivalent in Scotland, Wales then fair enough. But I think the stats show that increase is primarily agencies like HMRC and DWP. Basically call centres, which would mean a reduced service. AI might be the answer to that but it's not a magic button you can press.
It said that the range was £24 - 84k (from memory - haven’t checked).
The only way to plausibly cuts costs is to stop doing stuff. Governments need to cut verticals rather than horizontally. (Equally I am sure that there are the sort of grinding efficiencies - 1, 2, 3 percent a year - that the private sector makes which government agencies never seem to be able to find)
And that's why, at the moment, this is Potemkin Policy. Tell us which Civil Servants are going to be axed, and what's going to happen to the work they were doing, and it gets interesting. "It won't be done by the state" is a legitimate answer.
Otherwise, Kemi is doing the fun bit without doing the hard work first. Maggie wouldn't have approved.
PB Tories are normally pragmatic people, questioning the symmetry of a Labour or Lib Dem tax cut or spending pledge. "The books don't balance" they will cry.
Yet a welcome Tory £12b tax cut paid by fantasy wastage savings get a free ride.
Fortunately the Tories are not in Government. I am sure if they were the gilt markets might baulk.
They are not “fantasy wastage savings”.
They have said that they will reduce civil service numbers back to 2016 levels. That’s pretty specific - of course they haven’t identified “Me Mexican” or “Ms Pete” as being at risk of being made redundant - but it’s not just a number made up by some spreadsheet jockey.
You had fourteen years in Government. Fourteen years to identify and implement swingeing service cuts to pay for massive tax cuts. You failed. During that 14 years, service provision levels crashed at the same time the tax burden increased.
Posters have quoted Reform fantasy savings in Kent, savings so magnificent that Council tax increases could be suspended, until they found out there were few savings to be made and Council taxes were raised by 5%.
A nice speech offering the Moon on a stick is one thing, shoehorning the contents of that speech into reality is quite another.
Your party and the cheerleaders on here are profoundly unserious.
Good morning
And giveover
Badenoch gave a totally unexpected and successful speech that galvanised her audience and has given her party lots of policies, and of scrapping stamp duty has been well received from think tanks and Paul Johnson formally of the IFS who said yesterday it is the worst of many bad taxes
Your mixture of cynicism and satire is par for the cop* but at least this conservative is pleased to see conservative policies and Jenrick put back in his box
I don't believe I was being remotely cynical or satirical. If you want satire I can write all day about letter boxes and an offensive description of a smile.
You would be the first to criticise ( and justifiably so) an unfunded Reeves pledge. And make no mistake there is nothing in the credit column to match the tax cut in the debit column, except for a nebulous notion of cutting wastage.
If she has done enough to put Jenrick back in his box and take some points from Reform I'll drink to that, but my point stands, her welcome tax cut debit does not demonstrate a corresponding credit.
*If you don't like me posting on here you could always ask TSE politely to transfer me from "member" to " applicant" status, that way I can still access and read your posts but no longer post myself. There, that seems like a neat compromise.
At times you really are very silly as demonstrated by your last paragraph
4.5 billion cost as quoted by the IFS is eminently doable
I do apologise for my figures, I misinterpreted what you were writing. You were claiming that stamp duty only generated the Government £4.5b, I misinterpreted that, not least because I was under the misapprehension that the £11.6b figure was cast iron.
The widely accepted figure for stamp duty credit yesterday was £11.6b down from a little over £12b on the previous measurement timescale. I thought even Kemi accepted the stamp duty saving as £9b, although if you say it is only £4.5b I would be surprised, but £4.5b it is.
Nonetheless, how are you paying for that £4.5b shortfall? Nebulous growth wishcasting and bogus service cost savings don't count.
Thank you for your comments and in the scheme of things 4.5 billion is small beer
LOL! I won't be offering to buy you a pint!
You haven't answered my question. How are you paying for that £4.5b shortfall? Nebulous growth wishcasting and bogus service cost savings don't count.
Badenoch announced the end of ev and heat pump subsidies - that accounts for 2.5 billion alone
Yet another example of Badenoch inventing wild numbers. The EV subsidy is capped at £650 million over three years and the heat pump subsidy at £295 million for just one year, nowhere near £2.5 billion per year. It's so illiterate and lazy. If the Conservatives could spend just five minutes on Google if they wanted to "fully cost" their proposals
If so, I accept your revised figures to circa 1 billion pa, but the abolition of stamp duty is now a top priority for the conservatives endorsed by think tanks and many others
It is a bad tax, but more widely Badenoch has put forward a platform of policies that were previously missing and has energised the party
I doubt it will make a big difference in the immediate polling, but this is a four year trek to the next GE and certainly reducing Jenrick's hopes are an even more positive
I think everyone is on board with dumping stamp duty, but some of us are keen to see how it is being paid for.
Maybe Reeves steals Tory clothes.
After disinfecting them, presumably.
One side effect - or intentional effect - to watch out for would be on the fiscal autonomy of the devolved administrations. The tax is devolved; its replacement might not be.
Yes and I understand that, and it may well just be England only but the Scottish and Welsh governments would come under pressure to follow
I hadn't realised that stamp duty was devolved, and how much higher it is for more valuable properties in Scotland. Just check out the difference for, say, a £700K property. £25k in England. £42k in Scotland. Absolutely insane.
Yes it’s insane, but there’s also not many £700k properties in Scotland.
Conference season ends and I believe the unexpected happened
Kemi Badenoch delivered the best speech, rolled out an array of policies, and stamp duty the 'rabbit out of the hat'
She energised her supporters and have given them something to sell on the doorstep
And she did what I prayed she would, sent out a positive [conservative] message and barely mentioned Starmer or Farage
Labour and Farage fell into the trap of hurling insults at each other to the detriment of both
The added bonus is Jenrick is the biggest loser
I do not know how the polls will react, but today was a start on the long road to relevance
Rabbit out of a hat, or bollocks out of her arse?
Pound shop Liz Truss.
No Kemi identified welfare and spending cuts to fund her tax cut
It wasn't just welfare but cuts in climate change subsidies and increasing north sea production with associated tax income, as well as welcoming back millionaires, entrepreneurs, and wealth creators
She also will scrap IHT on farmers and abolish vat on private school fees
Add in banning doctor strikes
This is conservative policies and is a direct challenge to Labour and Reform
This is pennies BigG. No spending cuts plan is credible without some sort of control on pensioner benefits and health spending. They are are growing so quickly - from a very high base - that any other cut or even steady economic growth is completely overwhelmed by them. Literally by design in the case of the triple lock.
Labour haven't set out a plan either but let's not pretend the Conservative plan is fiscally prudent. DavidL's take on this is correct.
Google tells me that the number of UK civil servants has increased since 2016 by 132,000 and that the median salary is £34k.
That would imply a saving of £4.5bn under the Tory plan.
Not commenting on whether it is feasible or not but it’s not “pennies”
True - but I think the fact the median salary is so low suggests what kinds of roles those civil servants are doing - particularly when you consider how London dominated the civil service is.
If you could cut 130,000 people out of Whitehall or it's equivalent in Scotland, Wales then fair enough. But I think the stats show that increase is primarily agencies like HMRC and DWP. Basically call centres, which would mean a reduced service. AI might be the answer to that but it's not a magic button you can press.
It said that the range was £24 - 84k (from memory - haven’t checked).
The only way to plausibly cuts costs is to stop doing stuff. Governments need to cut verticals rather than horizontally. (Equally I am sure that there are the sort of grinding efficiencies - 1, 2, 3 percent a year - that the private sector makes which government agencies never seem to be able to find)
And that's why, at the moment, this is Potemkin Policy. Tell us which Civil Servants are going to be axed, and what's going to happen to the work they were doing, and it gets interesting. "It won't be done by the state" is a legitimate answer.
Otherwise, Kemi is doing the fun bit without doing the hard work first. Maggie wouldn't have approved.
PB Tories are normally pragmatic people, questioning the symmetry of a Labour or Lib Dem tax cut or spending pledge. "The books don't balance" they will cry.
Yet a welcome Tory £12b tax cut paid by fantasy wastage savings get a free ride.
Fortunately the Tories are not in Government. I am sure if they were the gilt markets might baulk.
They are not “fantasy wastage savings”.
They have said that they will reduce civil service numbers back to 2016 levels. That’s pretty specific - of course they haven’t identified “Me Mexican” or “Ms Pete” as being at risk of being made redundant - but it’s not just a number made up by some spreadsheet jockey.
You had fourteen years in Government. Fourteen years to identify and implement swingeing service cuts to pay for massive tax cuts. You failed. During that 14 years, service provision levels crashed at the same time the tax burden increased.
Posters have quoted Reform fantasy savings in Kent, savings so magnificent that Council tax increases could be suspended, until they found out there were few savings to be made and Council taxes were raised by 5%.
A nice speech offering the Moon on a stick is one thing, shoehorning the contents of that speech into reality is quite another.
Your party and the cheerleaders on here are profoundly unserious.
In 2009-10 the uk government spent £739 billion. In 2025-6 they are budgeted to spend £1,335 billion.
According to the Bank of England, £739 billion in 2009/10 is equivalent to £1,077 billion today.
So in real terms the government is spending £258 billion more than the Brown government (which was not known for fiscal rectitude).
The only “profoundly unserious” people on here are those who claim that every penny of that is wisely spent and absolutely no savings are possible
Where did I say Government money is wisely spent? Central and local government are profligate. I can give you one of manifold examples of each. From central government we have the PPE scandal and from local government we have the £63m invisible Garden Bridge over the Thames.
Those savings Badenoch has claimed to have in mind I would question; why was the saving not implemented up to July 2024?
Anything Badenoch or the Conservative Party say can be countered by "why didn't you do that when you were in power". Stephen Bush in the FT today argues that Badenoch needs to do more to say sorry, to apologise for the mistakes the Tories made in government.
As you know I've been reading a lot of Sumption (great!) and Starkey (mixed, to put it politely) recently, and I think they are right wrt the Blair constitutional changes were Not How Britain Works. With that in mind, may I recommend (thru gritted teeth) the following Critic articles
Conference season ends and I believe the unexpected happened
Kemi Badenoch delivered the best speech, rolled out an array of policies, and stamp duty the 'rabbit out of the hat'
She energised her supporters and have given them something to sell on the doorstep
And she did what I prayed she would, sent out a positive [conservative] message and barely mentioned Starmer or Farage
Labour and Farage fell into the trap of hurling insults at each other to the detriment of both
The added bonus is Jenrick is the biggest loser
I do not know how the polls will react, but today was a start on the long road to relevance
Rabbit out of a hat, or bollocks out of her arse?
Pound shop Liz Truss.
No Kemi identified welfare and spending cuts to fund her tax cut
It wasn't just welfare but cuts in climate change subsidies and increasing north sea production with associated tax income, as well as welcoming back millionaires, entrepreneurs, and wealth creators
She also will scrap IHT on farmers and abolish vat on private school fees
Add in banning doctor strikes
This is conservative policies and is a direct challenge to Labour and Reform
This is pennies BigG. No spending cuts plan is credible without some sort of control on pensioner benefits and health spending. They are are growing so quickly - from a very high base - that any other cut or even steady economic growth is completely overwhelmed by them. Literally by design in the case of the triple lock.
Labour haven't set out a plan either but let's not pretend the Conservative plan is fiscally prudent. DavidL's take on this is correct.
Google tells me that the number of UK civil servants has increased since 2016 by 132,000 and that the median salary is £34k.
That would imply a saving of £4.5bn under the Tory plan.
Not commenting on whether it is feasible or not but it’s not “pennies”
True - but I think the fact the median salary is so low suggests what kinds of roles those civil servants are doing - particularly when you consider how London dominated the civil service is.
If you could cut 130,000 people out of Whitehall or it's equivalent in Scotland, Wales then fair enough. But I think the stats show that increase is primarily agencies like HMRC and DWP. Basically call centres, which would mean a reduced service. AI might be the answer to that but it's not a magic button you can press.
It said that the range was £24 - 84k (from memory - haven’t checked).
The only way to plausibly cuts costs is to stop doing stuff. Governments need to cut verticals rather than horizontally. (Equally I am sure that there are the sort of grinding efficiencies - 1, 2, 3 percent a year - that the private sector makes which government agencies never seem to be able to find)
And that's why, at the moment, this is Potemkin Policy. Tell us which Civil Servants are going to be axed, and what's going to happen to the work they were doing, and it gets interesting. "It won't be done by the state" is a legitimate answer.
Otherwise, Kemi is doing the fun bit without doing the hard work first. Maggie wouldn't have approved.
PB Tories are normally pragmatic people, questioning the symmetry of a Labour or Lib Dem tax cut or spending pledge. "The books don't balance" they will cry.
Yet a welcome Tory £12b tax cut paid by fantasy wastage savings get a free ride.
Fortunately the Tories are not in Government. I am sure if they were the gilt markets might baulk.
They are not “fantasy wastage savings”.
They have said that they will reduce civil service numbers back to 2016 levels. That’s pretty specific - of course they haven’t identified “Me Mexican” or “Ms Pete” as being at risk of being made redundant - but it’s not just a number made up by some spreadsheet jockey.
You had fourteen years in Government. Fourteen years to identify and implement swingeing service cuts to pay for massive tax cuts. You failed. During that 14 years, service provision levels crashed at the same time the tax burden increased.
Posters have quoted Reform fantasy savings in Kent, savings so magnificent that Council tax increases could be suspended, until they found out there were few savings to be made and Council taxes were raised by 5%.
A nice speech offering the Moon on a stick is one thing, shoehorning the contents of that speech into reality is quite another.
Your party and the cheerleaders on here are profoundly unserious.
In 2009-10 the uk government spent £739 billion. In 2025-6 they are budgeted to spend £1,335 billion.
According to the Bank of England, £739 billion in 2009/10 is equivalent to £1,077 billion today.
So in real terms the government is spending £258 billion more than the Brown government (which was not known for fiscal rectitude).
The only “profoundly unserious” people on here are those who claim that every penny of that is wisely spent and absolutely no savings are possible
Where did I say Government money is wisely spent? Central and local government are profligate. I can give you one of manifold examples of each. From central government we have the PPE scandal and from local government we have the £63m invisible Garden Bridge over the Thames.
Those savings Badenoch has claimed to have in mind I would question; why was the saving not implemented up to July 2024?
One area ripe for reform across government is procurement. That doesn't necessarily mean siding less, but rather getting value for what we do spend.
Government is way too gullible compared with the private sector.
Conference season ends and I believe the unexpected happened
Kemi Badenoch delivered the best speech, rolled out an array of policies, and stamp duty the 'rabbit out of the hat'
She energised her supporters and have given them something to sell on the doorstep
And she did what I prayed she would, sent out a positive [conservative] message and barely mentioned Starmer or Farage
Labour and Farage fell into the trap of hurling insults at each other to the detriment of both
The added bonus is Jenrick is the biggest loser
I do not know how the polls will react, but today was a start on the long road to relevance
Rabbit out of a hat, or bollocks out of her arse?
Pound shop Liz Truss.
No Kemi identified welfare and spending cuts to fund her tax cut
It wasn't just welfare but cuts in climate change subsidies and increasing north sea production with associated tax income, as well as welcoming back millionaires, entrepreneurs, and wealth creators
She also will scrap IHT on farmers and abolish vat on private school fees
Add in banning doctor strikes
This is conservative policies and is a direct challenge to Labour and Reform
This is pennies BigG. No spending cuts plan is credible without some sort of control on pensioner benefits and health spending. They are are growing so quickly - from a very high base - that any other cut or even steady economic growth is completely overwhelmed by them. Literally by design in the case of the triple lock.
Labour haven't set out a plan either but let's not pretend the Conservative plan is fiscally prudent. DavidL's take on this is correct.
Google tells me that the number of UK civil servants has increased since 2016 by 132,000 and that the median salary is £34k.
That would imply a saving of £4.5bn under the Tory plan.
Not commenting on whether it is feasible or not but it’s not “pennies”
True - but I think the fact the median salary is so low suggests what kinds of roles those civil servants are doing - particularly when you consider how London dominated the civil service is.
If you could cut 130,000 people out of Whitehall or it's equivalent in Scotland, Wales then fair enough. But I think the stats show that increase is primarily agencies like HMRC and DWP. Basically call centres, which would mean a reduced service. AI might be the answer to that but it's not a magic button you can press.
It said that the range was £24 - 84k (from memory - haven’t checked).
The only way to plausibly cuts costs is to stop doing stuff. Governments need to cut verticals rather than horizontally. (Equally I am sure that there are the sort of grinding efficiencies - 1, 2, 3 percent a year - that the private sector makes which government agencies never seem to be able to find)
And that's why, at the moment, this is Potemkin Policy. Tell us which Civil Servants are going to be axed, and what's going to happen to the work they were doing, and it gets interesting. "It won't be done by the state" is a legitimate answer.
Otherwise, Kemi is doing the fun bit without doing the hard work first. Maggie wouldn't have approved.
PB Tories are normally pragmatic people, questioning the symmetry of a Labour or Lib Dem tax cut or spending pledge. "The books don't balance" they will cry.
Yet a welcome Tory £12b tax cut paid by fantasy wastage savings get a free ride.
Fortunately the Tories are not in Government. I am sure if they were the gilt markets might baulk.
They are not “fantasy wastage savings”.
They have said that they will reduce civil service numbers back to 2016 levels. That’s pretty specific - of course they haven’t identified “Me Mexican” or “Ms Pete” as being at risk of being made redundant - but it’s not just a number made up by some spreadsheet jockey.
You had fourteen years in Government. Fourteen years to identify and implement swingeing service cuts to pay for massive tax cuts. You failed. During that 14 years, service provision levels crashed at the same time the tax burden increased.
Posters have quoted Reform fantasy savings in Kent, savings so magnificent that Council tax increases could be suspended, until they found out there were few savings to be made and Council taxes were raised by 5%.
A nice speech offering the Moon on a stick is one thing, shoehorning the contents of that speech into reality is quite another.
Your party and the cheerleaders on here are profoundly unserious.
In 2009-10 the uk government spent £739 billion. In 2025-6 they are budgeted to spend £1,335 billion.
According to the Bank of England, £739 billion in 2009/10 is equivalent to £1,077 billion today.
So in real terms the government is spending £258 billion more than the Brown government (which was not known for fiscal rectitude).
The only “profoundly unserious” people on here are those who claim that every penny of that is wisely spent and absolutely no savings are possible
Where did I say Government money is wisely spent? Central and local government are profligate. I can give you one of manifold examples of each. From central government we have the PPE scandal and from local government we have the £63m invisible Garden Bridge over the Thames.
Those savings Badenoch has claimed to have in mind I would question; why was the saving not implemented up to July 2024?
Anything Badenoch or the Conservative Party say can be countered by "why didn't you do that when you were in power". Stephen Bush in the FT today argues that Badenoch needs to do more to say sorry, to apologise for the mistakes the Tories made in government.
While this isn't wrong, its also almost impossible for a party who has been that long in power to get back on the front foot. It needs time, fresh faces, fresh ideas, and a big chunk of amnesia.
As you know I've been reading a lot of Sumption (great!) and Starkey (mixed, to put it politely) recently, and I think they are right wrt the Blair constitutional changes were Not How Britain Works. With that in mind, may I recommend (thru gritted teeth) the following Critic articles
"However, that consensus is entirely wrong. The idea that the judiciary should be appointed by an independent body, without any meaningful oversight by ministers or Parliament is a modern invention. It was brought into being by the Blair government, as part of its “constitutional reform” agenda, with the claimed goal of “enhancing accountability and ensuring greater public confidence”. "
This is disingenuous. The appointment of the judiciary was largely independent of government for many years before. The Blair government tidied up the details.
Yougov: Would you support or oppose it being made compulsory for all newly-retired people to serve on a community service placement for a period of one year?” For those 65+, 20% of those support vs 50% of them wanting a similar mandatory national service scheme for young people
Every survey exposes the hypocrisy and entitlement of that generation (refuse to call them baby boomers, thet’s really 50-64 in the uk)
The west has a huge pensioner problem imo.
Lots of interesting polling there. I do note that 65+ are more supportive of the idea than younger groups, and there is lots of support for a voluntary scheme.
A voluntary scheme to volunteer? Confused, why not just volunteer without the scheme? There are loads of volunteering opportunities already.
There can be advantages in having a single, high-profile, govt-supported way into volunteering, that helps people into volunteering and finding a useful role.
Mr Cameron's something something society, redux, no? (Not that it is a bad idea in itself, oh no.)
I have long thought that Cameron's Big Society was a better idea than the sarcasm it received at the time suggested.
It was indeed a good idea, but was written for the time of plenty that was 2007, not the economic situation that prevailed in 2010 when the election was called.
It was a policy for the election that never was, the one that Sion Simon predicted.
I also think that Cameron never really defined it in any great detail and after ten years of Tony Blair people were cynical about meaningless buzz words that didn't have much substance behind them. Of course as a former PR man that was Cameron's MO.
But as you say in the much harsher world of the 2010s and 2020s it was all irrelevant to the main challenge of getting economic growth going again, so, like so much from the Heir to Blair era, it faded away.
It’s worth considering the effect of Lottery money on many, many small community projects.
One sad thing is the tendency, as time goes by, for Lottery money to be spent on bigger projects. Building a small changing room for the schools to use the local park as a sports field may not be sexy. But it’s a real, sensible thing.
John Major’s biggest legacy, although why people make bets where the gross return is 50% is still a wonder. I was working in a shop in 1995 or 96 when it all started, the queues on Saturday afternoons were crazy.
Government spending on sports and arts has over time been replaced by lottery money, and allowed expansion in those areas. There’s now hundreds of Olympic athletes and coaches getting a stipend from the lottery, the crowning grory of which was the London Games.
We know that people are attracted to long-odds bets, such that bookies can offer shorter odds than warranted and still attract enough bets.
The lottery offers very long-odds bets. There's no other opportunity, albeit a slim one, of transforming a few pounds into many millions of pounds.
Even a large winning bet at 100/1 is not going to return enough money to change your life in the way a lottery jackpot win would.
I don't find it so illogical, viewed from a game theory point of view, rather than a purely numerical one.
Might not be much in it if this particular bid comes off. NB, the URL has the wrong figure in it (it works, it's just not correct in terms of the story).
The billionaire media mogul Richard Desmond will urge a court to “err on the side of generosity” in assessing a £1.3bn damages claim against the Gambling Commission that would probably have to be funded by taxpayers if he wins. [...]
The Dubai-based billionaire is seeking damages of up to £1.3bn. A victory for the media mogul could have a significant cost for charities and the taxpayer because any payout would have to come from a lottery pot of money set aside to fund good causes.
If the payout is larger than the fund, which is understood to receive about £30m a week from lottery ticket sales, the taxpayer would have to foot the bill."
I see that Nottingham, London and Birmingham are taking, or planning to take, unofficial flags down.
Does anyone have a wider knowledge?
They have to take them down. Otherwise they are inviting everyone and anyone to hijack the public realm with their own pet causes. If people want to plaster their own property with England flags that's their prerogative, but they can't do it on public property.
The local council took down the Welsh flags over the Little Orme for them to be replaced with larger Welsh and Union Jacks flags higher up and social media telling the council 'You take them down, we will put them back up' !!!!
Shame people are willing to waste council taxpayers money on these silly displays of nationalism (often organised by far right activists, who know exactly what they are doing).
A key factor in Mr Trump's appeal to the voters was that he was the only hope for a particular thing they cared about deeply, deeply enough to consider any risk worth taking.
Reform is similar.
Good morning, everyone.
They hated Polish people enough to vote for Brexit and got brown people instead.
It would be nice to think they could join the dots to what a vote for RefUK will mean
Do you genuinely think people who had a problem with the economic consequences of FOM ‘hated Polish.people”?
Conference season ends and I believe the unexpected happened
Kemi Badenoch delivered the best speech, rolled out an array of policies, and stamp duty the 'rabbit out of the hat'
She energised her supporters and have given them something to sell on the doorstep
And she did what I prayed she would, sent out a positive [conservative] message and barely mentioned Starmer or Farage
Labour and Farage fell into the trap of hurling insults at each other to the detriment of both
The added bonus is Jenrick is the biggest loser
I do not know how the polls will react, but today was a start on the long road to relevance
Rabbit out of a hat, or bollocks out of her arse?
Pound shop Liz Truss.
No Kemi identified welfare and spending cuts to fund her tax cut
It wasn't just welfare but cuts in climate change subsidies and increasing north sea production with associated tax income, as well as welcoming back millionaires, entrepreneurs, and wealth creators
She also will scrap IHT on farmers and abolish vat on private school fees
Add in banning doctor strikes
This is conservative policies and is a direct challenge to Labour and Reform
This is pennies BigG. No spending cuts plan is credible without some sort of control on pensioner benefits and health spending. They are are growing so quickly - from a very high base - that any other cut or even steady economic growth is completely overwhelmed by them. Literally by design in the case of the triple lock.
Labour haven't set out a plan either but let's not pretend the Conservative plan is fiscally prudent. DavidL's take on this is correct.
Google tells me that the number of UK civil servants has increased since 2016 by 132,000 and that the median salary is £34k.
That would imply a saving of £4.5bn under the Tory plan.
Not commenting on whether it is feasible or not but it’s not “pennies”
True - but I think the fact the median salary is so low suggests what kinds of roles those civil servants are doing - particularly when you consider how London dominated the civil service is.
If you could cut 130,000 people out of Whitehall or it's equivalent in Scotland, Wales then fair enough. But I think the stats show that increase is primarily agencies like HMRC and DWP. Basically call centres, which would mean a reduced service. AI might be the answer to that but it's not a magic button you can press.
It said that the range was £24 - 84k (from memory - haven’t checked).
The only way to plausibly cuts costs is to stop doing stuff. Governments need to cut verticals rather than horizontally. (Equally I am sure that there are the sort of grinding efficiencies - 1, 2, 3 percent a year - that the private sector makes which government agencies never seem to be able to find)
And that's why, at the moment, this is Potemkin Policy. Tell us which Civil Servants are going to be axed, and what's going to happen to the work they were doing, and it gets interesting. "It won't be done by the state" is a legitimate answer.
Otherwise, Kemi is doing the fun bit without doing the hard work first. Maggie wouldn't have approved.
PB Tories are normally pragmatic people, questioning the symmetry of a Labour or Lib Dem tax cut or spending pledge. "The books don't balance" they will cry.
Yet a welcome Tory £12b tax cut paid by fantasy wastage savings get a free ride.
Fortunately the Tories are not in Government. I am sure if they were the gilt markets might baulk.
They are not “fantasy wastage savings”.
They have said that they will reduce civil service numbers back to 2016 levels. That’s pretty specific - of course they haven’t identified “Me Mexican” or “Ms Pete” as being at risk of being made redundant - but it’s not just a number made up by some spreadsheet jockey.
You had fourteen years in Government. Fourteen years to identify and implement swingeing service cuts to pay for massive tax cuts. You failed. During that 14 years, service provision levels crashed at the same time the tax burden increased.
Posters have quoted Reform fantasy savings in Kent, savings so magnificent that Council tax increases could be suspended, until they found out there were few savings to be made and Council taxes were raised by 5%.
A nice speech offering the Moon on a stick is one thing, shoehorning the contents of that speech into reality is quite another.
Your party and the cheerleaders on here are profoundly unserious.
In 2009-10 the uk government spent £739 billion. In 2025-6 they are budgeted to spend £1,335 billion.
According to the Bank of England, £739 billion in 2009/10 is equivalent to £1,077 billion today.
So in real terms the government is spending £258 billion more than the Brown government (which was not known for fiscal rectitude).
The only “profoundly unserious” people on here are those who claim that every penny of that is wisely spent and absolutely no savings are possible
Where did I say Government money is wisely spent? Central and local government are profligate. I can give you one of manifold examples of each. From central government we have the PPE scandal and from local government we have the £63m invisible Garden Bridge over the Thames.
Those savings Badenoch has claimed to have in mind I would question; why was the saving not implemented up to July 2024?
One area ripe for reform across government is procurement. That doesn't necessarily mean siding less, but rather getting value for what we do spend.
Government is way too gullible compared with the private sector.
Yes, when the government transacts with the private sector it's the latter that tends to get the value. There are lots of examples of this.
A key factor in Mr Trump's appeal to the voters was that he was the only hope for a particular thing they cared about deeply, deeply enough to consider any risk worth taking.
Reform is similar.
Good morning, everyone.
They hated Polish people enough to vote for Brexit and got brown people instead.
It would be nice to think they could join the dots to what a vote for RefUK will mean
Do you genuinely think people who had a problem with the economic consequences of FOM ‘hated Polish.people”?
The question is how many people had a problem with the economic consequences of FOM and how many hated Polish people. Reading some comments here, hating immigrants seems to be quite common.
I see that Nottingham, London and Birmingham are taking, or planning to take, unofficial flags down.
Does anyone have a wider knowledge?
They have to take them down. Otherwise they are inviting everyone and anyone to hijack the public realm with their own pet causes. If people want to plaster their own property with England flags that's their prerogative, but they can't do it on public property.
The local council took down the Welsh flags over the Little Orme for them to be replaced with larger Welsh and Union Jacks flags higher up and social media telling the council 'You take them down, we will put them back up' !!!!
Shame people are willing to waste council taxpayers money on these silly displays of nationalism (often organised by far right activists, who know exactly what they are doing).
Hardly far right with the Welsh Flag being flown
UF *and* the Dragon being put up at the same time, though. Are you fingering Llafur?
Changes from 1st October [Find Out Now, 8th October, N=2,668]
Highest ever Green VI in a poll
Zackly what the Greens were hoping for when they elected an articulate populist as leader.
Yes. It's amazing how popular left-populism is. Things like taxing the very rich with a wealth tax and abolishing landlords. If only there was a centre-left party in Government willing to steal those ideas instead of swallowing everything Reform puts in their mouth. ☹️
I see that Nottingham, London and Birmingham are taking, or planning to take, unofficial flags down.
Does anyone have a wider knowledge?
They have to take them down. Otherwise they are inviting everyone and anyone to hijack the public realm with their own pet causes. If people want to plaster their own property with England flags that's their prerogative, but they can't do it on public property.
The local council took down the Welsh flags over the Little Orme for them to be replaced with larger Welsh and Union Jacks flags higher up and social media telling the council 'You take them down, we will put them back up' !!!!
Shame people are willing to waste council taxpayers money on these silly displays of nationalism (often organised by far right activists, who know exactly what they are doing).
Hardly far right with the Welsh Flag being flown
UF *and* the Dragon being put up at the same time, though. Are you fingering Llafur?
I genuinely do not know who or when put these flags up but it is nice to see the Welsh dragon being flown
Conference season ends and I believe the unexpected happened
Kemi Badenoch delivered the best speech, rolled out an array of policies, and stamp duty the 'rabbit out of the hat'
She energised her supporters and have given them something to sell on the doorstep
And she did what I prayed she would, sent out a positive [conservative] message and barely mentioned Starmer or Farage
Labour and Farage fell into the trap of hurling insults at each other to the detriment of both
The added bonus is Jenrick is the biggest loser
I do not know how the polls will react, but today was a start on the long road to relevance
Rabbit out of a hat, or bollocks out of her arse?
Pound shop Liz Truss.
No Kemi identified welfare and spending cuts to fund her tax cut
It wasn't just welfare but cuts in climate change subsidies and increasing north sea production with associated tax income, as well as welcoming back millionaires, entrepreneurs, and wealth creators
She also will scrap IHT on farmers and abolish vat on private school fees
Add in banning doctor strikes
This is conservative policies and is a direct challenge to Labour and Reform
This is pennies BigG. No spending cuts plan is credible without some sort of control on pensioner benefits and health spending. They are are growing so quickly - from a very high base - that any other cut or even steady economic growth is completely overwhelmed by them. Literally by design in the case of the triple lock.
Labour haven't set out a plan either but let's not pretend the Conservative plan is fiscally prudent. DavidL's take on this is correct.
Google tells me that the number of UK civil servants has increased since 2016 by 132,000 and that the median salary is £34k.
That would imply a saving of £4.5bn under the Tory plan.
Not commenting on whether it is feasible or not but it’s not “pennies”
True - but I think the fact the median salary is so low suggests what kinds of roles those civil servants are doing - particularly when you consider how London dominated the civil service is.
If you could cut 130,000 people out of Whitehall or it's equivalent in Scotland, Wales then fair enough. But I think the stats show that increase is primarily agencies like HMRC and DWP. Basically call centres, which would mean a reduced service. AI might be the answer to that but it's not a magic button you can press.
It said that the range was £24 - 84k (from memory - haven’t checked).
The only way to plausibly cuts costs is to stop doing stuff. Governments need to cut verticals rather than horizontally. (Equally I am sure that there are the sort of grinding efficiencies - 1, 2, 3 percent a year - that the private sector makes which government agencies never seem to be able to find)
And that's why, at the moment, this is Potemkin Policy. Tell us which Civil Servants are going to be axed, and what's going to happen to the work they were doing, and it gets interesting. "It won't be done by the state" is a legitimate answer.
Otherwise, Kemi is doing the fun bit without doing the hard work first. Maggie wouldn't have approved.
PB Tories are normally pragmatic people, questioning the symmetry of a Labour or Lib Dem tax cut or spending pledge. "The books don't balance" they will cry.
Yet a welcome Tory £12b tax cut paid by fantasy wastage savings get a free ride.
Fortunately the Tories are not in Government. I am sure if they were the gilt markets might baulk.
They are not “fantasy wastage savings”.
They have said that they will reduce civil service numbers back to 2016 levels. That’s pretty specific - of course they haven’t identified “Me Mexican” or “Ms Pete” as being at risk of being made redundant - but it’s not just a number made up by some spreadsheet jockey.
You had fourteen years in Government. Fourteen years to identify and implement swingeing service cuts to pay for massive tax cuts. You failed. During that 14 years, service provision levels crashed at the same time the tax burden increased.
Posters have quoted Reform fantasy savings in Kent, savings so magnificent that Council tax increases could be suspended, until they found out there were few savings to be made and Council taxes were raised by 5%.
A nice speech offering the Moon on a stick is one thing, shoehorning the contents of that speech into reality is quite another.
Your party and the cheerleaders on here are profoundly unserious.
Good morning
And giveover
Badenoch gave a totally unexpected and successful speech that galvanised her audience and has given her party lots of policies, and of scrapping stamp duty has been well received from think tanks and Paul Johnson formally of the IFS who said yesterday it is the worst of many bad taxes
Your mixture of cynicism and satire is par for the cop* but at least this conservative is pleased to see conservative policies and Jenrick put back in his box
I don't believe I was being remotely cynical or satirical. If you want satire I can write all day about letter boxes and an offensive description of a smile.
You would be the first to criticise ( and justifiably so) an unfunded Reeves pledge. And make no mistake there is nothing in the credit column to match the tax cut in the debit column, except for a nebulous notion of cutting wastage.
If she has done enough to put Jenrick back in his box and take some points from Reform I'll drink to that, but my point stands, her welcome tax cut debit does not demonstrate a corresponding credit.
*If you don't like me posting on here you could always ask TSE politely to transfer me from "member" to " applicant" status, that way I can still access and read your posts but no longer post myself. There, that seems like a neat compromise.
At times you really are very silly as demonstrated by your last paragraph
4.5 billion cost as quoted by the IFS is eminently doable
I do apologise for my figures, I misinterpreted what you were writing. You were claiming that stamp duty only generated the Government £4.5b, I misinterpreted that, not least because I was under the misapprehension that the £11.6b figure was cast iron.
The widely accepted figure for stamp duty credit yesterday was £11.6b down from a little over £12b on the previous measurement timescale. I thought even Kemi accepted the stamp duty saving as £9b, although if you say it is only £4.5b I would be surprised, but £4.5b it is.
Nonetheless, how are you paying for that £4.5b shortfall? Nebulous growth wishcasting and bogus service cost savings don't count.
Thank you for your comments and in the scheme of things 4.5 billion is small beer
LOL! I won't be offering to buy you a pint!
You haven't answered my question. How are you paying for that £4.5b shortfall? Nebulous growth wishcasting and bogus service cost savings don't count.
Badenoch announced the end of ev and heat pump subsidies - that accounts for 2.5 billion alone
Yet another example of Badenoch inventing wild numbers. The EV subsidy is capped at £650 million over three years and the heat pump subsidy at £295 million for just one year, nowhere near £2.5 billion per year. It's so illiterate and lazy. If the Conservatives could spend just five minutes on Google if they wanted to "fully cost" their proposals
If so, I accept your revised figures to circa 1 billion pa, but the abolition of stamp duty is now a top priority for the conservatives endorsed by think tanks and many others
It is a bad tax, but more widely Badenoch has put forward a platform of policies that were previously missing and has energised the party
I doubt it will make a big difference in the immediate polling, but this is a four year trek to the next GE and certainly reducing Jenrick's hopes are an even more positive
I think everyone is on board with dumping stamp duty, but some of us are keen to see how it is being paid for.
Maybe Reeves steals Tory clothes.
After disinfecting them, presumably.
One side effect - or intentional effect - to watch out for would be on the fiscal autonomy of the devolved administrations. The tax is devolved; its replacement might not be.
Yes and I understand that, and it may well just be England only but the Scottish and Welsh governments would come under pressure to follow
I hadn't realised that stamp duty was devolved, and how much higher it is for more valuable properties in Scotland. Just check out the difference for, say, a £700K property. £25k in England. £42k in Scotland. Absolutely insane.
Part of the problem there is there are less 700k houses in Scotland than England, there's prob more in SW London alone. So they keep the rates on expensive properties high. Be a right laugh trying to calculate the tax if its a second home!
I see that Nottingham, London and Birmingham are taking, or planning to take, unofficial flags down.
Does anyone have a wider knowledge?
They have to take them down. Otherwise they are inviting everyone and anyone to hijack the public realm with their own pet causes. If people want to plaster their own property with England flags that's their prerogative, but they can't do it on public property.
The local council took down the Welsh flags over the Little Orme for them to be replaced with larger Welsh and Union Jacks flags higher up and social media telling the council 'You take them down, we will put them back up' !!!!
Shame people are willing to waste council taxpayers money on these silly displays of nationalism (often organised by far right activists, who know exactly what they are doing).
Hardly far right with the Welsh Flag being flown
It depends on why it has been put up on a day other than match day. If it is used like some people use the flag of St George as a symbol that "foreigners" aren't welcome it could be.
Conference season ends and I believe the unexpected happened
Kemi Badenoch delivered the best speech, rolled out an array of policies, and stamp duty the 'rabbit out of the hat'
She energised her supporters and have given them something to sell on the doorstep
And she did what I prayed she would, sent out a positive [conservative] message and barely mentioned Starmer or Farage
Labour and Farage fell into the trap of hurling insults at each other to the detriment of both
The added bonus is Jenrick is the biggest loser
I do not know how the polls will react, but today was a start on the long road to relevance
Rabbit out of a hat, or bollocks out of her arse?
Pound shop Liz Truss.
No Kemi identified welfare and spending cuts to fund her tax cut
It wasn't just welfare but cuts in climate change subsidies and increasing north sea production with associated tax income, as well as welcoming back millionaires, entrepreneurs, and wealth creators
She also will scrap IHT on farmers and abolish vat on private school fees
Add in banning doctor strikes
This is conservative policies and is a direct challenge to Labour and Reform
This is pennies BigG. No spending cuts plan is credible without some sort of control on pensioner benefits and health spending. They are are growing so quickly - from a very high base - that any other cut or even steady economic growth is completely overwhelmed by them. Literally by design in the case of the triple lock.
Labour haven't set out a plan either but let's not pretend the Conservative plan is fiscally prudent. DavidL's take on this is correct.
Google tells me that the number of UK civil servants has increased since 2016 by 132,000 and that the median salary is £34k.
That would imply a saving of £4.5bn under the Tory plan.
Not commenting on whether it is feasible or not but it’s not “pennies”
True - but I think the fact the median salary is so low suggests what kinds of roles those civil servants are doing - particularly when you consider how London dominated the civil service is.
If you could cut 130,000 people out of Whitehall or it's equivalent in Scotland, Wales then fair enough. But I think the stats show that increase is primarily agencies like HMRC and DWP. Basically call centres, which would mean a reduced service. AI might be the answer to that but it's not a magic button you can press.
It said that the range was £24 - 84k (from memory - haven’t checked).
The only way to plausibly cuts costs is to stop doing stuff. Governments need to cut verticals rather than horizontally. (Equally I am sure that there are the sort of grinding efficiencies - 1, 2, 3 percent a year - that the private sector makes which government agencies never seem to be able to find)
And that's why, at the moment, this is Potemkin Policy. Tell us which Civil Servants are going to be axed, and what's going to happen to the work they were doing, and it gets interesting. "It won't be done by the state" is a legitimate answer.
Otherwise, Kemi is doing the fun bit without doing the hard work first. Maggie wouldn't have approved.
PB Tories are normally pragmatic people, questioning the symmetry of a Labour or Lib Dem tax cut or spending pledge. "The books don't balance" they will cry.
Yet a welcome Tory £12b tax cut paid by fantasy wastage savings get a free ride.
Fortunately the Tories are not in Government. I am sure if they were the gilt markets might baulk.
They are not “fantasy wastage savings”.
They have said that they will reduce civil service numbers back to 2016 levels. That’s pretty specific - of course they haven’t identified “Me Mexican” or “Ms Pete” as being at risk of being made redundant - but it’s not just a number made up by some spreadsheet jockey.
You had fourteen years in Government. Fourteen years to identify and implement swingeing service cuts to pay for massive tax cuts. You failed. During that 14 years, service provision levels crashed at the same time the tax burden increased.
Posters have quoted Reform fantasy savings in Kent, savings so magnificent that Council tax increases could be suspended, until they found out there were few savings to be made and Council taxes were raised by 5%.
A nice speech offering the Moon on a stick is one thing, shoehorning the contents of that speech into reality is quite another.
Your party and the cheerleaders on here are profoundly unserious.
Good morning
And giveover
Badenoch gave a totally unexpected and successful speech that galvanised her audience and has given her party lots of policies, and of scrapping stamp duty has been well received from think tanks and Paul Johnson formally of the IFS who said yesterday it is the worst of many bad taxes
Your mixture of cynicism and satire is par for the cop* but at least this conservative is pleased to see conservative policies and Jenrick put back in his box
I don't believe I was being remotely cynical or satirical. If you want satire I can write all day about letter boxes and an offensive description of a smile.
You would be the first to criticise ( and justifiably so) an unfunded Reeves pledge. And make no mistake there is nothing in the credit column to match the tax cut in the debit column, except for a nebulous notion of cutting wastage.
If she has done enough to put Jenrick back in his box and take some points from Reform I'll drink to that, but my point stands, her welcome tax cut debit does not demonstrate a corresponding credit.
*If you don't like me posting on here you could always ask TSE politely to transfer me from "member" to " applicant" status, that way I can still access and read your posts but no longer post myself. There, that seems like a neat compromise.
At times you really are very silly as demonstrated by your last paragraph
4.5 billion cost as quoted by the IFS is eminently doable
I do apologise for my figures, I misinterpreted what you were writing. You were claiming that stamp duty only generated the Government £4.5b, I misinterpreted that, not least because I was under the misapprehension that the £11.6b figure was cast iron.
The widely accepted figure for stamp duty credit yesterday was £11.6b down from a little over £12b on the previous measurement timescale. I thought even Kemi accepted the stamp duty saving as £9b, although if you say it is only £4.5b I would be surprised, but £4.5b it is.
Nonetheless, how are you paying for that £4.5b shortfall? Nebulous growth wishcasting and bogus service cost savings don't count.
Thank you for your comments and in the scheme of things 4.5 billion is small beer
LOL! I won't be offering to buy you a pint!
You haven't answered my question. How are you paying for that £4.5b shortfall? Nebulous growth wishcasting and bogus service cost savings don't count.
Badenoch announced the end of ev and heat pump subsidies - that accounts for 2.5 billion alone
Yet another example of Badenoch inventing wild numbers. The EV subsidy is capped at £650 million over three years and the heat pump subsidy at £295 million for just one year, nowhere near £2.5 billion per year. It's so illiterate and lazy. If the Conservatives could spend just five minutes on Google if they wanted to "fully cost" their proposals
If so, I accept your revised figures to circa 1 billion pa, but the abolition of stamp duty is now a top priority for the conservatives endorsed by think tanks and many others
It is a bad tax, but more widely Badenoch has put forward a platform of policies that were previously missing and has energised the party
I doubt it will make a big difference in the immediate polling, but this is a four year trek to the next GE and certainly reducing Jenrick's hopes are an even more positive
I think everyone is on board with dumping stamp duty, but some of us are keen to see how it is being paid for.
Maybe Reeves steals Tory clothes.
After disinfecting them, presumably.
One side effect - or intentional effect - to watch out for would be on the fiscal autonomy of the devolved administrations. The tax is devolved; its replacement might not be.
Yes and I understand that, and it may well just be England only but the Scottish and Welsh governments would come under pressure to follow
I hadn't realised that stamp duty was devolved, and how much higher it is for more valuable properties in Scotland. Just check out the difference for, say, a £700K property. £25k in England. £42k in Scotland. Absolutely insane.
Part of the problem there is there are less 700k houses in Scotland than England, there's prob more in SW London alone. So they keep the rates on expensive properties high. Be a right laugh trying to calculate the tax if its a second home!
My daughter's sale just now saw the buyer at the beginning of the chain here in Wales thinking he had to pay £69,000 duty only to be recalculated as it was an investment at £116,000 so lots of last minute panic and price renegotiations
I see that Nottingham, London and Birmingham are taking, or planning to take, unofficial flags down.
Does anyone have a wider knowledge?
They have to take them down. Otherwise they are inviting everyone and anyone to hijack the public realm with their own pet causes. If people want to plaster their own property with England flags that's their prerogative, but they can't do it on public property.
The local council took down the Welsh flags over the Little Orme for them to be replaced with larger Welsh and Union Jacks flags higher up and social media telling the council 'You take them down, we will put them back up' !!!!
Shame people are willing to waste council taxpayers money on these silly displays of nationalism (often organised by far right activists, who know exactly what they are doing).
Hardly far right with the Welsh Flag being flown
In Scotland it’s exactly far right flag shaggers who are putting up alternating saltires and Union flags. They’re trying to corner the market in ‘true patriotism’ which will protect ar womenfolk & communities and abase itself before Farage. I see no reason to think it’s any different in Wales. Who’s paying for it all is what I’d like to know. Obviously the cheap tat flags from China are pennies but having an operation constantly out and about placing and replacing flags on eg quite high lighting poles on dual c/way central reservations isn’t one guy in a Transit.
I see that Nottingham, London and Birmingham are taking, or planning to take, unofficial flags down.
Does anyone have a wider knowledge?
They have to take them down. Otherwise they are inviting everyone and anyone to hijack the public realm with their own pet causes. If people want to plaster their own property with England flags that's their prerogative, but they can't do it on public property.
The local council took down the Welsh flags over the Little Orme for them to be replaced with larger Welsh and Union Jacks flags higher up and social media telling the council 'You take them down, we will put them back up' !!!!
Shame people are willing to waste council taxpayers money on these silly displays of nationalism (often organised by far right activists, who know exactly what they are doing).
Hardly far right with the Welsh Flag being flown
It depends on why it has been put up on a day other than match day. If it is used like some people use the flag of St George as a symbol that "foreigners" aren't welcome it could be.
Personally, I quite like the England and UK flags. It just feels nice to have my flag flown. This must be what gay people feel like in June and August. Hurray, some people don't despise me. Only in the UK do we get hot and bothered about people flying national flags. Go to Greece, for example: the Greek flag is everywhere.
I see that Nottingham, London and Birmingham are taking, or planning to take, unofficial flags down.
Does anyone have a wider knowledge?
They have to take them down. Otherwise they are inviting everyone and anyone to hijack the public realm with their own pet causes. If people want to plaster their own property with England flags that's their prerogative, but they can't do it on public property.
This is Nottinghamshire CC as of Aug 27:
The leader of Nottinghamshire County Council has urged people to be sensible when putting up flags across the county.
Flags have appeared across Nottinghamshire in recent days on roundabouts, bridges and lamp-posts.
Mick Barton, who leads the Reform-run authority, said it would not be removing flags.
He added: "We know there is a lot of patriotism about and we are just asking people to be sensible."
I see that Nottingham, London and Birmingham are taking, or planning to take, unofficial flags down.
Does anyone have a wider knowledge?
They have to take them down. Otherwise they are inviting everyone and anyone to hijack the public realm with their own pet causes. If people want to plaster their own property with England flags that's their prerogative, but they can't do it on public property.
The local council took down the Welsh flags over the Little Orme for them to be replaced with larger Welsh and Union Jacks flags higher up and social media telling the council 'You take them down, we will put them back up' !!!!
Shame people are willing to waste council taxpayers money on these silly displays of nationalism (often organised by far right activists, who know exactly what they are doing).
Hardly far right with the Welsh Flag being flown
It depends on why it has been put up on a day other than match day. If it is used like some people use the flag of St George as a symbol that "foreigners" aren't welcome it could be.
Union Jacks as well though
I do not know who is responsible but lots of support on local social media
If you remove £X stamp duty from a house purchase, the vendor will expect to receive an extra £X on the sale price, as that is the going rate for their property (all-in). More money in the pockets of vendors, buyers no better off. The Tory Chancellor £10 billion a year worse off.
You could not be more completely wrong. The money received depends upon the scarcity of the asset. Shortage of the asset cost goes up, sufficient of the asset cost goes down. Removing Stamp Duty affects the relationship between price and cost it does not affect value or worth self-evidently.
No. If we imagine a more extreme example - a stamp duty Y of £100 million per property at price X, say - it becomes obvious that the stamp duty reduces demand, and people will invest their money in something else. At the actual level it depresses demand a bit, starting with the people who could just afford the X and moving on to the people who can afford up to X+Y-£1. Removing it creates a space equal to Y which could be given entirely to the buyer (by leaving the price at X) or shared with the seller (who will probably reset the price at, say, X+Y/2). The primary effect of removing stamp duty is therefore to transfer more money from other investments into property, thus benefiting people in the housing market. Whether these are buyers or sellers depends on individual decisions, but realistically it will help them both a bit, at the expense of everyone else (who might have benefited from the tax revenue going elsewhere - e.g. people with moderate mental difficulties, who see their support removed to help pay for it). That's why the measure is of most interest to people who can afford relatively expensive property.
It's a tax on people moving home, particularly if people want to downsize or go to a bungalow from a bigger property. You can continue to tweak the tax system after it is removed, either by reforming Council tax (long overdue) or increasing second home tax. From my experience I don't think stamp duty could be covered by the mortgage so that should help younger/first time buyers
Wrt UBI. One thing I haven't seen mentioned is retraining (sorry I haven't read the whole thread). For example. There is the issue of folk on benefits with mental ill health. We know what works. (And no, it isn't taking away their benefits and telling them to pull their scrounging arses together louder and more frequently). Talking therapy has huge waiting lists or is prohibitively expensive. Why? Because there aren't enough people to deliver. Well. Have you seen the cost of training? It's almost impossible to get any help if you have a first degree. And it isn't something you necessarily want new graduates in their early twenties doing. And that's before the costs of supervision and the time to study as well as 150 hours of unpaid practice. Right now it lends itself open to being an occupation for the already well off.
Changes from 1st October [Find Out Now, 8th October, N=2,668]
Highest ever Green VI in a poll
Zackly what the Greens were hoping for when they elected an articulate populist as leader.
Yes. It's amazing how popular left-populism is. Things like taxing the very rich with a wealth tax and abolishing landlords. If only there was a centre-left party in Government willing to steal those ideas instead of swallowing everything Reform puts in their mouth. ☹️
But it's not popular enough to win a general election. The sort of populism that can do that has to be about identity not class. It needs a retro nativist streak. Blaming immigration and multiculturalism for people's problems is an easier sell than blaming capitalism and the rich.
Comments
When independent bodies endorse the policy, maybe time to accept Badenoch has got this right
Government spending on sports and arts has over time been replaced by lottery money, and allowed expansion in those areas. There’s now hundreds of Olympic athletes and coaches getting a stipend from the lottery, the crowning grory of which was the London Games.
Does anyone have a wider knowledge?
As to the level, I don't know, but obviously it can't be too high. The higher it is the higher the tax bands will have to be and nobody likes that and also it may encourage some to not work. However it has to be high enough so that benefits do not have to be reintroduced. Suspect one needs a few mathematicians/economists and spreadsheets on that one.
Regarding savings I suspect one treats them as a bonus. In the grand scheme of things they will be a small percentage, but for once when a politician says he can save money on bureaucratic wastage it will be true (unlike every other politician at every election).
If UBI was £600 a month and a reasonable amount of hours to work each month is 120, there would be a case for reducing the minimum wage by £5 a hour.
https://www.gov.uk/stamp-duty-land-tax/residential-property-rates
The £300k is a special time-limited exemption for “first time buyers”.
“Really looking forward to all the pro Palestine supporters tweeting their gratitude to Trump for helping to secure a peace deal.“
https://x.com/francisjfoster/status/1976210949745861090
There’s several with the same sentiment, that this is the day we work out who actually wants peace and who are the antisemites.
Trump. Who?
I suffer from TDS, but this is true.
Listening to the radio and you have people just calling it a tax break for the wealthy - that's true but infuriating that people can't or won't see the broader benefits.
I'm worried this will be another WFP
However, comfortably off boomers retireds' capacity to 'allow things they don't like' is less than you think. We all have exactly one vote, like all adults, and most people with the vote are much younger than comfortably off boomers retired. Remarkably few of them use it. It is insane to expect old people to do all the voting for them, though I am doing my best.
As it is People know there is a pain in the arse tax that they have to pay regardless and so have to factor it into their budget.
If you remove that tax it’s doesn’t make people suddenly think “great, I’ve got an extra fifty grand so happy to hand it over to this guy on top of what I think the house is worth”, they are pleased they don’t have to hand over the fifty grand to the tax man but they aren’t suddenly giving it to someone else and are more likely to find a house that’s up in a different bracket as that money is free for them to use not for the tax man.
If people try and add on the old stamp duty amount then people just won’t buy so the seller will drop their price. Nobody says their house is worth £x (where x= house cost+stamp+legal+survey).
Personally I don't believe that it would eliminate 99% of state benefits, so that needs a bit of explainingtoo.
Total income in the UK is about 1.4tn I think? Revenue: £700bn
So there has to some sort of a government scheme for people on low pay who need to live in expensive places, and that’s where it all starts to go wrong.
Then you look at people who are economically inactive but living in some of the most expensive housing in the country, how do they afford to “stay close to their family”?
It's a very old idea with the likes of Milton Friedman arguing for it. And Elon Musk, come to think of it. It's a bit sad that the lines are being drawn on Left/Right axis.
The lottery offers very long-odds bets. There's no other opportunity, albeit a slim one, of transforming a few pounds into many millions of pounds.
Even a large winning bet at 100/1 is not going to return enough money to change your life in the way a lottery jackpot win would.
I don't find it so illogical, viewed from a game theory point of view, rather than a purely numerical one.
I agree with all the questions on welfare though. It isn't that simple once you start looking at individual cases and circumstances.
As the sort of nice model physicists like though, its fine.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/personal-incomes-statistics-for-the-tax-year-2022-to-2023/personal-incomes-statistics-2022-to-2023-summary-statistics
According to the Bank of England, £739 billion in 2009/10 is equivalent to £1,077 billion today.
So in real terms the government is spending £258 billion more than the Brown government (which was not known for fiscal rectitude).
The only “profoundly unserious” people on here are those who claim that every penny of that is wisely spent and absolutely no savings are possible
Every group will lobby for top-ups for their own and withdrawal for their enemies and we'll end up with the same level of form filling and administration but with a big lump called UBI running on top of that.
Find Out Now voting intention:
🟦 Reform UK: 32% (-3)
🔴 Labour: 17% (-2)
🔵 Conservatives: 17% (+3)
🟢 Greens: 15% (+4)
🟠 Lib Dems: 12% (-)
Changes from 1st October
[Find Out Now, 8th October, N=2,668]
Highest ever Green VI in a poll
The spherical cow does sometimes tell us things about the world.
You could fake it without calling it UBI by having unemployment benefits tapered at 50% and a non-linear tax rate (it isn't as if we don't have calculators now).
Savings are always possible, but making them in such a way that money is genuinely saved, and you don't end up incurring unexpected extra costs elsewhere as a result, is hard. We know it is hard, because if it was easy it would have been done already. Everyone always talks about cutting down on waste.
Gordon Brown talked about it. He capped public sector pay increases and had a review into NHS spending to find efficiencies. Obviously it's the sort of thing that you need to have constant vigilance on, because otherwise waste can grow over time, but it's not a get out of jail free card that enables you to cut the deficit and taxes at the same time and avoid any difficult choices on which public services you're going to stop providing.
Why are we spending £258 billon more? It's not because waste has suddenly multiplied. It's because we have a larger population, an ageing population (more pensions, more healthcare costs), we're paying for COVID-19 (interest on debt + ongoing increased health and disability payments), more generous pensions, we're paying the costs of a war in Ukraine (increased energy costs, aid to Ukraine, increase military spending), and Brexit.
Nobody else (yet) has had them sub 20 this parliament
Those savings Badenoch has claimed to have in mind I would question; why was the saving not implemented up to July 2024?
If you want to cut large amounts of government spending you have to do one of a small number of things.
You can cut large amounts of fiscal transfers from the state, which mostly comes down to pensions.
You can cut the pay of people who work for the state. Ireland did this in the exceptional circumstances of being functionality bankrupt and having the Troika imposed on them.
You can cut the number of people who work for the state, and do without the work that they did. We see how well that is working with the Coalition cuts to the Courts Service.
There is no free lunch.
And note the choice of 2009/10 as a baseline - the following year debt interest jumped quite sharply, starting its decade and a half rise.
So turning back the clock is going to be massively harder than the comparison implies.
The "we will cut civil service numbers to 2016 levels" also blithely ignores the changes in the civil service consequent on Brexit.
The road back to fiscal rectitude is likely to be a very rocky one, and politicians pretending otherwise are some combination of stupid and dishonest.
I'm fairly strongly in favour of UBI, but only if it completely replaces a whole load of other benefits and tax reliefs, and removes the burden of managing that bureaucracy from the system entirely.
The whole point of UBI is that it's universal, not some sort of qualifiable add-on. Many Libertarians view it as a great opportunity to vastly streamline and simplify. But I worry that there are people in favour for entirely the wrong reasons....
https://thecritic.co.uk/why-jenrick-is-right-to-judge-the-judges/
https://thecritic.co.uk/tawdry-roots-of-a-deeply-damaging-doctrine/
Government is way too gullible compared with the private sector.
"However, that consensus is entirely wrong. The idea that the judiciary should be appointed by an independent body, without any meaningful oversight by ministers or Parliament is a modern invention. It was brought into being by the Blair government, as part of its “constitutional reform” agenda, with the claimed goal of “enhancing accountability and ensuring greater public confidence”. "
This is disingenuous. The appointment of the judiciary was largely independent of government for many years before. The Blair government tidied up the details.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/oct/09/richard-desmond-seeks-13m-claim-gambling-commission-uk-lottery
The billionaire media mogul Richard Desmond will urge a court to “err on the side of generosity” in assessing a £1.3bn damages claim against the Gambling Commission that would probably have to be funded by taxpayers if he wins. [...]
The Dubai-based billionaire is seeking damages of up to £1.3bn. A victory for the media mogul could have a significant cost for charities and the taxpayer because any payout would have to come from a lottery pot of money set aside to fund good causes.
If the payout is larger than the fund, which is understood to receive about £30m a week from lottery ticket sales, the taxpayer would have to foot the bill."
It will be really funny if Labour come third in a poll.
It will be even funnier (in a horror movie way) if they come fourth... ☹️
That's the most misunderstood thing in British politics. Even the vast majority on PB.com get it hopelessly wrong.
It will be even funnier (in a horror movie way) if they come fourth... ☹️
Labour on 50 seats. !!!!!
https://x.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1976266326097252401?s=19
The Corbyn Socially Conservative Party due to be launched next month.
Green plus Your 30%??
https://x.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1976266326097252401?s=19
Who’s paying for it all is what I’d like to know. Obviously the cheap tat flags from China are pennies but having an operation constantly out and about placing and replacing flags on eg quite high lighting poles on dual c/way central reservations isn’t one guy in a Transit.
Only in the UK do we get hot and bothered about people flying national flags. Go to Greece, for example: the Greek flag is everywhere.
The leader of Nottinghamshire County Council has urged people to be sensible when putting up flags across the county.
Flags have appeared across Nottinghamshire in recent days on roundabouts, bridges and lamp-posts.
Mick Barton, who leads the Reform-run authority, said it would not be removing flags.
He added: "We know there is a lot of patriotism about and we are just asking people to be sensible."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly7qdnxpy2o
I do not know who is responsible but lots of support on local social media
For example. There is the issue of folk on benefits with mental ill health.
We know what works. (And no, it isn't taking away their benefits and telling them to pull their scrounging arses together louder and more frequently).
Talking therapy has huge waiting lists or is prohibitively expensive.
Why? Because there aren't enough people to deliver.
Well. Have you seen the cost of training? It's almost impossible to get any help if you have a first degree. And it isn't something you necessarily want new graduates in their early twenties doing. And that's before the costs of supervision and the time to study as well as 150 hours of unpaid practice.
Right now it lends itself open to being an occupation for the already well off.
What do you call a judge with no thumbs?
Justice Fingers.