A plurality of voters think gambling taxes are too low – politicalbetting.com
A plurality of voters think gambling taxes are too low – politicalbetting.com
With gambling firms saying they might have to close betting shops if taxes on gambling are raised, do the public think taxes on gambling are too high or low?Too high: 7%Too low: 33%About right: 18%Don't know: 43%yougov.co.uk/topics/socie…
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DON'T RUIN MY HOLIDAY.
Because I suspect the answer would be different if you said With gambling firms saying they might have to close betting shops if taxes on gambling are raised, losing 30,000 jobs do the public think taxes on gambling are too high or low?
So it's quite useful to know if the question was
Should we tax gambling firms more?
or gambling firms saying they might have to close betting shops if taxes on gambling are raised, Should we tax gambling firms more?
Good morning, everybody.
Income Tax
Capital Gains Tax
Employees' National Insurance Contributions (NICs)
Inheritance Tax (IHT)
Indirect Taxes & Duties
Value Added Tax
Insurance Premium Tax
Excise Duties
Stamp Duty
Property/Land Taxes
Council Tax
Landfill Tax
Income Tax for Sole Traders
Taxes on Dividends
Council Tax
Tax on Vehicles
Corporation Tax
Employers' NICs
etc etc etc
still leave the government with a huge deficit and no growth, just maybe the problem is spending?
But our dismal government has failed completely to keep that under control.
So they tend to discount the immediate scare stories. Which usually turn out to be untrue anyway, so they say, well, we were right to ignore them.
The longer term negative impact then gets lost in the void somewhat.
The fact that means people lose their jobs or the unit will be empty for ages afterwards are secondary factors which don't enter their minds when they think - high taxes, something I don't like gone...
But again, that's not the immediate issue. And if it's not all of the shops at once people probably won't notice.
Betting shops have been closing, many after the changes to the FOBT machines.
https://x.com/cjsnowdon/status/1980341362366275653?s=61
So the government is borrowing £20bn in a month, and £100bn in the first six months, that latter figure 13% higher year-on-year.
Err, I think it’s fair to say the public finances are totally Donald Ducked at this point.
Rachel needs to find £50bn of tax rises and £50bn of spending cuts this year, as an absolute minimum, and that’s still only half way to fixing the problem. At this stage in the economic cycle govt should be close to running a surplus.
I think it is mostly seen as a sin tax, and discouraging gambling is like discouraging smoking, a good thing in all circumstances.
With the machines neutered somewhat in recent years, the operators will close the shops and move the online business offshore. So Rachel ends up with no taxes at all.
Short of banning UK banks from dealing with offshore bookies, she’s screwed.
Now longer term most business rates are based on achieved rents but reductions take 2-5 years to feed through into business rates
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Z8_JLWd80Mw
A 50-seconds video. The claim is that in a debate, President GHW Bush, while being questioned, looked at his watch. Those who saw it gave Clinton the win, whereas listeners lent to Bush.
It parallels the well-known finding in JFK/Nixon where radio listeners thought Nixon won but television viewers gave the verdict to Kennedy, who won the election.
https://news.stv.tv/scotland/scottish-private-schools-say-rolls-down-more-than-1000-since-vat-imposed-on-fees
I'm not sure where we are with FOBTs. Is there room for significantly reducing the numbers of them around?
Are they are major money-laundering route?
Are they still a plague on poorer people?
(These are one of those things I have just never done - ever, like getting legless drunk, smoking, drugs, online gaming. I have my other vices, I am sure - just not those.)
That’s the a feature of high skilled, well paid immigrants. They are more mobile than the UK locals and look at changing country like changing house.
If the tax/service/environment doesn’t improve, a bunch of colleagues at the bank might well ask to move to a different European office.
Why not? As they are all immigrants from outside Europe, it just means asking the bank to pay for some relatively cheap paperwork.
They don’t have to even change jobs - we are a distributed team, home working etc already. Joining the daily all from Rome or wherever makes little difference.
But the greatest damage if there is any isn't going to be yet. Give it two years, while the current cohort work through A-level and particularly GCSE, and then we shall see the impact.
The fact that already the numbers are very out of kilter with government estimates (as in, three times as much) does not bode well, but is not on its own conclusive.
I would expect the same with betting shops, although as demand for them is more elastic the timeframes will be shorter.
She'll need to raise taxes very significantly, and my guess is income tax threshold freeze, inheritance tax hike and a raid on pensions allowances at the very least.
She might even go further. She won't meaningfully cut spending.
Half the problem the country faces is that it’s never recovered from Brown turning on the taps after the 2001 election, which made the 2008-9 recession much worse than it should have been, and it was just about back to level when the pandemic hit, and now appears to be getting worse rather than better.
With falling rolls, of course, smaller class sizes would actually be very easy to attain. Just keep the staffing levels constant and watch as ratios contract.
But, of course, they are closing schools and cutting staff instead because funding is per pupil not en bloc.
Basically, we aren’t in recession. Yet. Recession will come. It always has. So the classic thinking is that while tax returns are high, pay down the borrowing. This gives you space to borrow in the recession that will come.
As things are, when the next recession starts, tax returns will drop. The budget deficit could easily double. And the cost of borrowing then rockets…
Another that raises more money than we think it does, is the electric car salary sacrifice and company car tax allowances. This saves my brother £10k a year. Just don’t tell Ed Miliband.
47 times, according to Rawnsley.
Then claimed what he had actually said was 'no more Tory boom and bust.'
Everything else is running on a shoestring already after the cuts since 2010.
Given that the Labour strategy for the next election is to gamble everything on improving the NHS, and the government have already backed down on a modest cut to pensioner payouts, then she has zero room for manoeuvre.
The only meaningful card she has left to play is a new property tax.
It should have been banking the taxes from the bankers’ bonuses and saving them for a rainy day.
Then it didn’t rain but it poured, and the crappy finances made the recession and the recovery from it much worse than otherwise would have been the case.
But I see none of the obvious sense of urgency required. We need £20-40bn a year more tax revenue and at least that in spending cuts to have any real impact on our trajectory.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c231n2zlpreo
By 2007 the UK economy was a disaster waiting to happen.
John Major was prepared to lose the next election by trying to ensure the public finances were on a sound footing.
The Tories led in a poll with ICM months after Black Wednesday, it was the tax rises that really ruined the Tories, they spent the 1992 election campaign banging on about Labour's tax rises.
what he would define as playing “fast and loose with the public finances”
Responding to the figures, Chief Secretary to the Treasury James Murray said the government would "never play fast and loose with the public finances".
He reiterated the government's aim of bringing down borrowing, to be rid of "costly debt interest, instead putting that money into our NHS, schools and police".
This was from the bbc article linked on the last thread but I can’t be arsed to find it again to link to source so you’ll just have to take my word for it
A well designed property tax alongside scrapping stamp duty would be a permanent legacy. No one will be able to afford scrapping it, and it would rebalance the UK economy to make those who benefitted from property price boom contribute.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8035130918o
The bond markets are not going to be too happy, which is a problem when you have £2trn of debt.
The real question for the CoE is how to keep a decent slice of the whole industry within UK tax system by ensuring it is overall competitive with Abroadland. There is an obvious logical problem about taxing gambling anyway - it automatically affects the odds setter who need a greater margin simply to break even, which if pushed far enough destroys the economic model of legal gambling, encouraging the illegal market. A bit like fags costing £150 for 20.
It may be legal but it’s unethical
By 1996, the PSBR was falling sharply; the UK was in its fifth year of economic growth; inflation was under control.
You can argue where it all then went wrong, but to claim Brown didn't inherit a robust economy in 1997 is just silly.
At best it indicates 43% are honest, and 57% happy to pontificate on any old crap.
"Responding to the figures, Chief Secretary to the Treasury James Murray said the government would "never play fast and loose with the public finances".
He reiterated the government's aim of bringing down borrowing, to be rid of "costly debt interest, instead putting that money into our NHS, schools and police"."
So, how, exactly, does "bringing down" borrowing (which is, of course, going up) "get rid" of debt interest?
The cost of that debt interest is rising very fast, £9.7bn in debt interest in September, which was up by £3.8bn from the same month last year. It will continue to increase as we roll over the "free" money borrowed at very low rates after 2008 to current rates (and which so many people criticised the government of not taking even more advantage of). It is the largest single element driving increased borrowing and it will be so over the next decade at least. The only way to "get rid" of it is to pay it back.
When they were proven to be a mirage we had something like a 10% of GDP structural deficit (ie excluding the impact of normal fiscal cycles). That’s just not sustainable
Each time they do the media runs stories saying “isn’t this funny” and a bunch of muppets thinks it’s actually a good idea…
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9904dz73pyo.amp
In the middle of the story is this:
https://x.com/RonWyden/status/1980317836934513051
...Here’s the other big problem: Treasury Secretary Bessent is sitting on a massive Epstein file containing thousands more bank documents that would help us continue to follow the money through his sex trafficking ring...
There certainly wasn't anything 'booming' in production and investment.
The UK economy was due for a recession around 2000 - instead Brown kept pumping in the borrowed money to keep consumption and house prices rising and to realise his own political ambitions.
Retired people are expensive to look after. Even if they are not yet needing expensive healthcare and social care, even if they are funding their retirement out of savings, the lack of tax they used to be paying hits the government on the income side. That's not a moral judgement, just a bit of arithmetic. (Talking of which, has anyone done the maths on how much of the GDP per head stagnation is due to more grey heads not doing very much production now?)
No, I don't know what the politically acceptable solution to this is.
Revisionists: Brown was overspending, stupidly assuming the city would generate mega money forever
Tories07: We'll match ever pound of Labour's spending commitments AND inflate the bubble even harder to create cash for tax cuts. And we're sick of the city being tied up in all this red tape. Lets slash it and free the banks up to go even harder.
In hindsight what Brown/Darling did was stupid. But at the time the Tories offered the alternative of even harder stupid. Lets not stick one side on a pedestal and the other in the gutter - both were in the same gutter with the same policies. The only competition was who could let the city get furthest out of control fastest...
George Osborne:
The Shadow Chancellor who failed to predict a recession which happened.
The Chancellor who predicted a recession which didn't happen.
OTOH my wife is fascinated by it and, like when Alison Hammond is on TV, I just have to bite my lip when it’s on.
(Vienna - geddit?)
Yet there must have been many, many more Americans involved with him.
Its almost as it information is being supressed.
He is still Duke of York, he just doesn't want to be called that.
I'm with Gandalf on the Ents on this one: "The Ents are about to wake up and find they are strong". If only ...
Had to tell off our newly moved-in neighbours from India for setting Divali fireworks off in the street! Then the people opposite, fellow British Asians, also told them off, and our neighbours then had the gall to rush over to start a fight, making verbal threats and swearing!. The people opposite called the police, they came round quite quickly, and they had had a word with the Indians. There is a word for this, and it's called "Indian Fatigue" (try typing into Youtube for example). And I say this as someone born in India!!
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/10/21/george-abaraonye-oxford-union-president-charlie-kirk/
If Brown had been running a 4% surplus (say) then the GFC would have wiped that out, maybe put us into mild deficit. And we would have had less debt. There would have been scope for some borrowing to be counter cyclic - rather than cuts.
Note that the Labour plan was more cuts than Osborne.
The Russian oligarch Vladimir Chernukhin and his wife, Lubov, have long been known for their generous support for the Conservative Party. Since 2012 Lubov has given the party at least £2.1 million, as well as an individual gift to former home secretary Priti Patel of a further £70,000 to fund her bid for the party leadership last year.
But these are uncertain times, and now, UnHerd can reveal, the Chernukhins are cultivating new political friends. Over two days in the first week of August, at their turreted villa with a stunning view of the Mediterranean at Cap d’Antibes, they hosted Reform UK Deputy Leader Richard Tice along with his partner, the journalist Isabel Oakeshott.
They had dinner à quatre at the Michelin-starred restaurant at the Grand-Hotel du Cap-Ferrat; Tice told me the meal was “very good”.
https://unherd.com/newsroom/richard-tice-holidays-with-russian-oligarch-on-riviera/
The presenting story is that it was not declared until the day after he was asked about it.
The lesson was (and is) to try and run a surplus in the boom times.
Winter is coming.