It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
I mean she’s not wrong. We have been living beyond our means for a long time
It’s all talk.
Yet she won’t do anything about reforming the triple lock or tackling her party over the burgeoning welfare bill.
It will be taxing ourselves to prosperity and regulating ourselves to prosperity.
The only growth she’s going to see is in emigration, and if she tries to tax that it will happen straight away and all at once.
So people are going to leave the UK in big numbers because of an exit tax and perhaps move to one of US, Canada, France, Germany, Norway, Spain or Australia that all have similar or stricter exit taxes? Maybe, people are sometimes a bit dim.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. The trouble is the whinging has acquired a life of its own- the Mail is particularly whingey- but the truth is a lot more nuanced.
It is just rich people whinging in an echo chamber. The UK is a premium location, which is why we have such low emigration rates.
Number of people leaving has risen massively. The question that doesn't seem to get answered (I think because the state doesn't record this) is who are these people. Are they people who were immigrants returning home, are they retirees going to Spain, are they highly educated individuals, rich people? Basically what proprotion of the significantly increased levels of emigration do these different types of make up (and many are overlapping e.g. high educated immigrant).
Emigration by British citizens has been falling since 2020 and is at a lower level than any time since Q4 1991 (the earlier point on the graph). Non-EU emigration has over doubled in this period. EU emigration has quadrupled.
There's never a good time to break manifesto pledges on taxes. To do so immediately after winning the election is bad. To do so immediately before the next election is foolish.
So, maybe to do so after 18 months but with a few years to get over it before the next GE is the optimum time.
They are going to get completely pummelled for it if they raise income tax*, and given our rolling news age I’m not sure that story will be closed down.
*the only way I can see them managing to - somewhat - pull it off will be if they make a corresponding cut to NI. That’ll give them their ability to hide behind the “working people” mantra.
That would be the right thing to do economically.
Even better if a four year plan was outlined to get rid of employees national insurance in 4x2% stages with income tax being increased by 4x2%.
It would also partially solve the issue of salary sacrifice pensions and likely encourage workers from not retiring as early.
The outrage though from those affected would be deafening.
I remember when pensioners were phoning in complaining about Hunt's NICs cut - because it was a tax cut that they wouldn't enjoy.
Anecdotally I've heard a few oldies complain about paying income tax recently.
Not the possibility of the state pension being higher than the individual tax allowance but having to pay income tax on the work pensions they currently receive.
It wouldn't surprise me if most oldies think they should be exempt from income tax entirely.
Quite a few people believe that pensioners pay no tax. And get upset when they retire and find out they do.
TAX 1) Rewrite the tax code - we need to make it much simpler with far fewer discounts and loopholes. Raise more money by setting lower rates that people actually have to pay 2) Asset Value tax. Tax the land and the buildings, not a hypothetical rent from the 90s 3) Non-Dom tax. Please come here, live in swanky apartments in that London. Pay us half a mil a year and no further questions asked 4) Company Value tax. Offer companies a FAT discount off Corporation Tax if they invest in the value of their staff and assets. Do actual training and development so that your employees are the best they can be. Pay them enough money so that they can actually pay their bills. Trained and happy staff are more productive, boosting economic output and reducing in work welfare payments 5) Offshored assets tax, or the "Starbucks" tax. Basically tax them as if they're not actually buying coffee from Luxembourg - which despite their tax set up they are not. With a fat discount if they onshore fully. Radical idea - pay tax in the UK for business done in the UK you degenerate bastards 6) A sex tax. Getting some? Pay out. 7) Investment tax credits. Come and build your AI data server near where we have so much power that we have to switch the turbines off. Huge savings to be offered.
SPEND 1) Scrap the faux-market structures in public services. An end to endless NHS and Education trusts. 2) Create StateCo enterprises to run and modernise the railways, the post office, the roads, power infrastructure etc. Borrow, invest, ROI, Growth 3) HouseCo organisations. Borrow money at state rates, automatic planning permission given to build on redundant council sites. A use it or lose it 6 months deadline on landbanking by Barratts et al. Build affordable apartments and rent them at social rent levels. Thus collapsing the private rental sector and with it correcting house prices 4) Launch municipal funds - councils should be investing in civic infrastructure not property speculation. Copy Manchester - build apartments in run down town and city centres so people live there. The rest will follow as it has in Manchester. 5) Decouple energy prices from gas. Prices drop 30-40% as they have in Spain, freeing up cash to spend elsewhere 6) Abolish the OBR, hire new brains into the Treasury. Abolish the annual budget cycle - a cut to hit this year's budget target which costs more than the cut next year is economic vandalism, yet we do it over and over and over again. No more.
As a starter for 10
"5) Decouple energy prices from gas."
I've never understood why the price is still tied to gas. Maybe I am missing something obvious?
The chance of VAT being increased is nil. Labour don't like VAT
I am not entirely convinced NI will be cut as that would lose a lot of revenue and thus 'waste' the revenue increasing benefits of raising income tax
Increases in income tax, threshold freezes indeed possible reductions in the higher rate and additional rate thresholds , also a possible new band between £45k and £50k seem virtually certain
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
I mean she’s not wrong. We have been living beyond our means for a long time
And yet she chose to increase spending by £60bn per year in the last budget. That's a choice she made and now because her tax rises have failed to yield enough we're left with an even bigger shortfall than what they purported to start with.
This is all her own fault. She could have cut spending on day one, made modest tax rises and moved towards balancing the budget but instead she chose to blow the budget on public sector pay rises and the endless money pit that is the NHS. Now she's back for more tax rises because, whoops, business investment crashed and now the economy is slowing down so not enough tax is being raised.
She's worse than useless, actively harmful to the national economy.
I personally am not bothered about being taxed a bit more if it means we don’t have to cut the NHS
It’s important to think of “The NHS” in terms of outputs though, not in terms of inputs.
Throwing ever increasing piles of money at an unreformed system does nothing to help with the actual problem.
Yes and no. There is still room in the NHS for a bit more funding (c.f. to other comparator nations we spend less as a proportion of GDP). I'm also not totally sure what reforms are needed to make the system more efficient, say, as the NHS is actually pretty efficient. I would like to see social care and the NHS integrated and a return to cottage hospitals. But I am not sure what is so wrong in the NHS that needs huge reform.
Re the Budget: The answer is 2p or 3p on the basic rate of income tax but with a large increase in the tax free allowance. They would be able to say that they have not increased tax for a large proportion of the population -the "Workers", whilst increasing the take from the high earners. Increasing the tax free allowance would help the lowest paid and take millions out of paying tax. I am already paying tax on my state pension.
Many would argue this is the opposite to what we should be doing. Our tax base has narrowed considerably over the years. Partly due to demographics, partly deliberate tax policy. The fewer people you tax, the more you have to charge those who do pay.
Another topic where Dan Neidle’s site has some useful analysis.
And it gives the minted flounce-threateners more influence.
I thought it was a decent speech from Reeves . It doesn’t remove the problem of likely breaking manifesto pledges .
People can debate whether Labour should have made that tax pledge.
What is there to debate? It was obviously a stupid promise, that has forced the government into a series of other poor measures to raise revenue, and basically wasted an entire year in office. Now they will get to look like "just another bunch of lying politicians who broke their promises".
Was it good politics? Yes if you think getting elected is all that matters, but not if you actually wish to govern, which is the entire point of getting elected in the first place.
If Reeves was the CFO of a company, she would already have got the boot.
And Reform and the Tories will continue to ignore reality . The country needs taxes to go up not down unless they want public services to collapse.
That's true, but it makes Labour look particularly bad if the best they can say is "they are lying as well". Crazy idea but perhaps leadership means telling the country some things that it doesn't want to hear?
Is anyone actually paying any attention to the Tories anyway?
I did enjoy the clips going around of yesterday. Philip stands at the dispatch box talking about knife crime and demanding more people be jailed for it which means deporting the forrin. Gets called out. Says "I didn't say that, withdraw!" as if Hansard are deaf.
Tories attacking Labour on tax rises will be fun to watch. As godawful as this government is, people still remember that the Tories were worse. Hence the polls.
TAX 1) Rewrite the tax code - we need to make it much simpler with far fewer discounts and loopholes. Raise more money by setting lower rates that people actually have to pay 2) Asset Value tax. Tax the land and the buildings, not a hypothetical rent from the 90s 3) Non-Dom tax. Please come here, live in swanky apartments in that London. Pay us half a mil a year and no further questions asked 4) Company Value tax. Offer companies a FAT discount off Corporation Tax if they invest in the value of their staff and assets. Do actual training and development so that your employees are the best they can be. Pay them enough money so that they can actually pay their bills. Trained and happy staff are more productive, boosting economic output and reducing in work welfare payments 5) Offshored assets tax, or the "Starbucks" tax. Basically tax them as if they're not actually buying coffee from Luxembourg - which despite their tax set up they are not. With a fat discount if they onshore fully. Radical idea - pay tax in the UK for business done in the UK you degenerate bastards 6) A sex tax. Getting some? Pay out. 7) Investment tax credits. Come and build your AI data server near where we have so much power that we have to switch the turbines off. Huge savings to be offered.
SPEND 1) Scrap the faux-market structures in public services. An end to endless NHS and Education trusts. 2) Create StateCo enterprises to run and modernise the railways, the post office, the roads, power infrastructure etc. Borrow, invest, ROI, Growth 3) HouseCo organisations. Borrow money at state rates, automatic planning permission given to build on redundant council sites. A use it or lose it 6 months deadline on landbanking by Barratts et al. Build affordable apartments and rent them at social rent levels. Thus collapsing the private rental sector and with it correcting house prices 4) Launch municipal funds - councils should be investing in civic infrastructure not property speculation. Copy Manchester - build apartments in run down town and city centres so people live there. The rest will follow as it has in Manchester. 5) Decouple energy prices from gas. Prices drop 30-40% as they have in Spain, freeing up cash to spend elsewhere 6) Abolish the OBR, hire new brains into the Treasury. Abolish the annual budget cycle - a cut to hit this year's budget target which costs more than the cut next year is economic vandalism, yet we do it over and over and over again. No more.
As a starter for 10
On Tax - I would have one rate of tax paid by all. Make it 20%. No changes to higher rates. The more you earn the more you pay.
There's never a good time to break manifesto pledges on taxes. To do so immediately after winning the election is bad. To do so immediately before the next election is foolish.
So, maybe to do so after 18 months but with a few years to get over it before the next GE is the optimum time.
They are going to get completely pummelled for it if they raise income tax*, and given our rolling news age I’m not sure that story will be closed down.
*the only way I can see them managing to - somewhat - pull it off will be if they make a corresponding cut to NI. That’ll give them their ability to hide behind the “working people” mantra.
That would be the right thing to do economically.
Even better if a four year plan was outlined to get rid of employees national insurance in 4x2% stages with income tax being increased by 4x2%.
It would also partially solve the issue of salary sacrifice pensions and likely encourage workers from not retiring as early.
The outrage though from those affected would be deafening.
I remember when pensioners were phoning in complaining about Hunt's NICs cut - because it was a tax cut that they wouldn't enjoy.
Anecdotally I've heard a few oldies complain about paying income tax recently.
Not the possibility of the state pension being higher than the individual tax allowance but having to pay income tax on the work pensions they currently receive.
It wouldn't surprise me if most oldies think they should be exempt from income tax entirely.
It's going to get a lot worse when people with defined contribution pensions start claiming their pensions. They will have a pot of money from which they withdraw some money from on which they will be paying income tax and if you look at it as pulling money from your savings that isn't income.
Indeed.
I've already worked out roughly how much income tax would be paid on my DC pension even if I retired at 55.
And any reduction in the tax free pension lump sum allowance will affect increasing numbers of people.
I'm hoping this isn't the case but if the already ineffably stupid OSA is expanded to ban VPNs that'll throw the work I currently have onto a bonfire.
Regular PBers may remember AI ate a load of my work a couple of years ago after which I had a wonderful and not at all soul-destroying year or so of trying to find more work. If unbelievably stupid government regulation then destroys what I've currently got it it would be fair to say I would be less than happy.
How could you actually ban VPNs? I mean, even the Chinese haven't managed that. Or at least, they are banned but everyone ignores the law.
What I suspect they’ll do is demand Apple/Google/Microsoft app stores remove the most prominent VPNs, have banks block payments to them, ban them from advertising in UK etc.
Of course it’s a giant whack-a-mole, and government has no chance of doing anything but educating teenagers on evasion tactics.
Google are moving Android to ability to restrict installs of apps from I think next year. They say it is for "safety" with only app developers that have provided all their details and approved will be able to install those apps. Not won't be able to download from app store, won't be able to install / run them. Doesn't take much to flick a switch to ban certain apps from ever installing. Amazon have done this with the Firestick (which is an android device), they now can remotely blacklist apps which won't run.
Something that came after extensive lobbying from sports rightsholders, knowing that sideloaded Android apps are responsible for a significant amount of TV piracy. Amazon realised it when they started broadcasting live sports.
TAX 1) Rewrite the tax code - we need to make it much simpler with far fewer discounts and loopholes. Raise more money by setting lower rates that people actually have to pay 2) Asset Value tax. Tax the land and the buildings, not a hypothetical rent from the 90s 3) Non-Dom tax. Please come here, live in swanky apartments in that London. Pay us half a mil a year and no further questions asked 4) Company Value tax. Offer companies a FAT discount off Corporation Tax if they invest in the value of their staff and assets. Do actual training and development so that your employees are the best they can be. Pay them enough money so that they can actually pay their bills. Trained and happy staff are more productive, boosting economic output and reducing in work welfare payments 5) Offshored assets tax, or the "Starbucks" tax. Basically tax them as if they're not actually buying coffee from Luxembourg - which despite their tax set up they are not. With a fat discount if they onshore fully. Radical idea - pay tax in the UK for business done in the UK you degenerate bastards 6) A sex tax. Getting some? Pay out. 7) Investment tax credits. Come and build your AI data server near where we have so much power that we have to switch the turbines off. Huge savings to be offered.
SPEND 1) Scrap the faux-market structures in public services. An end to endless NHS and Education trusts. 2) Create StateCo enterprises to run and modernise the railways, the post office, the roads, power infrastructure etc. Borrow, invest, ROI, Growth 3) HouseCo organisations. Borrow money at state rates, automatic planning permission given to build on redundant council sites. A use it or lose it 6 months deadline on landbanking by Barratts et al. Build affordable apartments and rent them at social rent levels. Thus collapsing the private rental sector and with it correcting house prices 4) Launch municipal funds - councils should be investing in civic infrastructure not property speculation. Copy Manchester - build apartments in run down town and city centres so people live there. The rest will follow as it has in Manchester. 5) Decouple energy prices from gas. Prices drop 30-40% as they have in Spain, freeing up cash to spend elsewhere 6) Abolish the OBR, hire new brains into the Treasury. Abolish the annual budget cycle - a cut to hit this year's budget target which costs more than the cut next year is economic vandalism, yet we do it over and over and over again. No more.
As a starter for 10
On Tax - I would have one rate of tax paid by all. Make it 20%. No changes to higher rates. The more you earn the more you pay.
PB - Explain why I am wrong.
We aren't that far apart. My UBI proposal (which I somehow left off the list) gives everyone a fixed income from the government and then taxes Every Single Penny you earn.
For most people that would mean a flat rate.
If the ultra rich paid 20% tax as you propose then we would be rolling in money. The challenge would be nailing shut their escape routes. Which is why we'd need to tax asset value and do something about scum who pay themselves through a company (hi).
There's never a good time to break manifesto pledges on taxes. To do so immediately after winning the election is bad. To do so immediately before the next election is foolish.
So, maybe to do so after 18 months but with a few years to get over it before the next GE is the optimum time.
They are going to get completely pummelled for it if they raise income tax*, and given our rolling news age I’m not sure that story will be closed down.
*the only way I can see them managing to - somewhat - pull it off will be if they make a corresponding cut to NI. That’ll give them their ability to hide behind the “working people” mantra.
That would be the right thing to do economically.
Even better if a four year plan was outlined to get rid of employees national insurance in 4x2% stages with income tax being increased by 4x2%.
It would also partially solve the issue of salary sacrifice pensions and likely encourage workers from not retiring as early.
The outrage though from those affected would be deafening.
I remember when pensioners were phoning in complaining about Hunt's NICs cut - because it was a tax cut that they wouldn't enjoy.
Anecdotally I've heard a few oldies complain about paying income tax recently.
Not the possibility of the state pension being higher than the individual tax allowance but having to pay income tax on the work pensions they currently receive.
It wouldn't surprise me if most oldies think they should be exempt from income tax entirely.
Most people think that taxes should be paid by other people.
It seems the country's going to be a lot quieter once all the people supposedly leaving have gone....
We all know Reeves and Starmer should have been honest about raising income tax and perhaps VAT before the election but the shadow cast by 1992 is very long and it would have been manna from heaven for Sunak and Hunt - "Labour will raise your taxes, the Conservatives will cut them" - the social media messages write themselves.
We also know, in the event of their re-election, Hunt would likely have raised taxes as well.
The deficit remains eye watering - no one objects to borrowing for long term capital investment but borrowing to get from one month to the next doesn't work well for individuals or countries. The truth is even if we can bring the deficit and borrowing down we will still be saddled with the annual debt interest payments of £60-70 billion tearing a chunk out of our available expenditure.
The priority for now must be getting the deficit down and while some of the more fanciful ideas on here about slashing civil service headcount by 50% and cutting benefits by the same amount might make some on here feel better, we all know that won't happen under a Labour, Conservative or even Reform Government.
Raising basic rate progressively to 25p, higher rate to nearer 50p and instigating a third higher tax rate is probably where Reeves is going. I'd still be looking at Land Value Taxation or some measure relating to property valuations to replace Stamp Duty and possibly Council Tax. As a small gesture of carrot, I'd put thresholds up by 2x inflation this year and pledge to keep them in line with inflation for the rest of the Parliament.
It looks as though online gaming and FOBTs in betting shops will face higher tax but it may be the lobbying by the horse racing and greyhound industries has done enough to stop a significant rise in betting duty. I suspect fuel duty will go up by more than inflation as well.
The biggest problem is the entrenched belief, among the electorate, that increased taxes will simply disappear into the maw of government, without noticeable improvement.
It's fairly clear that much of Government, local and national has lost control of costs. It's Feast-Or-Famine - either there's no money for X or theres billions spent on something that should cost millions.
The migrant hotels farce is a prefect example of this - an avalanche of money for the owners. I don't blame them - times are tough in the hotel business. If someone is offering you a zero risk, unbelievably profitable multi-year contract, you'd be insane not to take it.
We need to start cutting our cloth according to the.... cloth we actually have.
I know that a British Museum catalogue without a logo, a Richard Rogeresque HQ, some abstract sculpture in the foyer and a mission statement, isn't exciting. Not to mention a "dynamic team" for the Board of Directors on 6 figures each for 2 days of work as year.
But if we ditch those things, we might be able to afford a... British Museum catalogue.
People also have very distorted ideas of where the money goes. Migrant hotels and the British Museum are not why public spending is high. The money goes on healthcare and pensions, both of which are going up with an ageing population.
Sky newsflash; Sir Alan Bates has settled with the Post Office. 'Seven figure sum;' suggested.
I would have given him and the other SPMs a chunk of Post Office stock (it's 100% owned by the government - given them 30%). Then made them the board of directors. With the existing management locked in, below them.
Oh, and given the prosecution unit at the PO the job of dealing with Vennells etc. "Hunt them down, all nightmare long".
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
I mean she’s not wrong. We have been living beyond our means for a long time
It’s all talk.
Yet she won’t do anything about reforming the triple lock or tackling her party over the burgeoning welfare bill.
It will be taxing ourselves to prosperity and regulating ourselves to prosperity.
The only growth she’s going to see is in emigration, and if she tries to tax that it will happen straight away and all at once.
So people are going to leave the UK in big numbers because of an exit tax and perhaps move to one of US, Canada, France, Germany, Norway, Spain or Australia that all have similar or stricter exit taxes? Maybe, people are sometimes a bit dim.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. The trouble is the whinging has acquired a life of its own- the Mail is particularly whingey- but the truth is a lot more nuanced.
It is just rich people whinging in an echo chamber. The UK is a premium location, which is why we have such low emigration rates.
Number of people leaving has risen massively. The question that doesn't seem to get answered (I think because the state doesn't record this) is who are these people. Are they people who were immigrants returning home, are they retirees going to Spain, are they highly educated individuals, rich people? Basically what proprotion of the significantly increased levels of emigration do these different types of make up (and many are overlapping e.g. high educated immigrant).
Dont believe the Daily Mail and Telegraph. Emigration is rising slowly not massively, and that is to be expected when you have higher inwards migration, as not all settle permanently. Labour slowly getting to grips with deportations presumably also increases emigration.
A quick look at that shows that over 400, 000 were non-UK nationals, with only 77, 000 UK nationals. And emigration has lain between 400,000 and 600,000 every year since 2012. So normal for the UK.
Before 2020, it was normally more like 300-350k year. I don't know the answer what makes up this increase, its a question I have asked before. Is it a brain drain / wealth drain, I don't know.
There's never a good time to break manifesto pledges on taxes. To do so immediately after winning the election is bad. To do so immediately before the next election is foolish.
So, maybe to do so after 18 months but with a few years to get over it before the next GE is the optimum time.
They are going to get completely pummelled for it if they raise income tax*, and given our rolling news age I’m not sure that story will be closed down.
*the only way I can see them managing to - somewhat - pull it off will be if they make a corresponding cut to NI. That’ll give them their ability to hide behind the “working people” mantra.
That would be the right thing to do economically.
Even better if a four year plan was outlined to get rid of employees national insurance in 4x2% stages with income tax being increased by 4x2%.
It would also partially solve the issue of salary sacrifice pensions and likely encourage workers from not retiring as early.
The outrage though from those affected would be deafening.
I remember when pensioners were phoning in complaining about Hunt's NICs cut - because it was a tax cut that they wouldn't enjoy.
Anecdotally I've heard a few oldies complain about paying income tax recently.
Not the possibility of the state pension being higher than the individual tax allowance but having to pay income tax on the work pensions they currently receive.
It wouldn't surprise me if most oldies think they should be exempt from income tax entirely.
Most people think that taxes should be paid by other people.
When I was working on the shop floor in a tax office in East Ham in the 70's it was striking how many people there thought pensions shouldn't be taxable, as a matter of principle. They had very little idea of economic realities.
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
I mean she’s not wrong. We have been living beyond our means for a long time
And yet she chose to increase spending by £60bn per year in the last budget. That's a choice she made and now because her tax rises have failed to yield enough we're left with an even bigger shortfall than what they purported to start with.
This is all her own fault. She could have cut spending on day one, made modest tax rises and moved towards balancing the budget but instead she chose to blow the budget on public sector pay rises and the endless money pit that is the NHS. Now she's back for more tax rises because, whoops, business investment crashed and now the economy is slowing down so not enough tax is being raised.
She's worse than useless, actively harmful to the national economy.
I personally am not bothered about being taxed a bit more if it means we don’t have to cut the NHS
It’s important to think of “The NHS” in terms of outputs though, not in terms of inputs.
Throwing ever increasing piles of money at an unreformed system does nothing to help with the actual problem.
Yes and no. There is still room in the NHS for a bit more funding (c.f. to other comparator nations we spend less as a proportion of GDP). I'm also not totally sure what reforms are needed to make the system more efficient, say, as the NHS is actually pretty efficient. I would like to see social care and the NHS integrated and a return to cottage hospitals. But I am not sure what is so wrong in the NHS that needs huge reform.
I'm not sure efficient is quite the word, as frugal. And some of that frugality gets in the way of efficiency.
You would probably get more healthcare per pound by increasing the spend on admin staff, so that you don't get expensive doctors spending so long on their own paperwork. (It's certainly true in education.) But it's a tough sell, and has been for decades.
TAX 1) Rewrite the tax code - we need to make it much simpler with far fewer discounts and loopholes. Raise more money by setting lower rates that people actually have to pay 2) Asset Value tax. Tax the land and the buildings, not a hypothetical rent from the 90s 3) Non-Dom tax. Please come here, live in swanky apartments in that London. Pay us half a mil a year and no further questions asked 4) Company Value tax. Offer companies a FAT discount off Corporation Tax if they invest in the value of their staff and assets. Do actual training and development so that your employees are the best they can be. Pay them enough money so that they can actually pay their bills. Trained and happy staff are more productive, boosting economic output and reducing in work welfare payments 5) Offshored assets tax, or the "Starbucks" tax. Basically tax them as if they're not actually buying coffee from Luxembourg - which despite their tax set up they are not. With a fat discount if they onshore fully. Radical idea - pay tax in the UK for business done in the UK you degenerate bastards 6) A sex tax. Getting some? Pay out. 7) Investment tax credits. Come and build your AI data server near where we have so much power that we have to switch the turbines off. Huge savings to be offered.
SPEND 1) Scrap the faux-market structures in public services. An end to endless NHS and Education trusts. 2) Create StateCo enterprises to run and modernise the railways, the post office, the roads, power infrastructure etc. Borrow, invest, ROI, Growth 3) HouseCo organisations. Borrow money at state rates, automatic planning permission given to build on redundant council sites. A use it or lose it 6 months deadline on landbanking by Barratts et al. Build affordable apartments and rent them at social rent levels. Thus collapsing the private rental sector and with it correcting house prices 4) Launch municipal funds - councils should be investing in civic infrastructure not property speculation. Copy Manchester - build apartments in run down town and city centres so people live there. The rest will follow as it has in Manchester. 5) Decouple energy prices from gas. Prices drop 30-40% as they have in Spain, freeing up cash to spend elsewhere 6) Abolish the OBR, hire new brains into the Treasury. Abolish the annual budget cycle - a cut to hit this year's budget target which costs more than the cut next year is economic vandalism, yet we do it over and over and over again. No more.
As a starter for 10
On Tax - I would have one rate of tax paid by all. Make it 20%. No changes to higher rates. The more you earn the more you pay.
PB - Explain why I am wrong.
We aren't that far apart. My UBI proposal (which I somehow left off the list) gives everyone a fixed income from the government and then taxes Every Single Penny you earn.
For most people that would mean a flat rate.
If the ultra rich paid 20% tax as you propose then we would be rolling in money. The challenge would be nailing shut their escape routes. Which is why we'd need to tax asset value and do something about scum who pay themselves through a company (hi).
From knowing some ultra-rich people (including relatives), a flat rate with no fiddle factors would probably get most of them to fire the tribes of accountants and lawyers they need. And just pay the tax.
It seems the country's going to be a lot quieter once all the people supposedly leaving have gone....
We all know Reeves and Starmer should have been honest about raising income tax and perhaps VAT before the election but the shadow cast by 1992 is very long and it would have been manna from heaven for Sunak and Hunt - "Labour will raise your taxes, the Conservatives will cut them" - the social media messages write themselves.
We also know, in the event of their re-election, Hunt would likely have raised taxes as well.
The deficit remains eye watering - no one objects to borrowing for long term capital investment but borrowing to get from one month to the next doesn't work well for individuals or countries. The truth is even if we can bring the deficit and borrowing down we will still be saddled with the annual debt interest payments of £60-70 billion tearing a chunk out of our available expenditure.
The priority for now must be getting the deficit down and while some of the more fanciful ideas on here about slashing civil service headcount by 50% and cutting benefits by the same amount might make some on here feel better, we all know that won't happen under a Labour, Conservative or even Reform Government.
Raising basic rate progressively to 25p, higher rate to nearer 50p and instigating a third higher tax rate is probably where Reeves is going. I'd still be looking at Land Value Taxation or some measure relating to property valuations to replace Stamp Duty and possibly Council Tax. As a small gesture of carrot, I'd put thresholds up by 2x inflation this year and pledge to keep them in line with inflation for the rest of the Parliament.
It looks as though online gaming and FOBTs in betting shops will face higher tax but it may be the lobbying by the horse racing and greyhound industries has done enough to stop a significant rise in betting duty. I suspect fuel duty will go up by more than inflation as well.
The biggest problem is the entrenched belief, among the electorate, that increased taxes will simply disappear into the maw of government, without noticeable improvement.
It's fairly clear that much of Government, local and national has lost control of costs. It's Feast-Or-Famine - either there's no money for X or theres billions spent on something that should cost millions.
The migrant hotels farce is a prefect example of this - an avalanche of money for the owners. I don't blame them - times are tough in the hotel business. If someone is offering you a zero risk, unbelievably profitable multi-year contract, you'd be insane not to take it.
We need to start cutting our cloth according to the.... cloth we actually have.
I know that a British Museum catalogue without a logo, a Richard Rogeresque HQ, some abstract sculpture in the foyer and a mission statement, isn't exciting. Not to mention a "dynamic team" for the Board of Directors on 6 figures each for 2 days of work as year.
But if we ditch those things, we might be able to afford a... British Museum catalogue.
People also have very distorted ideas of where the money goes. Migrant hotels and the British Museum are not why public spending is high. The money goes on healthcare and pensions, both of which are going up with an ageing population.
That's why we need to deport working age migrants "Nurse! Nurse! I need my bedpan and my postal ballot."
Virtually all of the useless commentary is on taxes. The fundamental thing is that government spending is too high. Bringing that should be target number one
We tried that between 2010 to 2015 ish and it made everything shit
It seems the country's going to be a lot quieter once all the people supposedly leaving have gone....
We all know Reeves and Starmer should have been honest about raising income tax and perhaps VAT before the election but the shadow cast by 1992 is very long and it would have been manna from heaven for Sunak and Hunt - "Labour will raise your taxes, the Conservatives will cut them" - the social media messages write themselves.
We also know, in the event of their re-election, Hunt would likely have raised taxes as well.
The deficit remains eye watering - no one objects to borrowing for long term capital investment but borrowing to get from one month to the next doesn't work well for individuals or countries. The truth is even if we can bring the deficit and borrowing down we will still be saddled with the annual debt interest payments of £60-70 billion tearing a chunk out of our available expenditure.
The priority for now must be getting the deficit down and while some of the more fanciful ideas on here about slashing civil service headcount by 50% and cutting benefits by the same amount might make some on here feel better, we all know that won't happen under a Labour, Conservative or even Reform Government.
Raising basic rate progressively to 25p, higher rate to nearer 50p and instigating a third higher tax rate is probably where Reeves is going. I'd still be looking at Land Value Taxation or some measure relating to property valuations to replace Stamp Duty and possibly Council Tax. As a small gesture of carrot, I'd put thresholds up by 2x inflation this year and pledge to keep them in line with inflation for the rest of the Parliament.
It looks as though online gaming and FOBTs in betting shops will face higher tax but it may be the lobbying by the horse racing and greyhound industries has done enough to stop a significant rise in betting duty. I suspect fuel duty will go up by more than inflation as well.
The biggest problem is the entrenched belief, among the electorate, that increased taxes will simply disappear into the maw of government, without noticeable improvement.
It's fairly clear that much of Government, local and national has lost control of costs. It's Feast-Or-Famine - either there's no money for X or theres billions spent on something that should cost millions.
The migrant hotels farce is a prefect example of this - an avalanche of money for the owners. I don't blame them - times are tough in the hotel business. If someone is offering you a zero risk, unbelievably profitable multi-year contract, you'd be insane not to take it.
We need to start cutting our cloth according to the.... cloth we actually have.
I know that a British Museum catalogue without a logo, a Richard Rogeresque HQ, some abstract sculpture in the foyer and a mission statement, isn't exciting. Not to mention a "dynamic team" for the Board of Directors on 6 figures each for 2 days of work as year.
But if we ditch those things, we might be able to afford a... British Museum catalogue.
People also have very distorted ideas of where the money goes. Migrant hotels and the British Museum are not why public spending is high. The money goes on healthcare and pensions, both of which are going up with an ageing population.
It goes on welfare too. Pensions are just under half of the welfare budget. UC is 28% and the non pensions side of welfare is rising rapidly especially as more and more people are claiming it.
It seems the country's going to be a lot quieter once all the people supposedly leaving have gone....
We all know Reeves and Starmer should have been honest about raising income tax and perhaps VAT before the election but the shadow cast by 1992 is very long and it would have been manna from heaven for Sunak and Hunt - "Labour will raise your taxes, the Conservatives will cut them" - the social media messages write themselves.
We also know, in the event of their re-election, Hunt would likely have raised taxes as well.
The deficit remains eye watering - no one objects to borrowing for long term capital investment but borrowing to get from one month to the next doesn't work well for individuals or countries. The truth is even if we can bring the deficit and borrowing down we will still be saddled with the annual debt interest payments of £60-70 billion tearing a chunk out of our available expenditure.
The priority for now must be getting the deficit down and while some of the more fanciful ideas on here about slashing civil service headcount by 50% and cutting benefits by the same amount might make some on here feel better, we all know that won't happen under a Labour, Conservative or even Reform Government.
Raising basic rate progressively to 25p, higher rate to nearer 50p and instigating a third higher tax rate is probably where Reeves is going. I'd still be looking at Land Value Taxation or some measure relating to property valuations to replace Stamp Duty and possibly Council Tax. As a small gesture of carrot, I'd put thresholds up by 2x inflation this year and pledge to keep them in line with inflation for the rest of the Parliament.
It looks as though online gaming and FOBTs in betting shops will face higher tax but it may be the lobbying by the horse racing and greyhound industries has done enough to stop a significant rise in betting duty. I suspect fuel duty will go up by more than inflation as well.
The biggest problem is the entrenched belief, among the electorate, that increased taxes will simply disappear into the maw of government, without noticeable improvement.
It's fairly clear that much of Government, local and national has lost control of costs. It's Feast-Or-Famine - either there's no money for X or theres billions spent on something that should cost millions.
The migrant hotels farce is a prefect example of this - an avalanche of money for the owners. I don't blame them - times are tough in the hotel business. If someone is offering you a zero risk, unbelievably profitable multi-year contract, you'd be insane not to take it.
We need to start cutting our cloth according to the.... cloth we actually have.
I know that a British Museum catalogue without a logo, a Richard Rogeresque HQ, some abstract sculpture in the foyer and a mission statement, isn't exciting. Not to mention a "dynamic team" for the Board of Directors on 6 figures each for 2 days of work as year.
But if we ditch those things, we might be able to afford a... British Museum catalogue.
People also have very distorted ideas of where the money goes. Migrant hotels and the British Museum are not why public spending is high. The money goes on healthcare and pensions, both of which are going up with an ageing population.
My favourite-least-favourite bit of polling, which shows that maybe it is time to end the disastrous democratic experiment;
It seems the country's going to be a lot quieter once all the people supposedly leaving have gone....
We all know Reeves and Starmer should have been honest about raising income tax and perhaps VAT before the election but the shadow cast by 1992 is very long and it would have been manna from heaven for Sunak and Hunt - "Labour will raise your taxes, the Conservatives will cut them" - the social media messages write themselves.
We also know, in the event of their re-election, Hunt would likely have raised taxes as well.
The deficit remains eye watering - no one objects to borrowing for long term capital investment but borrowing to get from one month to the next doesn't work well for individuals or countries. The truth is even if we can bring the deficit and borrowing down we will still be saddled with the annual debt interest payments of £60-70 billion tearing a chunk out of our available expenditure.
The priority for now must be getting the deficit down and while some of the more fanciful ideas on here about slashing civil service headcount by 50% and cutting benefits by the same amount might make some on here feel better, we all know that won't happen under a Labour, Conservative or even Reform Government.
Raising basic rate progressively to 25p, higher rate to nearer 50p and instigating a third higher tax rate is probably where Reeves is going. I'd still be looking at Land Value Taxation or some measure relating to property valuations to replace Stamp Duty and possibly Council Tax. As a small gesture of carrot, I'd put thresholds up by 2x inflation this year and pledge to keep them in line with inflation for the rest of the Parliament.
It looks as though online gaming and FOBTs in betting shops will face higher tax but it may be the lobbying by the horse racing and greyhound industries has done enough to stop a significant rise in betting duty. I suspect fuel duty will go up by more than inflation as well.
The biggest problem is the entrenched belief, among the electorate, that increased taxes will simply disappear into the maw of government, without noticeable improvement.
It's fairly clear that much of Government, local and national has lost control of costs. It's Feast-Or-Famine - either there's no money for X or theres billions spent on something that should cost millions.
The migrant hotels farce is a prefect example of this - an avalanche of money for the owners. I don't blame them - times are tough in the hotel business. If someone is offering you a zero risk, unbelievably profitable multi-year contract, you'd be insane not to take it.
We need to start cutting our cloth according to the.... cloth we actually have.
I know that a British Museum catalogue without a logo, a Richard Rogeresque HQ, some abstract sculpture in the foyer and a mission statement, isn't exciting. Not to mention a "dynamic team" for the Board of Directors on 6 figures each for 2 days of work as year.
But if we ditch those things, we might be able to afford a... British Museum catalogue.
People also have very distorted ideas of where the money goes. Migrant hotels and the British Museum are not why public spending is high. The money goes on healthcare and pensions, both of which are going up with an ageing population.
But you see this pattern through government - the hospitals are both falling down and built for prices that are crazy.
My relative who runs a building business looked at the contract to build a school local to me - the price was higher, per square foot than digging luxury basements. Which is the most expensive thing to do in the construction industry. He said that he could do the job, and throw in a basement swimming pool, under the playground and still make 30%.
A view of the Refuk UK claims around Motability (Agent Anderson's Bring Back Invacar) from a thoughtful disabled friend who has been in this field for decades. He also wants reform of the scheme, but without Anderson's poisonous politics.
What's really depressing about this is it targetting the flaws in the scheme in such a way as to put the blame on disabled people! The scheme is basically a way of channelling the welfare budget into a subsidy for the car industry. The reason why you can buy a BMW is that if you couldn't BMW would crucify the government for unfair subsidies. Either Reform knows this and is being really malicious, or it doesn't, in which case its being stupid.
(Can't link - quoting from a private forum.)
The problem is that if the only new BMWs on a street of of old cars and hondas, belong to those “on the sick”, then it feeds massively into the narrative that those who get up and go to work end the morning end up worse off than “the scroungers”.
Resticting Motability to British-made cars is a good start, as is removing the VAT subsidy that makes “luxury” cars suddenly affordable on Motability that wouldn’t be otherwise.
I just don’t see how Labour can recover after breaking a manifesto pledge of such high profile .
Their next election manifesto will be trashed as not worth the paper it’s printed on . Perhaps they might mitigate some of the damage with new leadership in No 10 and 11 . And even then they’d need the economy to be improving and better public services .
And I don't see how they recover without breaking the pledge.
I thought it was a decent speech from Reeves . It doesn’t remove the problem of likely breaking manifesto pledges .
People can debate whether Labour should have made that tax pledge.
What is there to debate? It was obviously a stupid promise, that has forced the government into a series of other poor measures to raise revenue, and basically wasted an entire year in office. Now they will get to look like "just another bunch of lying politicians who broke their promises".
Was it good politics? Yes if you think getting elected is all that matters, but not if you actually wish to govern, which is the entire point of getting elected in the first place.
If Reeves was the CFO of a company, she would already have got the boot.
And Reform and the Tories will continue to ignore reality . The country needs taxes to go up not down unless they want public services to collapse.
Reform have questioned the continuation of the triple lock and rolled back on their 90 billion welfare cuts so, perhaps, they are getting it.
I expect they’ll still have to promise to keep the Triple Lock at the next GE as pensioners are ruthless ! Unless there’s cross party support to drop it I can’t see it going .
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
I mean she’s not wrong. We have been living beyond our means for a long time
And yet she chose to increase spending by £60bn per year in the last budget. That's a choice she made and now because her tax rises have failed to yield enough we're left with an even bigger shortfall than what they purported to start with.
This is all her own fault. She could have cut spending on day one, made modest tax rises and moved towards balancing the budget but instead she chose to blow the budget on public sector pay rises and the endless money pit that is the NHS. Now she's back for more tax rises because, whoops, business investment crashed and now the economy is slowing down so not enough tax is being raised.
She's worse than useless, actively harmful to the national economy.
I personally am not bothered about being taxed a bit more if it means we don’t have to cut the NHS
It’s important to think of “The NHS” in terms of outputs though, not in terms of inputs.
Throwing ever increasing piles of money at an unreformed system does nothing to help with the actual problem.
Yes and no. There is still room in the NHS for a bit more funding (c.f. to other comparator nations we spend less as a proportion of GDP). I'm also not totally sure what reforms are needed to make the system more efficient, say, as the NHS is actually pretty efficient. I would like to see social care and the NHS integrated and a return to cottage hospitals. But I am not sure what is so wrong in the NHS that needs huge reform.
The NHS just needs to be fixed as a proportion of GDP - say 12% (currently 11%), with default fast lanes for children followed by working-age adults.
I still think people can't comprehend how quickly spending is growing. 4% in real terms simply isn't sustainable - 250% since 2000. It's not inevitable because only a small proportion of that is due to demographics.
TAX 1) Rewrite the tax code - we need to make it much simpler with far fewer discounts and loopholes. Raise more money by setting lower rates that people actually have to pay 2) Asset Value tax. Tax the land and the buildings, not a hypothetical rent from the 90s 3) Non-Dom tax. Please come here, live in swanky apartments in that London. Pay us half a mil a year and no further questions asked 4) Company Value tax. Offer companies a FAT discount off Corporation Tax if they invest in the value of their staff and assets. Do actual training and development so that your employees are the best they can be. Pay them enough money so that they can actually pay their bills. Trained and happy staff are more productive, boosting economic output and reducing in work welfare payments 5) Offshored assets tax, or the "Starbucks" tax. Basically tax them as if they're not actually buying coffee from Luxembourg - which despite their tax set up they are not. With a fat discount if they onshore fully. Radical idea - pay tax in the UK for business done in the UK you degenerate bastards 6) A sex tax. Getting some? Pay out. 7) Investment tax credits. Come and build your AI data server near where we have so much power that we have to switch the turbines off. Huge savings to be offered.
SPEND 1) Scrap the faux-market structures in public services. An end to endless NHS and Education trusts. 2) Create StateCo enterprises to run and modernise the railways, the post office, the roads, power infrastructure etc. Borrow, invest, ROI, Growth 3) HouseCo organisations. Borrow money at state rates, automatic planning permission given to build on redundant council sites. A use it or lose it 6 months deadline on landbanking by Barratts et al. Build affordable apartments and rent them at social rent levels. Thus collapsing the private rental sector and with it correcting house prices 4) Launch municipal funds - councils should be investing in civic infrastructure not property speculation. Copy Manchester - build apartments in run down town and city centres so people live there. The rest will follow as it has in Manchester. 5) Decouple energy prices from gas. Prices drop 30-40% as they have in Spain, freeing up cash to spend elsewhere 6) Abolish the OBR, hire new brains into the Treasury. Abolish the annual budget cycle - a cut to hit this year's budget target which costs more than the cut next year is economic vandalism, yet we do it over and over and over again. No more.
As a starter for 10
On Tax - I would have one rate of tax paid by all. Make it 20%. No changes to higher rates. The more you earn the more you pay.
PB - Explain why I am wrong.
We aren't that far apart. My UBI proposal (which I somehow left off the list) gives everyone a fixed income from the government and then taxes Every Single Penny you earn.
For most people that would mean a flat rate.
If the ultra rich paid 20% tax as you propose then we would be rolling in money. The challenge would be nailing shut their escape routes. Which is why we'd need to tax asset value and do something about scum who pay themselves through a company (hi).
From knowing some ultra-rich people (including relatives), a flat rate with no fiddle factors would probably get most of them to fire the tribes of accountants and lawyers they need. And just pay the tax.
That is exactly what Art Laffer was discussing/advocating on the recent Merryn Talks Money podcast. A flat tax and do away with the middle men and women who add little value.
TAX 1) Rewrite the tax code - we need to make it much simpler with far fewer discounts and loopholes. Raise more money by setting lower rates that people actually have to pay 2) Asset Value tax. Tax the land and the buildings, not a hypothetical rent from the 90s 3) Non-Dom tax. Please come here, live in swanky apartments in that London. Pay us half a mil a year and no further questions asked 4) Company Value tax. Offer companies a FAT discount off Corporation Tax if they invest in the value of their staff and assets. Do actual training and development so that your employees are the best they can be. Pay them enough money so that they can actually pay their bills. Trained and happy staff are more productive, boosting economic output and reducing in work welfare payments 5) Offshored assets tax, or the "Starbucks" tax. Basically tax them as if they're not actually buying coffee from Luxembourg - which despite their tax set up they are not. With a fat discount if they onshore fully. Radical idea - pay tax in the UK for business done in the UK you degenerate bastards 6) A sex tax. Getting some? Pay out. 7) Investment tax credits. Come and build your AI data server near where we have so much power that we have to switch the turbines off. Huge savings to be offered.
SPEND 1) Scrap the faux-market structures in public services. An end to endless NHS and Education trusts. 2) Create StateCo enterprises to run and modernise the railways, the post office, the roads, power infrastructure etc. Borrow, invest, ROI, Growth 3) HouseCo organisations. Borrow money at state rates, automatic planning permission given to build on redundant council sites. A use it or lose it 6 months deadline on landbanking by Barratts et al. Build affordable apartments and rent them at social rent levels. Thus collapsing the private rental sector and with it correcting house prices 4) Launch municipal funds - councils should be investing in civic infrastructure not property speculation. Copy Manchester - build apartments in run down town and city centres so people live there. The rest will follow as it has in Manchester. 5) Decouple energy prices from gas. Prices drop 30-40% as they have in Spain, freeing up cash to spend elsewhere 6) Abolish the OBR, hire new brains into the Treasury. Abolish the annual budget cycle - a cut to hit this year's budget target which costs more than the cut next year is economic vandalism, yet we do it over and over and over again. No more.
As a starter for 10
On Tax - I would have one rate of tax paid by all. Make it 20%. No changes to higher rates. The more you earn the more you pay.
PB - Explain why I am wrong.
We aren't that far apart. My UBI proposal (which I somehow left off the list) gives everyone a fixed income from the government and then taxes Every Single Penny you earn.
For most people that would mean a flat rate.
If the ultra rich paid 20% tax as you propose then we would be rolling in money. The challenge would be nailing shut their escape routes. Which is why we'd need to tax asset value and do something about scum who pay themselves through a company (hi).
We have 20% flat rate and the Hedgies, Partners etc etc who I speak to have no problem with it and don’t bother with any attempts at minimisation because if they weigh it up they tend to think along the lines of the fact that everyone does need to contribute, there is no point paying zero tax for the sake of a bit of extra cash and finding there are no staff for shops and restaurants or mechanics for their cars because there is no money in the state’s coffers to pay for schools etc.
20% psychologically is a good figure - it’s not even a quarter of your income so it feels “ok”.
We also don’t have IHT or CGT but there is the caveat that being a small place with a very high earning industry as a huge part of the economy makes it a lot easier to generate large tax revenues at 20% but still it’s human nature to want to keep as much of what you earn as possible but also to understand that there are those who need help and there are things the state needs to pay for. Finding that sweet spot is always the key that nobody ever really agrees on.
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
I mean she’s not wrong. We have been living beyond our means for a long time
It’s all talk.
Yet she won’t do anything about reforming the triple lock or tackling her party over the burgeoning welfare bill.
It will be taxing ourselves to prosperity and regulating ourselves to prosperity.
The only growth she’s going to see is in emigration, and if she tries to tax that it will happen straight away and all at once.
So people are going to leave the UK in big numbers because of an exit tax and perhaps move to one of US, Canada, France, Germany, Norway, Spain or Australia that all have similar or stricter exit taxes? Maybe, people are sometimes a bit dim.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. The trouble is the whinging has acquired a life of its own- the Mail is particularly whingey- but the truth is a lot more nuanced.
It is just rich people whinging in an echo chamber. The UK is a premium location, which is why we have such low emigration rates.
Number of people leaving has risen massively. The question that doesn't seem to get answered (I think because the state doesn't record this) is who are these people. Are they people who were immigrants returning home, are they retirees going to Spain, are they highly educated individuals, rich people? Basically what proprotion of the significantly increased levels of emigration do these different types of make up (and many are overlapping e.g. high educated immigrant).
Dont believe the Daily Mail and Telegraph. Emigration is rising slowly not massively, and that is to be expected when you have higher inwards migration, as not all settle permanently. Labour slowly getting to grips with deportations presumably also increases emigration.
513,000 people emigrated in 2024....that is a lot of people leaving per year. 10 years ago it was more like 300k.
AI tells me
"In 2024, approximately 517,000 people emigrated from the UK, consisting of about 77,000 British citizens, 218,000 EU citizens, and 222,000 non-EU citizens"
Seems those fleeing the UK are those that came and don't like it.
Virtually all of the useless commentary is on taxes. The fundamental thing is that government spending is too high. Bringing that should be target number one
We tried that between 2010 to 2015 ish and it made everything shit
NHS productivity did increase significantly during that period. That's why all this nonsense about linking it to pay is silly - if that were the case, doctors and nurses are due a significant boost to wages.
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
I mean she’s not wrong. We have been living beyond our means for a long time
It’s all talk.
Yet she won’t do anything about reforming the triple lock or tackling her party over the burgeoning welfare bill.
It will be taxing ourselves to prosperity and regulating ourselves to prosperity.
The only growth she’s going to see is in emigration, and if she tries to tax that it will happen straight away and all at once.
So people are going to leave the UK in big numbers because of an exit tax and perhaps move to one of US, Canada, France, Germany, Norway, Spain or Australia that all have similar or stricter exit taxes? Maybe, people are sometimes a bit dim.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. The trouble is the whinging has acquired a life of its own- the Mail is particularly whingey- but the truth is a lot more nuanced.
It is just rich people whinging in an echo chamber. The UK is a premium location, which is why we have such low emigration rates.
This is one of the problems in that people are only looking at the emigration side of the ledger instead of looking at whether we are an attractive place for entrepreneurs and the wealthy to move to, bring new business, growth, taxes.
If the UK puts up barriers - high taxes, penalties on leaving, making wealthy and successful people scapegoats then it’s a massive negative to people choosing the Uk.
They will have a pluses and minus sheet and in the pluses you might have London, English as a natural language, rule of law (just about) safe from extreme weather.
The thing is that if that list of positives shrinks and the negatives grow then we don’t attract new business and they choose the US (for example) - yes exit taxes but choice of low tax states to base in, a huge quality university sector, English language, New York, LA etc etc.
So whilst everyone might clap themselves on the back because “only x thousands of entrepreneurs and super wealthy” have left it’s not taken into account the tech wizards from Belgium who might have decamped to the UK with their new business and now are choosing elsewhere etc. These are precisely the people the UK wants to attract in to create growth not make it less attractive - they aren’t coming for the weather.
Good morning @boulay . It must be very sad to have all that money and not be wanted. Would you send me a millionaire to hug and sympathise with.
It seems the country's going to be a lot quieter once all the people supposedly leaving have gone....
We all know Reeves and Starmer should have been honest about raising income tax and perhaps VAT before the election but the shadow cast by 1992 is very long and it would have been manna from heaven for Sunak and Hunt - "Labour will raise your taxes, the Conservatives will cut them" - the social media messages write themselves.
We also know, in the event of their re-election, Hunt would likely have raised taxes as well.
The deficit remains eye watering - no one objects to borrowing for long term capital investment but borrowing to get from one month to the next doesn't work well for individuals or countries. The truth is even if we can bring the deficit and borrowing down we will still be saddled with the annual debt interest payments of £60-70 billion tearing a chunk out of our available expenditure.
The priority for now must be getting the deficit down and while some of the more fanciful ideas on here about slashing civil service headcount by 50% and cutting benefits by the same amount might make some on here feel better, we all know that won't happen under a Labour, Conservative or even Reform Government.
Raising basic rate progressively to 25p, higher rate to nearer 50p and instigating a third higher tax rate is probably where Reeves is going. I'd still be looking at Land Value Taxation or some measure relating to property valuations to replace Stamp Duty and possibly Council Tax. As a small gesture of carrot, I'd put thresholds up by 2x inflation this year and pledge to keep them in line with inflation for the rest of the Parliament.
It looks as though online gaming and FOBTs in betting shops will face higher tax but it may be the lobbying by the horse racing and greyhound industries has done enough to stop a significant rise in betting duty. I suspect fuel duty will go up by more than inflation as well.
The biggest problem is the entrenched belief, among the electorate, that increased taxes will simply disappear into the maw of government, without noticeable improvement.
It's fairly clear that much of Government, local and national has lost control of costs. It's Feast-Or-Famine - either there's no money for X or theres billions spent on something that should cost millions.
The migrant hotels farce is a prefect example of this - an avalanche of money for the owners. I don't blame them - times are tough in the hotel business. If someone is offering you a zero risk, unbelievably profitable multi-year contract, you'd be insane not to take it.
We need to start cutting our cloth according to the.... cloth we actually have.
I know that a British Museum catalogue without a logo, a Richard Rogeresque HQ, some abstract sculpture in the foyer and a mission statement, isn't exciting. Not to mention a "dynamic team" for the Board of Directors on 6 figures each for 2 days of work as year.
But if we ditch those things, we might be able to afford a... British Museum catalogue.
People also have very distorted ideas of where the money goes. Migrant hotels and the British Museum are not why public spending is high. The money goes on healthcare and pensions, both of which are going up with an ageing population.
But you see this pattern through government - the hospitals are both falling down and built for prices that are crazy.
My relative who runs a building business looked at the contract to build a school local to me - the price was higher, per square foot than digging luxury basements. Which is the most expensive thing to do in the construction industry. He said that he could do the job, and throw in a basement swimming pool, under the playground and still make 30%.
You could probably fix that by making “frameworks” unlawful for public procurement so that people like your relative could bid for such work without having to get on a framework first.
However the same people want to get rid of procurement regulations entirely which would just encourage people running public procurements to give contracts to the contractors they know well.
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
I mean she’s not wrong. We have been living beyond our means for a long time
It’s all talk.
Yet she won’t do anything about reforming the triple lock or tackling her party over the burgeoning welfare bill.
It will be taxing ourselves to prosperity and regulating ourselves to prosperity.
The only growth she’s going to see is in emigration, and if she tries to tax that it will happen straight away and all at once.
So people are going to leave the UK in big numbers because of an exit tax and perhaps move to one of US, Canada, France, Germany, Norway, Spain or Australia that all have similar or stricter exit taxes? Maybe, people are sometimes a bit dim.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. The trouble is the whinging has acquired a life of its own- the Mail is particularly whingey- but the truth is a lot more nuanced.
It is just rich people whinging in an echo chamber. The UK is a premium location, which is why we have such low emigration rates.
Number of people leaving has risen massively. The question that doesn't seem to get answered (I think because the state doesn't record this) is who are these people. Are they people who were immigrants returning home, are they retirees going to Spain, are they highly educated individuals, rich people? Basically what proprotion of the significantly increased levels of emigration do these different types of make up (and many are overlapping e.g. high educated immigrant).
Dont believe the Daily Mail and Telegraph. Emigration is rising slowly not massively, and that is to be expected when you have higher inwards migration, as not all settle permanently. Labour slowly getting to grips with deportations presumably also increases emigration.
A quick look at that shows that over 400, 000 were non-UK nationals, with only 77, 000 UK nationals. And emigration has lain between 400,000 and 600,000 every year since 2012. So normal for the UK.
Before 2020, it was normally more like 300-350k year. I don't know the answer what makes up this increase, its a question I have asked before. Is it a brain drain / wealth drain, I don't know.
So, those figures don't show an increase in HNW individuals leaving the country. To answer FrancisUrquhart's question, "Are they people who were immigrants returning home, are they retirees going to Spain, are they highly educated individuals, rich people?" They are immigrants returning home.
A view of the Refuk UK claims around Motability (Agent Anderson's Bring Back Invacar) from a thoughtful disabled friend who has been in this field for decades. He also wants reform of the scheme, but without Anderson's poisonous politics.
What's really depressing about this is it targetting the flaws in the scheme in such a way as to put the blame on disabled people! The scheme is basically a way of channelling the welfare budget into a subsidy for the car industry. The reason why you can buy a BMW is that if you couldn't BMW would crucify the government for unfair subsidies. Either Reform knows this and is being really malicious, or it doesn't, in which case its being stupid.
(Can't link - quoting from a private forum.)
The problem is that if the only new BMWs on a street of of old cars and hondas, belong to those “on the sick”, then it feeds massively into the narrative that those who get up and go to work end the morning end up worse off than “the scroungers”.
Resticting Motability to British-made cars is a good start, as is removing the VAT subsidy that makes “luxury” cars suddenly affordable on Motability that wouldn’t be otherwise.
Maybe motability should also be means tested. If you have to get taxis everywhere then you are spending a lot more money than a comparative able-bodied person, but if you have a job, most people will provide a car out of their own resources so you could say that motability should only fund the cost of adaptations
Virtually all of the useless commentary is on taxes. The fundamental thing is that government spending is too high. Bringing that should be target number one
We tried that between 2010 to 2015 ish and it made everything shit
NHS productivity did increase significantly during that period. That's why all this nonsense about linking it to pay is silly - if that were the case, doctors and nurses are due a significant boost to wages.
“NHS productivity” is one of those bollocks statistics which can be anything you want. You can’t accurately measure general productivity when you don’t have a quantifiable output.
Sky newsflash; Sir Alan Bates has settled with the Post Office. 'Seven figure sum;' suggested.
I would have given him and the other SPMs a chunk of Post Office stock (it's 100% owned by the government - given them 30%). Then made them the board of directors. With the existing management locked in, below them.
Oh, and given the prosecution unit at the PO the job of dealing with Vennells etc. "Hunt them down, all nightmare long".
Then bought popcorn.
It's a really nice fantasy, M, but realistically what would you do now? It's impossibe to put right decades of wrong. Money helps but the true financial cost is astronomic. Revenge isn't going to help and is imractical in may cases.
It was a desperately badly run organisation for decades. Had it been in private hands the situation would have been remedied by financial collapse. In the Public Sector it was able to persist through subsidy and the exercise of powers way beyond what was wise or fair.
The blame spreads very wide indeed, and I really do not envy the position of Sir Wyn NiceOldThing as he tries to sift through the evidence and come up wth sensible suggestions.
It seems the country's going to be a lot quieter once all the people supposedly leaving have gone....
We all know Reeves and Starmer should have been honest about raising income tax and perhaps VAT before the election but the shadow cast by 1992 is very long and it would have been manna from heaven for Sunak and Hunt - "Labour will raise your taxes, the Conservatives will cut them" - the social media messages write themselves.
We also know, in the event of their re-election, Hunt would likely have raised taxes as well.
The deficit remains eye watering - no one objects to borrowing for long term capital investment but borrowing to get from one month to the next doesn't work well for individuals or countries. The truth is even if we can bring the deficit and borrowing down we will still be saddled with the annual debt interest payments of £60-70 billion tearing a chunk out of our available expenditure.
The priority for now must be getting the deficit down and while some of the more fanciful ideas on here about slashing civil service headcount by 50% and cutting benefits by the same amount might make some on here feel better, we all know that won't happen under a Labour, Conservative or even Reform Government.
Raising basic rate progressively to 25p, higher rate to nearer 50p and instigating a third higher tax rate is probably where Reeves is going. I'd still be looking at Land Value Taxation or some measure relating to property valuations to replace Stamp Duty and possibly Council Tax. As a small gesture of carrot, I'd put thresholds up by 2x inflation this year and pledge to keep them in line with inflation for the rest of the Parliament.
It looks as though online gaming and FOBTs in betting shops will face higher tax but it may be the lobbying by the horse racing and greyhound industries has done enough to stop a significant rise in betting duty. I suspect fuel duty will go up by more than inflation as well.
The biggest problem is the entrenched belief, among the electorate, that increased taxes will simply disappear into the maw of government, without noticeable improvement.
It's fairly clear that much of Government, local and national has lost control of costs. It's Feast-Or-Famine - either there's no money for X or theres billions spent on something that should cost millions.
The migrant hotels farce is a prefect example of this - an avalanche of money for the owners. I don't blame them - times are tough in the hotel business. If someone is offering you a zero risk, unbelievably profitable multi-year contract, you'd be insane not to take it.
We need to start cutting our cloth according to the.... cloth we actually have.
I know that a British Museum catalogue without a logo, a Richard Rogeresque HQ, some abstract sculpture in the foyer and a mission statement, isn't exciting. Not to mention a "dynamic team" for the Board of Directors on 6 figures each for 2 days of work as year.
But if we ditch those things, we might be able to afford a... British Museum catalogue.
People also have very distorted ideas of where the money goes. Migrant hotels and the British Museum are not why public spending is high. The money goes on healthcare and pensions, both of which are going up with an ageing population.
But you see this pattern through government - the hospitals are both falling down and built for prices that are crazy.
My relative who runs a building business looked at the contract to build a school local to me - the price was higher, per square foot than digging luxury basements. Which is the most expensive thing to do in the construction industry. He said that he could do the job, and throw in a basement swimming pool, under the playground and still make 30%.
I can’t understand why contract management is so bad throughout the public sector.
A view of the Refuk UK claims around Motability (Agent Anderson's Bring Back Invacar) from a thoughtful disabled friend who has been in this field for decades. He also wants reform of the scheme, but without Anderson's poisonous politics.
What's really depressing about this is it targetting the flaws in the scheme in such a way as to put the blame on disabled people! The scheme is basically a way of channelling the welfare budget into a subsidy for the car industry. The reason why you can buy a BMW is that if you couldn't BMW would crucify the government for unfair subsidies. Either Reform knows this and is being really malicious, or it doesn't, in which case its being stupid.
(Can't link - quoting from a private forum.)
The problem is that if the only new BMWs on a street of of old cars and hondas, belong to those “on the sick”, then it feeds massively into the narrative that those who get up and go to work end the morning end up worse off than “the scroungers”.
Resticting Motability to British-made cars is a good start, as is removing the VAT subsidy that makes “luxury” cars suddenly affordable on Motability that wouldn’t be otherwise.
If the only new BMWs on a street of old cars and Hondas belong to those “on the sick”, then that would be a problem... but that isn't the case. Have you seen any UK streets lately?
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
I mean she’s not wrong. We have been living beyond our means for a long time
It’s all talk.
Yet she won’t do anything about reforming the triple lock or tackling her party over the burgeoning welfare bill.
It will be taxing ourselves to prosperity and regulating ourselves to prosperity.
The only growth she’s going to see is in emigration, and if she tries to tax that it will happen straight away and all at once.
So people are going to leave the UK in big numbers because of an exit tax and perhaps move to one of US, Canada, France, Germany, Norway, Spain or Australia that all have similar or stricter exit taxes? Maybe, people are sometimes a bit dim.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. The trouble is the whinging has acquired a life of its own- the Mail is particularly whingey- but the truth is a lot more nuanced.
It is just rich people whinging in an echo chamber. The UK is a premium location, which is why we have such low emigration rates.
Number of people leaving has risen massively. The question that doesn't seem to get answered (I think because the state doesn't record this) is who are these people. Are they people who were immigrants returning home, are they retirees going to Spain, are they highly educated individuals, rich people? Basically what proprotion of the significantly increased levels of emigration do these different types of make up (and many are overlapping e.g. high educated immigrant).
Dont believe the Daily Mail and Telegraph. Emigration is rising slowly not massively, and that is to be expected when you have higher inwards migration, as not all settle permanently. Labour slowly getting to grips with deportations presumably also increases emigration.
513,000 people emigrated in 2024....that is a lot of people leaving per year. 10 years ago it was more like 300k.
AI tells me
"In 2024, approximately 517,000 people emigrated from the UK, consisting of about 77,000 British citizens, 218,000 EU citizens, and 222,000 non-EU citizens"
Seems those fleeing the UK are those that came and don't like it.
Well, in my team at the bank, I am the only White British person. All the others are migrants. Why shouldn't they transfer to a European office of the same bank?
Sky newsflash; Sir Alan Bates has settled with the Post Office. 'Seven figure sum;' suggested.
I would have given him and the other SPMs a chunk of Post Office stock (it's 100% owned by the government - given them 30%). Then made them the board of directors. With the existing management locked in, below them.
Oh, and given the prosecution unit at the PO the job of dealing with Vennells etc. "Hunt them down, all nightmare long".
Then bought popcorn.
It's a really nice fantasy, M, but realistically what would you do now? It's impossibe to put right decades of wrong. Money helps but the true financial cost is astronomic. Revenge isn't going to help and is imractical in may cases.
It was a desperately badly run organisation for decades. Had it been in private hands the situation would have been remedied by financial collapse. In the Public Sector it was able to persist through subsidy and the exercise of powers way beyond what was wise or fair.
The blame spreads very wide indeed, and I really do not envy the position of Sir Wyn NiceOldThing as he tries to sift through the evidence and come up wth sensible suggestions.
I think those who have been shown to have lied under oath, or knowingly allowed prosecutions to go ahead when the evidence was based on a flawed system that they knew was flawed, need to be prosecuted. Is that revenge? I think its justice.
It seems the country's going to be a lot quieter once all the people supposedly leaving have gone....
We all know Reeves and Starmer should have been honest about raising income tax and perhaps VAT before the election but the shadow cast by 1992 is very long and it would have been manna from heaven for Sunak and Hunt - "Labour will raise your taxes, the Conservatives will cut them" - the social media messages write themselves.
We also know, in the event of their re-election, Hunt would likely have raised taxes as well.
The deficit remains eye watering - no one objects to borrowing for long term capital investment but borrowing to get from one month to the next doesn't work well for individuals or countries. The truth is even if we can bring the deficit and borrowing down we will still be saddled with the annual debt interest payments of £60-70 billion tearing a chunk out of our available expenditure.
The priority for now must be getting the deficit down and while some of the more fanciful ideas on here about slashing civil service headcount by 50% and cutting benefits by the same amount might make some on here feel better, we all know that won't happen under a Labour, Conservative or even Reform Government.
Raising basic rate progressively to 25p, higher rate to nearer 50p and instigating a third higher tax rate is probably where Reeves is going. I'd still be looking at Land Value Taxation or some measure relating to property valuations to replace Stamp Duty and possibly Council Tax. As a small gesture of carrot, I'd put thresholds up by 2x inflation this year and pledge to keep them in line with inflation for the rest of the Parliament.
It looks as though online gaming and FOBTs in betting shops will face higher tax but it may be the lobbying by the horse racing and greyhound industries has done enough to stop a significant rise in betting duty. I suspect fuel duty will go up by more than inflation as well.
The biggest problem is the entrenched belief, among the electorate, that increased taxes will simply disappear into the maw of government, without noticeable improvement.
It's fairly clear that much of Government, local and national has lost control of costs. It's Feast-Or-Famine - either there's no money for X or theres billions spent on something that should cost millions.
The migrant hotels farce is a prefect example of this - an avalanche of money for the owners. I don't blame them - times are tough in the hotel business. If someone is offering you a zero risk, unbelievably profitable multi-year contract, you'd be insane not to take it.
We need to start cutting our cloth according to the.... cloth we actually have.
I know that a British Museum catalogue without a logo, a Richard Rogeresque HQ, some abstract sculpture in the foyer and a mission statement, isn't exciting. Not to mention a "dynamic team" for the Board of Directors on 6 figures each for 2 days of work as year.
But if we ditch those things, we might be able to afford a... British Museum catalogue.
People also have very distorted ideas of where the money goes. Migrant hotels and the British Museum are not why public spending is high. The money goes on healthcare and pensions, both of which are going up with an ageing population.
But you see this pattern through government - the hospitals are both falling down and built for prices that are crazy.
My relative who runs a building business looked at the contract to build a school local to me - the price was higher, per square foot than digging luxury basements. Which is the most expensive thing to do in the construction industry. He said that he could do the job, and throw in a basement swimming pool, under the playground and still make 30%.
I can’t understand why contract management is so bad throughout the public sector.
Because salaries are shite compared to the private sector or the experience just isn’t there? NHS used to have very good legal teams that could manage complex contracts like PFI but they got austerity-ed away and as such the poor NHS contract manager with PRINCE2 is up against a magic circle law firm.
A view of the Refuk UK claims around Motability (Agent Anderson's Bring Back Invacar) from a thoughtful disabled friend who has been in this field for decades. He also wants reform of the scheme, but without Anderson's poisonous politics.
What's really depressing about this is it targetting the flaws in the scheme in such a way as to put the blame on disabled people! The scheme is basically a way of channelling the welfare budget into a subsidy for the car industry. The reason why you can buy a BMW is that if you couldn't BMW would crucify the government for unfair subsidies. Either Reform knows this and is being really malicious, or it doesn't, in which case its being stupid.
(Can't link - quoting from a private forum.)
The thing I don't get about this is, IIUC, recipients get the DLA (PIP for adults? My expertise, such as it is, is for kids) with the mobility component. They can spend that how they like to address their mobility issues. One option is to give it to Motability as (part) payment for an adapted vehicle.
Either the payment is justified or it is not. What it is notionally spent on seems irrelevant to me. If the person has the means, why should they not use it towards adapting a Beamer rather than a second hand Austin Metro?
Now, Motability made an absolute fortune from this in the past, but - again - that's not the recipients' fault (one does wonder why there are not really competing schemes and competition in this space).
Sky newsflash; Sir Alan Bates has settled with the Post Office. 'Seven figure sum;' suggested.
I would have given him and the other SPMs a chunk of Post Office stock (it's 100% owned by the government - given them 30%). Then made them the board of directors. With the existing management locked in, below them.
Oh, and given the prosecution unit at the PO the job of dealing with Vennells etc. "Hunt them down, all nightmare long".
Then bought popcorn.
It's a really nice fantasy, M, but realistically what would you do now? It's impossibe to put right decades of wrong. Money helps but the true financial cost is astronomic. Revenge isn't going to help and is imractical in may cases.
It was a desperately badly run organisation for decades. Had it been in private hands the situation would have been remedied by financial collapse. In the Public Sector it was able to persist through subsidy and the exercise of powers way beyond what was wise or fair.
The blame spreads very wide indeed, and I really do not envy the position of Sir Wyn NiceOldThing as he tries to sift through the evidence and come up wth sensible suggestions.
Ah yes. Lessons Will Be Learned*. Too Late For Legal Remedy.
The point is to create a horrific, savage, nasty, ghastly, hideous result. Pour encourager les autres**
Paula Vennells spending the next 2 decades in court, at her own cost sounds exactly like justice to me.
*Will not contain Lessons. Will not contain Learning. Will not contain Will. May not contain "Be". All wrongs reserved. **I came across a paper that analysed the performance of friend and relations of Admiral Byng in the RN. It seems that for the next 20 years, there was a marked performance improvement in the lower/mid management level in the RN, especially among them.
Virtually all of the useless commentary is on taxes. The fundamental thing is that government spending is too high. Bringing that should be target number one
We tried that between 2010 to 2015 ish and it made everything shit
Yes, it got some loudmouths screeching about austerity. Tough shit for Labour, the arithmetic cannot now be ducked
TAX 1) Rewrite the tax code - we need to make it much simpler with far fewer discounts and loopholes. Raise more money by setting lower rates that people actually have to pay 2) Asset Value tax. Tax the land and the buildings, not a hypothetical rent from the 90s 3) Non-Dom tax. Please come here, live in swanky apartments in that London. Pay us half a mil a year and no further questions asked 4) Company Value tax. Offer companies a FAT discount off Corporation Tax if they invest in the value of their staff and assets. Do actual training and development so that your employees are the best they can be. Pay them enough money so that they can actually pay their bills. Trained and happy staff are more productive, boosting economic output and reducing in work welfare payments 5) Offshored assets tax, or the "Starbucks" tax. Basically tax them as if they're not actually buying coffee from Luxembourg - which despite their tax set up they are not. With a fat discount if they onshore fully. Radical idea - pay tax in the UK for business done in the UK you degenerate bastards 6) A sex tax. Getting some? Pay out. 7) Investment tax credits. Come and build your AI data server near where we have so much power that we have to switch the turbines off. Huge savings to be offered.
SPEND 1) Scrap the faux-market structures in public services. An end to endless NHS and Education trusts. 2) Create StateCo enterprises to run and modernise the railways, the post office, the roads, power infrastructure etc. Borrow, invest, ROI, Growth 3) HouseCo organisations. Borrow money at state rates, automatic planning permission given to build on redundant council sites. A use it or lose it 6 months deadline on landbanking by Barratts et al. Build affordable apartments and rent them at social rent levels. Thus collapsing the private rental sector and with it correcting house prices 4) Launch municipal funds - councils should be investing in civic infrastructure not property speculation. Copy Manchester - build apartments in run down town and city centres so people live there. The rest will follow as it has in Manchester. 5) Decouple energy prices from gas. Prices drop 30-40% as they have in Spain, freeing up cash to spend elsewhere 6) Abolish the OBR, hire new brains into the Treasury. Abolish the annual budget cycle - a cut to hit this year's budget target which costs more than the cut next year is economic vandalism, yet we do it over and over and over again. No more.
As a starter for 10
On Tax - I would have one rate of tax paid by all. Make it 20%. No changes to higher rates. The more you earn the more you pay.
PB - Explain why I am wrong.
We aren't that far apart. My UBI proposal (which I somehow left off the list) gives everyone a fixed income from the government and then taxes Every Single Penny you earn.
For most people that would mean a flat rate.
If the ultra rich paid 20% tax as you propose then we would be rolling in money. The challenge would be nailing shut their escape routes. Which is why we'd need to tax asset value and do something about scum who pay themselves through a company (hi).
From knowing some ultra-rich people (including relatives), a flat rate with no fiddle factors would probably get most of them to fire the tribes of accountants and lawyers they need. And just pay the tax.
Yup, make inheritance tax 10% except for farmers. No other exemptions at all. We’d all happily pay it.
Virtually all of the useless commentary is on taxes. The fundamental thing is that government spending is too high. Bringing that should be target number one
We tried that between 2010 to 2015 ish and it made everything shit
Yes, it got some loudmouths screeching about austerity. Tough shit for Labour, the arithmetic cannot now be ducked
Regardless of that I think it’s pretty well accepted that the country is now much more run down and enshitified since austerity. Hence Brexit. Hence Reform.
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
I mean she’s not wrong. We have been living beyond our means for a long time
And yet she chose to increase spending by £60bn per year in the last budget. That's a choice she made and now because her tax rises have failed to yield enough we're left with an even bigger shortfall than what they purported to start with.
This is all her own fault. She could have cut spending on day one, made modest tax rises and moved towards balancing the budget but instead she chose to blow the budget on public sector pay rises and the endless money pit that is the NHS. Now she's back for more tax rises because, whoops, business investment crashed and now the economy is slowing down so not enough tax is being raised.
She's worse than useless, actively harmful to the national economy.
And yet the IMF, who are supposed to be bailing us out any day now, have the UK as the second fastest growing economy in the G7.
Aren't comparisons with the G7 a bit passé?
The more concerning thing is how fast Britain (and Europe) is falling behind China in technological terms.
TAX 1) Rewrite the tax code - we need to make it much simpler with far fewer discounts and loopholes. Raise more money by setting lower rates that people actually have to pay 2) Asset Value tax. Tax the land and the buildings, not a hypothetical rent from the 90s 3) Non-Dom tax. Please come here, live in swanky apartments in that London. Pay us half a mil a year and no further questions asked 4) Company Value tax. Offer companies a FAT discount off Corporation Tax if they invest in the value of their staff and assets. Do actual training and development so that your employees are the best they can be. Pay them enough money so that they can actually pay their bills. Trained and happy staff are more productive, boosting economic output and reducing in work welfare payments 5) Offshored assets tax, or the "Starbucks" tax. Basically tax them as if they're not actually buying coffee from Luxembourg - which despite their tax set up they are not. With a fat discount if they onshore fully. Radical idea - pay tax in the UK for business done in the UK you degenerate bastards 6) A sex tax. Getting some? Pay out. 7) Investment tax credits. Come and build your AI data server near where we have so much power that we have to switch the turbines off. Huge savings to be offered.
SPEND 1) Scrap the faux-market structures in public services. An end to endless NHS and Education trusts. 2) Create StateCo enterprises to run and modernise the railways, the post office, the roads, power infrastructure etc. Borrow, invest, ROI, Growth 3) HouseCo organisations. Borrow money at state rates, automatic planning permission given to build on redundant council sites. A use it or lose it 6 months deadline on landbanking by Barratts et al. Build affordable apartments and rent them at social rent levels. Thus collapsing the private rental sector and with it correcting house prices 4) Launch municipal funds - councils should be investing in civic infrastructure not property speculation. Copy Manchester - build apartments in run down town and city centres so people live there. The rest will follow as it has in Manchester. 5) Decouple energy prices from gas. Prices drop 30-40% as they have in Spain, freeing up cash to spend elsewhere 6) Abolish the OBR, hire new brains into the Treasury. Abolish the annual budget cycle - a cut to hit this year's budget target which costs more than the cut next year is economic vandalism, yet we do it over and over and over again. No more.
As a starter for 10
On Tax - I would have one rate of tax paid by all. Make it 20%. No changes to higher rates. The more you earn the more you pay.
PB - Explain why I am wrong.
We aren't that far apart. My UBI proposal (which I somehow left off the list) gives everyone a fixed income from the government and then taxes Every Single Penny you earn.
For most people that would mean a flat rate.
If the ultra rich paid 20% tax as you propose then we would be rolling in money. The challenge would be nailing shut their escape routes. Which is why we'd need to tax asset value and do something about scum who pay themselves through a company (hi).
From knowing some ultra-rich people (including relatives), a flat rate with no fiddle factors would probably get most of them to fire the tribes of accountants and lawyers they need. And just pay the tax.
That is exactly what Art Laffer was discussing/advocating on the recent Merryn Talks Money podcast. A flat tax and do away with the middle men and women who add little value.
Very interesting it was too.
Art Laffer is now aged 85, and is still more erudite in his prescriptions for the economy than 99% of modern economic commentators.
Why do the dumbass colonists use blue for the left-wing party and red for the right wing party?
Beware Reds under the bed! :lol
On that night in 1980, for instance, ABC was the outlier, showing Republicans as red, having used yellow for the party four years earlier. During the network’s 1984 election coverage, Brinkley, by then at ABC, offered a seemingly arbitrary on-air explanation for the decision: “Red, R, Reagan — that’s why we chose red.”
A view of the Refuk UK claims around Motability (Agent Anderson's Bring Back Invacar) from a thoughtful disabled friend who has been in this field for decades. He also wants reform of the scheme, but without Anderson's poisonous politics.
What's really depressing about this is it targetting the flaws in the scheme in such a way as to put the blame on disabled people! The scheme is basically a way of channelling the welfare budget into a subsidy for the car industry. The reason why you can buy a BMW is that if you couldn't BMW would crucify the government for unfair subsidies. Either Reform knows this and is being really malicious, or it doesn't, in which case its being stupid.
(Can't link - quoting from a private forum.)
The thing I don't get about this is, IIUC, recipients get the DLA (PIP for adults? My expertise, such as it is, is for kids) with the mobility component. They can spend that how they like to address their mobility issues. One option is to give it to Motability as (part) payment for an adapted vehicle.
Either the payment is justified or it is not. What it is notionally spent on seems irrelevant to me. If the person has the means, why should they not use it towards adapting a Beamer rather than a second hand Austin Metro?
Now, Motability made an absolute fortune from this in the past, but - again - that's not the recipients' fault (one does wonder why there are not really competing schemes and competition in this space).
I think it's a felt-fair thing. Some disabled people are unemployed, but are able to run a fancier car than many people in employment. Also many disabled people work, and/or have partners that do, and therefore Motability is paying for something they could fund from their own resources. A work colleague (DWP so he knows how it works) complained that neighbours on disability could apparently afford a new car every 3 years
This was a speech largely targeted at bond markets. Not really aimed at voters or backbenchers. Key words that kept coming up: interest rates, fiscal rules, inflation. Hints that she wants to go beyond just closing the black hole and building back the fiscal headroom.
Looks like primarily an attempt to get gilt yields to keep falling between now and budget day so that the OBR numbers are a little bit easier.
Reeves lost credibility with the bond markets because of the failures to make cuts to the winter fuel allowance and PIP.
She'll need to do something to reduce the deficit to regain that credibility.
It seems the country's going to be a lot quieter once all the people supposedly leaving have gone....
We all know Reeves and Starmer should have been honest about raising income tax and perhaps VAT before the election but the shadow cast by 1992 is very long and it would have been manna from heaven for Sunak and Hunt - "Labour will raise your taxes, the Conservatives will cut them" - the social media messages write themselves.
We also know, in the event of their re-election, Hunt would likely have raised taxes as well.
The deficit remains eye watering - no one objects to borrowing for long term capital investment but borrowing to get from one month to the next doesn't work well for individuals or countries. The truth is even if we can bring the deficit and borrowing down we will still be saddled with the annual debt interest payments of £60-70 billion tearing a chunk out of our available expenditure.
The priority for now must be getting the deficit down and while some of the more fanciful ideas on here about slashing civil service headcount by 50% and cutting benefits by the same amount might make some on here feel better, we all know that won't happen under a Labour, Conservative or even Reform Government.
Raising basic rate progressively to 25p, higher rate to nearer 50p and instigating a third higher tax rate is probably where Reeves is going. I'd still be looking at Land Value Taxation or some measure relating to property valuations to replace Stamp Duty and possibly Council Tax. As a small gesture of carrot, I'd put thresholds up by 2x inflation this year and pledge to keep them in line with inflation for the rest of the Parliament.
It looks as though online gaming and FOBTs in betting shops will face higher tax but it may be the lobbying by the horse racing and greyhound industries has done enough to stop a significant rise in betting duty. I suspect fuel duty will go up by more than inflation as well.
The biggest problem is the entrenched belief, among the electorate, that increased taxes will simply disappear into the maw of government, without noticeable improvement.
It's fairly clear that much of Government, local and national has lost control of costs. It's Feast-Or-Famine - either there's no money for X or theres billions spent on something that should cost millions.
The migrant hotels farce is a prefect example of this - an avalanche of money for the owners. I don't blame them - times are tough in the hotel business. If someone is offering you a zero risk, unbelievably profitable multi-year contract, you'd be insane not to take it.
We need to start cutting our cloth according to the.... cloth we actually have.
I know that a British Museum catalogue without a logo, a Richard Rogeresque HQ, some abstract sculpture in the foyer and a mission statement, isn't exciting. Not to mention a "dynamic team" for the Board of Directors on 6 figures each for 2 days of work as year.
But if we ditch those things, we might be able to afford a... British Museum catalogue.
People also have very distorted ideas of where the money goes. Migrant hotels and the British Museum are not why public spending is high. The money goes on healthcare and pensions, both of which are going up with an ageing population.
But you see this pattern through government - the hospitals are both falling down and built for prices that are crazy.
My relative who runs a building business looked at the contract to build a school local to me - the price was higher, per square foot than digging luxury basements. Which is the most expensive thing to do in the construction industry. He said that he could do the job, and throw in a basement swimming pool, under the playground and still make 30%.
I can’t understand why contract management is so bad throughout the public sector.
It’s because “Chief contract negotiator” is a CL6 (sic) position, paying from £45,268 in year 1, to £53,826 in Year 8.
Meanwhile, the guy on the other side is making 1% of the contract value, and attracts people who want to make £10m a year.
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
I mean she’s not wrong. We have been living beyond our means for a long time
And yet she chose to increase spending by £60bn per year in the last budget. That's a choice she made and now because her tax rises have failed to yield enough we're left with an even bigger shortfall than what they purported to start with.
This is all her own fault. She could have cut spending on day one, made modest tax rises and moved towards balancing the budget but instead she chose to blow the budget on public sector pay rises and the endless money pit that is the NHS. Now she's back for more tax rises because, whoops, business investment crashed and now the economy is slowing down so not enough tax is being raised.
She's worse than useless, actively harmful to the national economy.
I personally am not bothered about being taxed a bit more if it means we don’t have to cut the NHS
It’s important to think of “The NHS” in terms of outputs though, not in terms of inputs.
Throwing ever increasing piles of money at an unreformed system does nothing to help with the actual problem.
Yes and no. There is still room in the NHS for a bit more funding (c.f. to other comparator nations we spend less as a proportion of GDP). I'm also not totally sure what reforms are needed to make the system more efficient, say, as the NHS is actually pretty efficient. I would like to see social care and the NHS integrated and a return to cottage hospitals. But I am not sure what is so wrong in the NHS that needs huge reform.
The NHS just needs to be fixed as a proportion of GDP - say 12% (currently 11%), with default fast lanes for children followed by working-age adults.
I still think people can't comprehend how quickly spending is growing. 4% in real terms simply isn't sustainable - 250% since 2000. It's not inevitable because only a small proportion of that is due to demographics.
The over-65 population has increased by 42% since 2000.
Why do the dumbass colonists use blue for the left-wing party and red for the right wing party?
Beware Reds under the bed! :lol
On that night in 1980, for instance, ABC was the outlier, showing Republicans as red, having used yellow for the party four years earlier. During the network’s 1984 election coverage, Brinkley, by then at ABC, offered a seemingly arbitrary on-air explanation for the decision: “Red, R, Reagan — that’s why we chose red.”
TAX 1) Rewrite the tax code - we need to make it much simpler with far fewer discounts and loopholes. Raise more money by setting lower rates that people actually have to pay 2) Asset Value tax. Tax the land and the buildings, not a hypothetical rent from the 90s 3) Non-Dom tax. Please come here, live in swanky apartments in that London. Pay us half a mil a year and no further questions asked 4) Company Value tax. Offer companies a FAT discount off Corporation Tax if they invest in the value of their staff and assets. Do actual training and development so that your employees are the best they can be. Pay them enough money so that they can actually pay their bills. Trained and happy staff are more productive, boosting economic output and reducing in work welfare payments 5) Offshored assets tax, or the "Starbucks" tax. Basically tax them as if they're not actually buying coffee from Luxembourg - which despite their tax set up they are not. With a fat discount if they onshore fully. Radical idea - pay tax in the UK for business done in the UK you degenerate bastards 6) A sex tax. Getting some? Pay out. 7) Investment tax credits. Come and build your AI data server near where we have so much power that we have to switch the turbines off. Huge savings to be offered.
SPEND 1) Scrap the faux-market structures in public services. An end to endless NHS and Education trusts. 2) Create StateCo enterprises to run and modernise the railways, the post office, the roads, power infrastructure etc. Borrow, invest, ROI, Growth 3) HouseCo organisations. Borrow money at state rates, automatic planning permission given to build on redundant council sites. A use it or lose it 6 months deadline on landbanking by Barratts et al. Build affordable apartments and rent them at social rent levels. Thus collapsing the private rental sector and with it correcting house prices 4) Launch municipal funds - councils should be investing in civic infrastructure not property speculation. Copy Manchester - build apartments in run down town and city centres so people live there. The rest will follow as it has in Manchester. 5) Decouple energy prices from gas. Prices drop 30-40% as they have in Spain, freeing up cash to spend elsewhere 6) Abolish the OBR, hire new brains into the Treasury. Abolish the annual budget cycle - a cut to hit this year's budget target which costs more than the cut next year is economic vandalism, yet we do it over and over and over again. No more.
As a starter for 10
On Tax - I would have one rate of tax paid by all. Make it 20%. No changes to higher rates. The more you earn the more you pay.
PB - Explain why I am wrong.
We aren't that far apart. My UBI proposal (which I somehow left off the list) gives everyone a fixed income from the government and then taxes Every Single Penny you earn.
For most people that would mean a flat rate.
If the ultra rich paid 20% tax as you propose then we would be rolling in money. The challenge would be nailing shut their escape routes. Which is why we'd need to tax asset value and do something about scum who pay themselves through a company (hi).
From knowing some ultra-rich people (including relatives), a flat rate with no fiddle factors would probably get most of them to fire the tribes of accountants and lawyers they need. And just pay the tax.
Yup, make inheritance tax 10% except for farmers. No other exemptions at all. We’d all happily pay it.
Given that only around 4% of deaths currently result in inheritance tax, raising that to 100% (minus a few farmers) is going to be pissing a lot of people off as well as generating a lot more bureaucracy. Good news for accountants and lawyers though.
It seems the country's going to be a lot quieter once all the people supposedly leaving have gone....
We all know Reeves and Starmer should have been honest about raising income tax and perhaps VAT before the election but the shadow cast by 1992 is very long and it would have been manna from heaven for Sunak and Hunt - "Labour will raise your taxes, the Conservatives will cut them" - the social media messages write themselves.
We also know, in the event of their re-election, Hunt would likely have raised taxes as well.
The deficit remains eye watering - no one objects to borrowing for long term capital investment but borrowing to get from one month to the next doesn't work well for individuals or countries. The truth is even if we can bring the deficit and borrowing down we will still be saddled with the annual debt interest payments of £60-70 billion tearing a chunk out of our available expenditure.
The priority for now must be getting the deficit down and while some of the more fanciful ideas on here about slashing civil service headcount by 50% and cutting benefits by the same amount might make some on here feel better, we all know that won't happen under a Labour, Conservative or even Reform Government.
Raising basic rate progressively to 25p, higher rate to nearer 50p and instigating a third higher tax rate is probably where Reeves is going. I'd still be looking at Land Value Taxation or some measure relating to property valuations to replace Stamp Duty and possibly Council Tax. As a small gesture of carrot, I'd put thresholds up by 2x inflation this year and pledge to keep them in line with inflation for the rest of the Parliament.
It looks as though online gaming and FOBTs in betting shops will face higher tax but it may be the lobbying by the horse racing and greyhound industries has done enough to stop a significant rise in betting duty. I suspect fuel duty will go up by more than inflation as well.
The biggest problem is the entrenched belief, among the electorate, that increased taxes will simply disappear into the maw of government, without noticeable improvement.
It's fairly clear that much of Government, local and national has lost control of costs. It's Feast-Or-Famine - either there's no money for X or theres billions spent on something that should cost millions.
The migrant hotels farce is a prefect example of this - an avalanche of money for the owners. I don't blame them - times are tough in the hotel business. If someone is offering you a zero risk, unbelievably profitable multi-year contract, you'd be insane not to take it.
We need to start cutting our cloth according to the.... cloth we actually have.
I know that a British Museum catalogue without a logo, a Richard Rogeresque HQ, some abstract sculpture in the foyer and a mission statement, isn't exciting. Not to mention a "dynamic team" for the Board of Directors on 6 figures each for 2 days of work as year.
But if we ditch those things, we might be able to afford a... British Museum catalogue.
People also have very distorted ideas of where the money goes. Migrant hotels and the British Museum are not why public spending is high. The money goes on healthcare and pensions, both of which are going up with an ageing population.
But you see this pattern through government - the hospitals are both falling down and built for prices that are crazy.
My relative who runs a building business looked at the contract to build a school local to me - the price was higher, per square foot than digging luxury basements. Which is the most expensive thing to do in the construction industry. He said that he could do the job, and throw in a basement swimming pool, under the playground and still make 30%.
I can’t understand why contract management is so bad throughout the public sector.
It’s because “Chief contract negotiator” is a CL6 (sic) position, paying from £45,268 in year 1, to £53,826 in Year 8.
Meanwhile, the guy on the other side is making 1% of the contract value, and attracts people who want to make £10m a year.
It seems the country's going to be a lot quieter once all the people supposedly leaving have gone....
We all know Reeves and Starmer should have been honest about raising income tax and perhaps VAT before the election but the shadow cast by 1992 is very long and it would have been manna from heaven for Sunak and Hunt - "Labour will raise your taxes, the Conservatives will cut them" - the social media messages write themselves.
We also know, in the event of their re-election, Hunt would likely have raised taxes as well.
The deficit remains eye watering - no one objects to borrowing for long term capital investment but borrowing to get from one month to the next doesn't work well for individuals or countries. The truth is even if we can bring the deficit and borrowing down we will still be saddled with the annual debt interest payments of £60-70 billion tearing a chunk out of our available expenditure.
The priority for now must be getting the deficit down and while some of the more fanciful ideas on here about slashing civil service headcount by 50% and cutting benefits by the same amount might make some on here feel better, we all know that won't happen under a Labour, Conservative or even Reform Government.
Raising basic rate progressively to 25p, higher rate to nearer 50p and instigating a third higher tax rate is probably where Reeves is going. I'd still be looking at Land Value Taxation or some measure relating to property valuations to replace Stamp Duty and possibly Council Tax. As a small gesture of carrot, I'd put thresholds up by 2x inflation this year and pledge to keep them in line with inflation for the rest of the Parliament.
It looks as though online gaming and FOBTs in betting shops will face higher tax but it may be the lobbying by the horse racing and greyhound industries has done enough to stop a significant rise in betting duty. I suspect fuel duty will go up by more than inflation as well.
The biggest problem is the entrenched belief, among the electorate, that increased taxes will simply disappear into the maw of government, without noticeable improvement.
It's fairly clear that much of Government, local and national has lost control of costs. It's Feast-Or-Famine - either there's no money for X or theres billions spent on something that should cost millions.
The migrant hotels farce is a prefect example of this - an avalanche of money for the owners. I don't blame them - times are tough in the hotel business. If someone is offering you a zero risk, unbelievably profitable multi-year contract, you'd be insane not to take it.
We need to start cutting our cloth according to the.... cloth we actually have.
I know that a British Museum catalogue without a logo, a Richard Rogeresque HQ, some abstract sculpture in the foyer and a mission statement, isn't exciting. Not to mention a "dynamic team" for the Board of Directors on 6 figures each for 2 days of work as year.
But if we ditch those things, we might be able to afford a... British Museum catalogue.
People also have very distorted ideas of where the money goes. Migrant hotels and the British Museum are not why public spending is high. The money goes on healthcare and pensions, both of which are going up with an ageing population.
But you see this pattern through government - the hospitals are both falling down and built for prices that are crazy.
My relative who runs a building business looked at the contract to build a school local to me - the price was higher, per square foot than digging luxury basements. Which is the most expensive thing to do in the construction industry. He said that he could do the job, and throw in a basement swimming pool, under the playground and still make 30%.
I can’t understand why contract management is so bad throughout the public sector.
A combination of - contracts mostly go a circle* of contractors and people negotiating the contracts who aren't skilled in contract negotiation. So they just use the last price. Plus a bit.
There was a very good, in depth discussion of how it works in one of DK Brown's books - the ship building industry took the government on a ride for the building of the KGV battleships.
I've mentioned before, how a previous Government binned the specialist ammunition buying unit in the MOD. And bought cheap, crap ammo, that jammed guns. I recently found out the cherry on top - they bought cheap ammo, all right. But they paid one of the highest prices (though less than the good stuff) that had been paid for that crap. So they go done, both ways.
*What they used to call a "Ring" in the days when Basil Rathbone was playing Sherlock Holmes.
A view of the Refuk UK claims around Motability (Agent Anderson's Bring Back Invacar) from a thoughtful disabled friend who has been in this field for decades. He also wants reform of the scheme, but without Anderson's poisonous politics.
What's really depressing about this is it targetting the flaws in the scheme in such a way as to put the blame on disabled people! The scheme is basically a way of channelling the welfare budget into a subsidy for the car industry. The reason why you can buy a BMW is that if you couldn't BMW would crucify the government for unfair subsidies. Either Reform knows this and is being really malicious, or it doesn't, in which case its being stupid.
(Can't link - quoting from a private forum.)
The thing I don't get about this is, IIUC, recipients get the DLA (PIP for adults? My expertise, such as it is, is for kids) with the mobility component. They can spend that how they like to address their mobility issues. One option is to give it to Motability as (part) payment for an adapted vehicle.
Either the payment is justified or it is not. What it is notionally spent on seems irrelevant to me. If the person has the means, why should they not use it towards adapting a Beamer rather than a second hand Austin Metro?
Now, Motability made an absolute fortune from this in the past, but - again - that's not the recipients' fault (one does wonder why there are not really competing schemes and competition in this space).
I think it's a felt-fair thing. Some disabled people are unemployed, but are able to run a fancier car than many people in employment. Also many disabled people work, and/or have partners that do, and therefore Motability is paying for something they could fund from their own resources. A work colleague (DWP so he knows how it works) complained that neighbours on disability could apparently afford a new car every 3 years
Again, that's not so much an issue with Motability but rather PIP being non-means tested. It comes down to your values and how you think about things like this.
And I think there are some rather well paid PBers on PIP living with serious medical conditions. I don't begrudge them at all but I wonder if a soft taper (25% perhaps) wouldn't be a good idea.
TAX 1) Rewrite the tax code - we need to make it much simpler with far fewer discounts and loopholes. Raise more money by setting lower rates that people actually have to pay 2) Asset Value tax. Tax the land and the buildings, not a hypothetical rent from the 90s 3) Non-Dom tax. Please come here, live in swanky apartments in that London. Pay us half a mil a year and no further questions asked 4) Company Value tax. Offer companies a FAT discount off Corporation Tax if they invest in the value of their staff and assets. Do actual training and development so that your employees are the best they can be. Pay them enough money so that they can actually pay their bills. Trained and happy staff are more productive, boosting economic output and reducing in work welfare payments 5) Offshored assets tax, or the "Starbucks" tax. Basically tax them as if they're not actually buying coffee from Luxembourg - which despite their tax set up they are not. With a fat discount if they onshore fully. Radical idea - pay tax in the UK for business done in the UK you degenerate bastards 6) A sex tax. Getting some? Pay out. 7) Investment tax credits. Come and build your AI data server near where we have so much power that we have to switch the turbines off. Huge savings to be offered.
SPEND 1) Scrap the faux-market structures in public services. An end to endless NHS and Education trusts. 2) Create StateCo enterprises to run and modernise the railways, the post office, the roads, power infrastructure etc. Borrow, invest, ROI, Growth 3) HouseCo organisations. Borrow money at state rates, automatic planning permission given to build on redundant council sites. A use it or lose it 6 months deadline on landbanking by Barratts et al. Build affordable apartments and rent them at social rent levels. Thus collapsing the private rental sector and with it correcting house prices 4) Launch municipal funds - councils should be investing in civic infrastructure not property speculation. Copy Manchester - build apartments in run down town and city centres so people live there. The rest will follow as it has in Manchester. 5) Decouple energy prices from gas. Prices drop 30-40% as they have in Spain, freeing up cash to spend elsewhere 6) Abolish the OBR, hire new brains into the Treasury. Abolish the annual budget cycle - a cut to hit this year's budget target which costs more than the cut next year is economic vandalism, yet we do it over and over and over again. No more.
As a starter for 10
On Tax - I would have one rate of tax paid by all. Make it 20%. No changes to higher rates. The more you earn the more you pay.
PB - Explain why I am wrong.
We aren't that far apart. My UBI proposal (which I somehow left off the list) gives everyone a fixed income from the government and then taxes Every Single Penny you earn.
For most people that would mean a flat rate.
If the ultra rich paid 20% tax as you propose then we would be rolling in money. The challenge would be nailing shut their escape routes. Which is why we'd need to tax asset value and do something about scum who pay themselves through a company (hi).
From knowing some ultra-rich people (including relatives), a flat rate with no fiddle factors would probably get most of them to fire the tribes of accountants and lawyers they need. And just pay the tax.
Yup, make inheritance tax 10% except for farmers. No other exemptions at all. We’d all happily pay it.
Given that only around 4% of deaths currently result in inheritance tax, raising that to 100% (minus a few farmers) is going to be pissing a lot of people off as well as generating a lot more bureaucracy. Good news for accountants and lawyers though.
Quite the opposite in practice. People spend hundreds of thousands setting up trusts, paying lawyers and accountants to avoid the 40% tax, that if it were 10% would be mostly accepted.
Kemi has just said that the Tories have a record of protecting the NHS.
With a straight face.
What have they done then to make you say that? Funding for the NHS was never cut, even during 'austerity'.
Ask Google 'NHS waiting list versus party in power'
AI Overview
Analyzing the relationship between the governing political party and the NHS waiting list shows significant long-term increases in the waiting list under Conservative-led governments (pre-1997 and 2010-2024), and substantial reductions under the Labour governments of 1997-2010. However, direct comparisons across decades are challenging due to changes in how waiting lists are measured.
Historical Overview Conservative Governments (1987-1997): The waiting list rose substantially. However, it is noted that the median waiting time for patients, and the number waiting more than a year, actually fell during this period, indicating complex trends in how quickly patients were treated versus the total number on the list.
Labour Governments (1997-2010): The waiting list fell substantially under New Labour, especially after new targets were introduced around 2005. The total waiting list nearly halved by 2009, and median waiting times were lower than under the preceding Conservative governments.
Conservative/Coalition Governments (2010-2024): The NHS waiting list doubled in the decade before the COVID-19 pandemic, from around 2.3 million in January 2010 to 4.6 million in December 2019. Median waiting times also rose during this period. The 18-week treatment target (92% of patients treated within 18 weeks) has not been met since September 2015.
Post-Pandemic (2020 onwards): The waiting list grew rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic, peaking at around 7.8 million in September 2023. The substantial disruption from the pandemic and subsequent industrial action exacerbated an already strained system.
Labour Government (from July 2024): The waiting list was around 7.6 million when Labour took office. Initial data shows a slight decrease in the total list (to around 7.4 million by August 2025) and improvements in the percentage of waits within 18 weeks.
A view of the Refuk UK claims around Motability (Agent Anderson's Bring Back Invacar) from a thoughtful disabled friend who has been in this field for decades. He also wants reform of the scheme, but without Anderson's poisonous politics.
What's really depressing about this is it targetting the flaws in the scheme in such a way as to put the blame on disabled people! The scheme is basically a way of channelling the welfare budget into a subsidy for the car industry. The reason why you can buy a BMW is that if you couldn't BMW would crucify the government for unfair subsidies. Either Reform knows this and is being really malicious, or it doesn't, in which case its being stupid.
(Can't link - quoting from a private forum.)
The thing I don't get about this is, IIUC, recipients get the DLA (PIP for adults? My expertise, such as it is, is for kids) with the mobility component. They can spend that how they like to address their mobility issues. One option is to give it to Motability as (part) payment for an adapted vehicle.
Either the payment is justified or it is not. What it is notionally spent on seems irrelevant to me. If the person has the means, why should they not use it towards adapting a Beamer rather than a second hand Austin Metro?
Now, Motability made an absolute fortune from this in the past, but - again - that's not the recipients' fault (one does wonder why there are not really competing schemes and competition in this space).
I think it's a felt-fair thing. Some disabled people are unemployed, but are able to run a fancier car than many people in employment. Also many disabled people work, and/or have partners that do, and therefore Motability is paying for something they could fund from their own resources. A work colleague (DWP so he knows how it works) complained that neighbours on disability could apparently afford a new car every 3 years
Again, that's not so much an issue with Motability but rather PIP being non-means tested. It comes down to your values and how you think about things like this.
And I think there are some rather well paid PBers on PIP living with serious medical conditions. I don't begrudge them at all but I wonder if a soft taper (25% perhaps) wouldn't be a good idea.
Make everything taxable. At the same tax rate. This does away with tons of cliff edges, saves complex means testing and would be perceived as fairer.
Kemi has just said that the Tories have a record of protecting the NHS.
With a straight face.
What have they done then to make you say that? Funding for the NHS was never cut, even during 'austerity'.
It isn't funding, its structure. The Tories presided over an ENHS system where funding reached record highs AND funds available to front line medicine were dangerously low.
A significant driver of this? The faux market structures imposed a decade ago. The bureaucracy burns the cash. I always give Thornaby as a great example - a health centre containing two GP practices. Each with their own management teams and administrators and contracts for services with other parts of the local NHS. An absurd duplication burning cash for no benefit.
Remove all of the market structures and spend the money on healthcare not contract managers and lawyers.
It seems the country's going to be a lot quieter once all the people supposedly leaving have gone....
We all know Reeves and Starmer should have been honest about raising income tax and perhaps VAT before the election but the shadow cast by 1992 is very long and it would have been manna from heaven for Sunak and Hunt - "Labour will raise your taxes, the Conservatives will cut them" - the social media messages write themselves.
We also know, in the event of their re-election, Hunt would likely have raised taxes as well.
The deficit remains eye watering - no one objects to borrowing for long term capital investment but borrowing to get from one month to the next doesn't work well for individuals or countries. The truth is even if we can bring the deficit and borrowing down we will still be saddled with the annual debt interest payments of £60-70 billion tearing a chunk out of our available expenditure.
The priority for now must be getting the deficit down and while some of the more fanciful ideas on here about slashing civil service headcount by 50% and cutting benefits by the same amount might make some on here feel better, we all know that won't happen under a Labour, Conservative or even Reform Government.
Raising basic rate progressively to 25p, higher rate to nearer 50p and instigating a third higher tax rate is probably where Reeves is going. I'd still be looking at Land Value Taxation or some measure relating to property valuations to replace Stamp Duty and possibly Council Tax. As a small gesture of carrot, I'd put thresholds up by 2x inflation this year and pledge to keep them in line with inflation for the rest of the Parliament.
It looks as though online gaming and FOBTs in betting shops will face higher tax but it may be the lobbying by the horse racing and greyhound industries has done enough to stop a significant rise in betting duty. I suspect fuel duty will go up by more than inflation as well.
The biggest problem is the entrenched belief, among the electorate, that increased taxes will simply disappear into the maw of government, without noticeable improvement.
It's fairly clear that much of Government, local and national has lost control of costs. It's Feast-Or-Famine - either there's no money for X or theres billions spent on something that should cost millions.
The migrant hotels farce is a prefect example of this - an avalanche of money for the owners. I don't blame them - times are tough in the hotel business. If someone is offering you a zero risk, unbelievably profitable multi-year contract, you'd be insane not to take it.
We need to start cutting our cloth according to the.... cloth we actually have.
I know that a British Museum catalogue without a logo, a Richard Rogeresque HQ, some abstract sculpture in the foyer and a mission statement, isn't exciting. Not to mention a "dynamic team" for the Board of Directors on 6 figures each for 2 days of work as year.
But if we ditch those things, we might be able to afford a... British Museum catalogue.
People also have very distorted ideas of where the money goes. Migrant hotels and the British Museum are not why public spending is high. The money goes on healthcare and pensions, both of which are going up with an ageing population.
But you see this pattern through government - the hospitals are both falling down and built for prices that are crazy.
My relative who runs a building business looked at the contract to build a school local to me - the price was higher, per square foot than digging luxury basements. Which is the most expensive thing to do in the construction industry. He said that he could do the job, and throw in a basement swimming pool, under the playground and still make 30%.
I can’t understand why contract management is so bad throughout the public sector.
It’s because “Chief contract negotiator” is a CL6 (sic) position, paying from £45,268 in year 1, to £53,826 in Year 8.
Meanwhile, the guy on the other side is making 1% of the contract value, and attracts people who want to make £10m a year.
Agreed. But you won’t fix that with cuts
Oh I’d be all in favour of central government having a crack team of contract negotiators on unlimited commission based on saving public money.
Kemi has just said that the Tories have a record of protecting the NHS.
With a straight face.
What have they done then to make you say that? Funding for the NHS was never cut, even during 'austerity'.
Ask Google 'NHS waiting list versus party in power'
AI Overview
Analyzing the relationship between the governing political party and the NHS waiting list shows significant long-term increases in the waiting list under Conservative-led governments (pre-1997 and 2010-2024), and substantial reductions under the Labour governments of 1997-2010. However, direct comparisons across decades are challenging due to changes in how waiting lists are measured.
Historical Overview Conservative Governments (1987-1997): The waiting list rose substantially. However, it is noted that the median waiting time for patients, and the number waiting more than a year, actually fell during this period, indicating complex trends in how quickly patients were treated versus the total number on the list.
Labour Governments (1997-2010): The waiting list fell substantially under New Labour, especially after new targets were introduced around 2005. The total waiting list nearly halved by 2009, and median waiting times were lower than under the preceding Conservative governments.
Conservative/Coalition Governments (2010-2024): The NHS waiting list doubled in the decade before the COVID-19 pandemic, from around 2.3 million in January 2010 to 4.6 million in December 2019. Median waiting times also rose during this period. The 18-week treatment target (92% of patients treated within 18 weeks) has not been met since September 2015.
Post-Pandemic (2020 onwards): The waiting list grew rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic, peaking at around 7.8 million in September 2023. The substantial disruption from the pandemic and subsequent industrial action exacerbated an already strained system.
Labour Government (from July 2024): The waiting list was around 7.6 million when Labour took office. Initial data shows a slight decrease in the total list (to around 7.4 million by August 2025) and improvements in the percentage of waits within 18 weeks.
It is risible to suggest that the waiting lists would not have rocketed if Labour were in power during the Covid epidemic. That massively undermines any "correlation".
TAX 1) Rewrite the tax code - we need to make it much simpler with far fewer discounts and loopholes. Raise more money by setting lower rates that people actually have to pay 2) Asset Value tax. Tax the land and the buildings, not a hypothetical rent from the 90s 3) Non-Dom tax. Please come here, live in swanky apartments in that London. Pay us half a mil a year and no further questions asked 4) Company Value tax. Offer companies a FAT discount off Corporation Tax if they invest in the value of their staff and assets. Do actual training and development so that your employees are the best they can be. Pay them enough money so that they can actually pay their bills. Trained and happy staff are more productive, boosting economic output and reducing in work welfare payments 5) Offshored assets tax, or the "Starbucks" tax. Basically tax them as if they're not actually buying coffee from Luxembourg - which despite their tax set up they are not. With a fat discount if they onshore fully. Radical idea - pay tax in the UK for business done in the UK you degenerate bastards 6) A sex tax. Getting some? Pay out. 7) Investment tax credits. Come and build your AI data server near where we have so much power that we have to switch the turbines off. Huge savings to be offered.
SPEND 1) Scrap the faux-market structures in public services. An end to endless NHS and Education trusts. 2) Create StateCo enterprises to run and modernise the railways, the post office, the roads, power infrastructure etc. Borrow, invest, ROI, Growth 3) HouseCo organisations. Borrow money at state rates, automatic planning permission given to build on redundant council sites. A use it or lose it 6 months deadline on landbanking by Barratts et al. Build affordable apartments and rent them at social rent levels. Thus collapsing the private rental sector and with it correcting house prices 4) Launch municipal funds - councils should be investing in civic infrastructure not property speculation. Copy Manchester - build apartments in run down town and city centres so people live there. The rest will follow as it has in Manchester. 5) Decouple energy prices from gas. Prices drop 30-40% as they have in Spain, freeing up cash to spend elsewhere 6) Abolish the OBR, hire new brains into the Treasury. Abolish the annual budget cycle - a cut to hit this year's budget target which costs more than the cut next year is economic vandalism, yet we do it over and over and over again. No more.
As a starter for 10
On Tax - I would have one rate of tax paid by all. Make it 20%. No changes to higher rates. The more you earn the more you pay.
PB - Explain why I am wrong.
We aren't that far apart. My UBI proposal (which I somehow left off the list) gives everyone a fixed income from the government and then taxes Every Single Penny you earn.
For most people that would mean a flat rate.
If the ultra rich paid 20% tax as you propose then we would be rolling in money. The challenge would be nailing shut their escape routes. Which is why we'd need to tax asset value and do something about scum who pay themselves through a company (hi).
From knowing some ultra-rich people (including relatives), a flat rate with no fiddle factors would probably get most of them to fire the tribes of accountants and lawyers they need. And just pay the tax.
Yup, make inheritance tax 10% except for farmers. No other exemptions at all. We’d all happily pay it.
Given that only around 4% of deaths currently result in inheritance tax, raising that to 100% (minus a few farmers) is going to be pissing a lot of people off as well as generating a lot more bureaucracy. Good news for accountants and lawyers though.
Quite the opposite in practice. People spend hundreds of thousands setting up trusts, paying lawyers and accountants to avoid the 40% tax, that if it were 10% would be mostly accepted.
But the vast majority of people don't pay IHT because their assets don't reach the threshold for IHT. By making it a flat 10%, you bringing in a huge number of people who wouldn't otherwise have paid anything. The people who spend hundreds of thousands setting up trusts, etc, are only a tiny proportion of the population.
TAX 1) Rewrite the tax code - we need to make it much simpler with far fewer discounts and loopholes. Raise more money by setting lower rates that people actually have to pay 2) Asset Value tax. Tax the land and the buildings, not a hypothetical rent from the 90s 3) Non-Dom tax. Please come here, live in swanky apartments in that London. Pay us half a mil a year and no further questions asked 4) Company Value tax. Offer companies a FAT discount off Corporation Tax if they invest in the value of their staff and assets. Do actual training and development so that your employees are the best they can be. Pay them enough money so that they can actually pay their bills. Trained and happy staff are more productive, boosting economic output and reducing in work welfare payments 5) Offshored assets tax, or the "Starbucks" tax. Basically tax them as if they're not actually buying coffee from Luxembourg - which despite their tax set up they are not. With a fat discount if they onshore fully. Radical idea - pay tax in the UK for business done in the UK you degenerate bastards 6) A sex tax. Getting some? Pay out. 7) Investment tax credits. Come and build your AI data server near where we have so much power that we have to switch the turbines off. Huge savings to be offered.
SPEND 1) Scrap the faux-market structures in public services. An end to endless NHS and Education trusts. 2) Create StateCo enterprises to run and modernise the railways, the post office, the roads, power infrastructure etc. Borrow, invest, ROI, Growth 3) HouseCo organisations. Borrow money at state rates, automatic planning permission given to build on redundant council sites. A use it or lose it 6 months deadline on landbanking by Barratts et al. Build affordable apartments and rent them at social rent levels. Thus collapsing the private rental sector and with it correcting house prices 4) Launch municipal funds - councils should be investing in civic infrastructure not property speculation. Copy Manchester - build apartments in run down town and city centres so people live there. The rest will follow as it has in Manchester. 5) Decouple energy prices from gas. Prices drop 30-40% as they have in Spain, freeing up cash to spend elsewhere 6) Abolish the OBR, hire new brains into the Treasury. Abolish the annual budget cycle - a cut to hit this year's budget target which costs more than the cut next year is economic vandalism, yet we do it over and over and over again. No more.
As a starter for 10
On Tax - I would have one rate of tax paid by all. Make it 20%. No changes to higher rates. The more you earn the more you pay.
PB - Explain why I am wrong.
We aren't that far apart. My UBI proposal (which I somehow left off the list) gives everyone a fixed income from the government and then taxes Every Single Penny you earn.
For most people that would mean a flat rate.
If the ultra rich paid 20% tax as you propose then we would be rolling in money. The challenge would be nailing shut their escape routes. Which is why we'd need to tax asset value and do something about scum who pay themselves through a company (hi).
From knowing some ultra-rich people (including relatives), a flat rate with no fiddle factors would probably get most of them to fire the tribes of accountants and lawyers they need. And just pay the tax.
Yup, make inheritance tax 10% except for farmers. No other exemptions at all. We’d all happily pay it.
Given that only around 4% of deaths currently result in inheritance tax, raising that to 100% (minus a few farmers) is going to be pissing a lot of people off as well as generating a lot more bureaucracy. Good news for accountants and lawyers though.
Quite the opposite in practice. People spend hundreds of thousands setting up trusts, paying lawyers and accountants to avoid the 40% tax, that if it were 10% would be mostly accepted.
It would be a very minor part of probate arranging a 10% payment to HMRC. And less than the cost of solicitor/funeral in many cases.
I think justifiable if you also introduce a flat 1% property tax to replace CT.
A view of the Refuk UK claims around Motability (Agent Anderson's Bring Back Invacar) from a thoughtful disabled friend who has been in this field for decades. He also wants reform of the scheme, but without Anderson's poisonous politics.
What's really depressing about this is it targetting the flaws in the scheme in such a way as to put the blame on disabled people! The scheme is basically a way of channelling the welfare budget into a subsidy for the car industry. The reason why you can buy a BMW is that if you couldn't BMW would crucify the government for unfair subsidies. Either Reform knows this and is being really malicious, or it doesn't, in which case its being stupid.
(Can't link - quoting from a private forum.)
The thing I don't get about this is, IIUC, recipients get the DLA (PIP for adults? My expertise, such as it is, is for kids) with the mobility component. They can spend that how they like to address their mobility issues. One option is to give it to Motability as (part) payment for an adapted vehicle.
Either the payment is justified or it is not. What it is notionally spent on seems irrelevant to me. If the person has the means, why should they not use it towards adapting a Beamer rather than a second hand Austin Metro?
Now, Motability made an absolute fortune from this in the past, but - again - that's not the recipients' fault (one does wonder why there are not really competing schemes and competition in this space).
I think it's a felt-fair thing. Some disabled people are unemployed, but are able to run a fancier car than many people in employment. Also many disabled people work, and/or have partners that do, and therefore Motability is paying for something they could fund from their own resources. A work colleague (DWP so he knows how it works) complained that neighbours on disability could apparently afford a new car every 3 years
Again, that's not so much an issue with Motability but rather PIP being non-means tested. It comes down to your values and how you think about things like this.
And I think there are some rather well paid PBers on PIP living with serious medical conditions. I don't begrudge them at all but I wonder if a soft taper (25% perhaps) wouldn't be a good idea.
Make everything taxable. At the same tax rate. This does away with tons of cliff edges, saves complex means testing and would be perceived as fairer.
Won't happen.
As we've seen, the left don't care about tax generation, it's how much they hit 'rich' individuals and companies that matters to their sense of self-righteousness.
It seems the country's going to be a lot quieter once all the people supposedly leaving have gone....
We all know Reeves and Starmer should have been honest about raising income tax and perhaps VAT before the election but the shadow cast by 1992 is very long and it would have been manna from heaven for Sunak and Hunt - "Labour will raise your taxes, the Conservatives will cut them" - the social media messages write themselves.
We also know, in the event of their re-election, Hunt would likely have raised taxes as well.
The deficit remains eye watering - no one objects to borrowing for long term capital investment but borrowing to get from one month to the next doesn't work well for individuals or countries. The truth is even if we can bring the deficit and borrowing down we will still be saddled with the annual debt interest payments of £60-70 billion tearing a chunk out of our available expenditure.
The priority for now must be getting the deficit down and while some of the more fanciful ideas on here about slashing civil service headcount by 50% and cutting benefits by the same amount might make some on here feel better, we all know that won't happen under a Labour, Conservative or even Reform Government.
Raising basic rate progressively to 25p, higher rate to nearer 50p and instigating a third higher tax rate is probably where Reeves is going. I'd still be looking at Land Value Taxation or some measure relating to property valuations to replace Stamp Duty and possibly Council Tax. As a small gesture of carrot, I'd put thresholds up by 2x inflation this year and pledge to keep them in line with inflation for the rest of the Parliament.
It looks as though online gaming and FOBTs in betting shops will face higher tax but it may be the lobbying by the horse racing and greyhound industries has done enough to stop a significant rise in betting duty. I suspect fuel duty will go up by more than inflation as well.
The biggest problem is the entrenched belief, among the electorate, that increased taxes will simply disappear into the maw of government, without noticeable improvement.
It's fairly clear that much of Government, local and national has lost control of costs. It's Feast-Or-Famine - either there's no money for X or theres billions spent on something that should cost millions.
The migrant hotels farce is a prefect example of this - an avalanche of money for the owners. I don't blame them - times are tough in the hotel business. If someone is offering you a zero risk, unbelievably profitable multi-year contract, you'd be insane not to take it.
We need to start cutting our cloth according to the.... cloth we actually have.
I know that a British Museum catalogue without a logo, a Richard Rogeresque HQ, some abstract sculpture in the foyer and a mission statement, isn't exciting. Not to mention a "dynamic team" for the Board of Directors on 6 figures each for 2 days of work as year.
But if we ditch those things, we might be able to afford a... British Museum catalogue.
People also have very distorted ideas of where the money goes. Migrant hotels and the British Museum are not why public spending is high. The money goes on healthcare and pensions, both of which are going up with an ageing population.
But you see this pattern through government - the hospitals are both falling down and built for prices that are crazy.
My relative who runs a building business looked at the contract to build a school local to me - the price was higher, per square foot than digging luxury basements. Which is the most expensive thing to do in the construction industry. He said that he could do the job, and throw in a basement swimming pool, under the playground and still make 30%.
I can’t understand why contract management is so bad throughout the public sector.
It’s because “Chief contract negotiator” is a CL6 (sic) position, paying from £45,268 in year 1, to £53,826 in Year 8.
Meanwhile, the guy on the other side is making 1% of the contract value, and attracts people who want to make £10m a year.
Agreed. But you won’t fix that with cuts
Oh I’d be all in favour of central government having a crack team of contract negotiators on unlimited commission based on saving public money.
Let me at it!
Carbon Capture Schemes? gone.
Nuclear power projects - persuade me why they shouldn't be gone....
A view of the Refuk UK claims around Motability (Agent Anderson's Bring Back Invacar) from a thoughtful disabled friend who has been in this field for decades. He also wants reform of the scheme, but without Anderson's poisonous politics.
What's really depressing about this is it targetting the flaws in the scheme in such a way as to put the blame on disabled people! The scheme is basically a way of channelling the welfare budget into a subsidy for the car industry. The reason why you can buy a BMW is that if you couldn't BMW would crucify the government for unfair subsidies. Either Reform knows this and is being really malicious, or it doesn't, in which case its being stupid.
(Can't link - quoting from a private forum.)
The thing I don't get about this is, IIUC, recipients get the DLA (PIP for adults? My expertise, such as it is, is for kids) with the mobility component. They can spend that how they like to address their mobility issues. One option is to give it to Motability as (part) payment for an adapted vehicle.
Either the payment is justified or it is not. What it is notionally spent on seems irrelevant to me. If the person has the means, why should they not use it towards adapting a Beamer rather than a second hand Austin Metro?
Now, Motability made an absolute fortune from this in the past, but - again - that's not the recipients' fault (one does wonder why there are not really competing schemes and competition in this space).
I think it's a felt-fair thing. Some disabled people are unemployed, but are able to run a fancier car than many people in employment. Also many disabled people work, and/or have partners that do, and therefore Motability is paying for something they could fund from their own resources. A work colleague (DWP so he knows how it works) complained that neighbours on disability could apparently afford a new car every 3 years
Again, that's not so much an issue with Motability but rather PIP being non-means tested. It comes down to your values and how you think about things like this.
And I think there are some rather well paid PBers on PIP living with serious medical conditions. I don't begrudge them at all but I wonder if a soft taper (25% perhaps) wouldn't be a good idea.
Make everything taxable. At the same tax rate. This does away with tons of cliff edges, saves complex means testing and would be perceived as fairer.
I can see the need for additional taxes as a flat tax doesn't drive behaviours. A flat tax in our current system would be grotesque. But UBI and a flat tax? I'm listening...
It seems the country's going to be a lot quieter once all the people supposedly leaving have gone....
We all know Reeves and Starmer should have been honest about raising income tax and perhaps VAT before the election but the shadow cast by 1992 is very long and it would have been manna from heaven for Sunak and Hunt - "Labour will raise your taxes, the Conservatives will cut them" - the social media messages write themselves.
We also know, in the event of their re-election, Hunt would likely have raised taxes as well.
The deficit remains eye watering - no one objects to borrowing for long term capital investment but borrowing to get from one month to the next doesn't work well for individuals or countries. The truth is even if we can bring the deficit and borrowing down we will still be saddled with the annual debt interest payments of £60-70 billion tearing a chunk out of our available expenditure.
The priority for now must be getting the deficit down and while some of the more fanciful ideas on here about slashing civil service headcount by 50% and cutting benefits by the same amount might make some on here feel better, we all know that won't happen under a Labour, Conservative or even Reform Government.
Raising basic rate progressively to 25p, higher rate to nearer 50p and instigating a third higher tax rate is probably where Reeves is going. I'd still be looking at Land Value Taxation or some measure relating to property valuations to replace Stamp Duty and possibly Council Tax. As a small gesture of carrot, I'd put thresholds up by 2x inflation this year and pledge to keep them in line with inflation for the rest of the Parliament.
It looks as though online gaming and FOBTs in betting shops will face higher tax but it may be the lobbying by the horse racing and greyhound industries has done enough to stop a significant rise in betting duty. I suspect fuel duty will go up by more than inflation as well.
The biggest problem is the entrenched belief, among the electorate, that increased taxes will simply disappear into the maw of government, without noticeable improvement.
It's fairly clear that much of Government, local and national has lost control of costs. It's Feast-Or-Famine - either there's no money for X or theres billions spent on something that should cost millions.
The migrant hotels farce is a prefect example of this - an avalanche of money for the owners. I don't blame them - times are tough in the hotel business. If someone is offering you a zero risk, unbelievably profitable multi-year contract, you'd be insane not to take it.
We need to start cutting our cloth according to the.... cloth we actually have.
I know that a British Museum catalogue without a logo, a Richard Rogeresque HQ, some abstract sculpture in the foyer and a mission statement, isn't exciting. Not to mention a "dynamic team" for the Board of Directors on 6 figures each for 2 days of work as year.
But if we ditch those things, we might be able to afford a... British Museum catalogue.
People also have very distorted ideas of where the money goes. Migrant hotels and the British Museum are not why public spending is high. The money goes on healthcare and pensions, both of which are going up with an ageing population.
But you see this pattern through government - the hospitals are both falling down and built for prices that are crazy.
My relative who runs a building business looked at the contract to build a school local to me - the price was higher, per square foot than digging luxury basements. Which is the most expensive thing to do in the construction industry. He said that he could do the job, and throw in a basement swimming pool, under the playground and still make 30%.
I can’t understand why contract management is so bad throughout the public sector.
It’s because “Chief contract negotiator” is a CL6 (sic) position, paying from £45,268 in year 1, to £53,826 in Year 8.
Meanwhile, the guy on the other side is making 1% of the contract value, and attracts people who want to make £10m a year.
Agreed. But you won’t fix that with cuts
Oh I’d be all in favour of central government having a crack team of contract negotiators on unlimited commission based on saving public money.
Let me at it!
Carbon Capture Schemes? gone.
Nuclear power projects - persuade me why they shouldn't be gone....
Carbon capture was always a waste of money - added cost zero benefit
Nuclear power - we shouldn’t be building big ones except the Korean design. Small modular ones we should be investing in to get the factories working so we start exporting them
TAX 1) Rewrite the tax code - we need to make it much simpler with far fewer discounts and loopholes. Raise more money by setting lower rates that people actually have to pay 2) Asset Value tax. Tax the land and the buildings, not a hypothetical rent from the 90s 3) Non-Dom tax. Please come here, live in swanky apartments in that London. Pay us half a mil a year and no further questions asked 4) Company Value tax. Offer companies a FAT discount off Corporation Tax if they invest in the value of their staff and assets. Do actual training and development so that your employees are the best they can be. Pay them enough money so that they can actually pay their bills. Trained and happy staff are more productive, boosting economic output and reducing in work welfare payments 5) Offshored assets tax, or the "Starbucks" tax. Basically tax them as if they're not actually buying coffee from Luxembourg - which despite their tax set up they are not. With a fat discount if they onshore fully. Radical idea - pay tax in the UK for business done in the UK you degenerate bastards 6) A sex tax. Getting some? Pay out. 7) Investment tax credits. Come and build your AI data server near where we have so much power that we have to switch the turbines off. Huge savings to be offered.
SPEND 1) Scrap the faux-market structures in public services. An end to endless NHS and Education trusts. 2) Create StateCo enterprises to run and modernise the railways, the post office, the roads, power infrastructure etc. Borrow, invest, ROI, Growth 3) HouseCo organisations. Borrow money at state rates, automatic planning permission given to build on redundant council sites. A use it or lose it 6 months deadline on landbanking by Barratts et al. Build affordable apartments and rent them at social rent levels. Thus collapsing the private rental sector and with it correcting house prices 4) Launch municipal funds - councils should be investing in civic infrastructure not property speculation. Copy Manchester - build apartments in run down town and city centres so people live there. The rest will follow as it has in Manchester. 5) Decouple energy prices from gas. Prices drop 30-40% as they have in Spain, freeing up cash to spend elsewhere 6) Abolish the OBR, hire new brains into the Treasury. Abolish the annual budget cycle - a cut to hit this year's budget target which costs more than the cut next year is economic vandalism, yet we do it over and over and over again. No more.
As a starter for 10
On Tax - I would have one rate of tax paid by all. Make it 20%. No changes to higher rates. The more you earn the more you pay.
PB - Explain why I am wrong.
We aren't that far apart. My UBI proposal (which I somehow left off the list) gives everyone a fixed income from the government and then taxes Every Single Penny you earn.
For most people that would mean a flat rate.
If the ultra rich paid 20% tax as you propose then we would be rolling in money. The challenge would be nailing shut their escape routes. Which is why we'd need to tax asset value and do something about scum who pay themselves through a company (hi).
From knowing some ultra-rich people (including relatives), a flat rate with no fiddle factors would probably get most of them to fire the tribes of accountants and lawyers they need. And just pay the tax.
Yup, make inheritance tax 10% except for farmers. No other exemptions at all. We’d all happily pay it.
Given that only around 4% of deaths currently result in inheritance tax, raising that to 100% (minus a few farmers) is going to be pissing a lot of people off as well as generating a lot more bureaucracy. Good news for accountants and lawyers though.
Quite the opposite in practice. People spend hundreds of thousands setting up trusts, paying lawyers and accountants to avoid the 40% tax, that if it were 10% would be mostly accepted.
It would be a very minor part of probate arranging a 10% payment to HMRC. And less than the cost of solicitor/funeral in many cases.
I think justifiable if you also introduce a flat 1% property tax to replace CT.
CT and stamp duty - we should be encouraging downsizing
A view of the Refuk UK claims around Motability (Agent Anderson's Bring Back Invacar) from a thoughtful disabled friend who has been in this field for decades. He also wants reform of the scheme, but without Anderson's poisonous politics.
What's really depressing about this is it targetting the flaws in the scheme in such a way as to put the blame on disabled people! The scheme is basically a way of channelling the welfare budget into a subsidy for the car industry. The reason why you can buy a BMW is that if you couldn't BMW would crucify the government for unfair subsidies. Either Reform knows this and is being really malicious, or it doesn't, in which case its being stupid.
(Can't link - quoting from a private forum.)
The thing I don't get about this is, IIUC, recipients get the DLA (PIP for adults? My expertise, such as it is, is for kids) with the mobility component. They can spend that how they like to address their mobility issues. One option is to give it to Motability as (part) payment for an adapted vehicle.
Either the payment is justified or it is not. What it is notionally spent on seems irrelevant to me. If the person has the means, why should they not use it towards adapting a Beamer rather than a second hand Austin Metro?
Now, Motability made an absolute fortune from this in the past, but - again - that's not the recipients' fault (one does wonder why there are not really competing schemes and competition in this space).
I think it's a felt-fair thing. Some disabled people are unemployed, but are able to run a fancier car than many people in employment. Also many disabled people work, and/or have partners that do, and therefore Motability is paying for something they could fund from their own resources. A work colleague (DWP so he knows how it works) complained that neighbours on disability could apparently afford a new car every 3 years
Again, that's not so much an issue with Motability but rather PIP being non-means tested. It comes down to your values and how you think about things like this.
And I think there are some rather well paid PBers on PIP living with serious medical conditions. I don't begrudge them at all but I wonder if a soft taper (25% perhaps) wouldn't be a good idea.
All those posts are fair and make valid points. As one of those 'well-off' PIP recipients due to my paraplegia (since I was 19), I benefit from PIP and use Motability.
Like everyone on here I do not refuse the tax breaks or benefits I am allowed under the rules (is anyone who thinks benefits spending should be cut planning to forego their State Retirement Pension?)
If PIP was taxed or means tested, I wouldn't object; the Motability scheme per se is not the issue - those whinging about it are just demonstrating the politics of envy.
It seems the country's going to be a lot quieter once all the people supposedly leaving have gone....
We all know Reeves and Starmer should have been honest about raising income tax and perhaps VAT before the election but the shadow cast by 1992 is very long and it would have been manna from heaven for Sunak and Hunt - "Labour will raise your taxes, the Conservatives will cut them" - the social media messages write themselves.
We also know, in the event of their re-election, Hunt would likely have raised taxes as well.
The deficit remains eye watering - no one objects to borrowing for long term capital investment but borrowing to get from one month to the next doesn't work well for individuals or countries. The truth is even if we can bring the deficit and borrowing down we will still be saddled with the annual debt interest payments of £60-70 billion tearing a chunk out of our available expenditure.
The priority for now must be getting the deficit down and while some of the more fanciful ideas on here about slashing civil service headcount by 50% and cutting benefits by the same amount might make some on here feel better, we all know that won't happen under a Labour, Conservative or even Reform Government.
Raising basic rate progressively to 25p, higher rate to nearer 50p and instigating a third higher tax rate is probably where Reeves is going. I'd still be looking at Land Value Taxation or some measure relating to property valuations to replace Stamp Duty and possibly Council Tax. As a small gesture of carrot, I'd put thresholds up by 2x inflation this year and pledge to keep them in line with inflation for the rest of the Parliament.
It looks as though online gaming and FOBTs in betting shops will face higher tax but it may be the lobbying by the horse racing and greyhound industries has done enough to stop a significant rise in betting duty. I suspect fuel duty will go up by more than inflation as well.
The biggest problem is the entrenched belief, among the electorate, that increased taxes will simply disappear into the maw of government, without noticeable improvement.
It's fairly clear that much of Government, local and national has lost control of costs. It's Feast-Or-Famine - either there's no money for X or theres billions spent on something that should cost millions.
The migrant hotels farce is a prefect example of this - an avalanche of money for the owners. I don't blame them - times are tough in the hotel business. If someone is offering you a zero risk, unbelievably profitable multi-year contract, you'd be insane not to take it.
We need to start cutting our cloth according to the.... cloth we actually have.
I know that a British Museum catalogue without a logo, a Richard Rogeresque HQ, some abstract sculpture in the foyer and a mission statement, isn't exciting. Not to mention a "dynamic team" for the Board of Directors on 6 figures each for 2 days of work as year.
But if we ditch those things, we might be able to afford a... British Museum catalogue.
People also have very distorted ideas of where the money goes. Migrant hotels and the British Museum are not why public spending is high. The money goes on healthcare and pensions, both of which are going up with an ageing population.
But you see this pattern through government - the hospitals are both falling down and built for prices that are crazy.
My relative who runs a building business looked at the contract to build a school local to me - the price was higher, per square foot than digging luxury basements. Which is the most expensive thing to do in the construction industry. He said that he could do the job, and throw in a basement swimming pool, under the playground and still make 30%.
I can’t understand why contract management is so bad throughout the public sector.
It’s because “Chief contract negotiator” is a CL6 (sic) position, paying from £45,268 in year 1, to £53,826 in Year 8.
Meanwhile, the guy on the other side is making 1% of the contract value, and attracts people who want to make £10m a year.
Agreed. But you won’t fix that with cuts
Oh I’d be all in favour of central government having a crack team of contract negotiators on unlimited commission based on saving public money.
Disaster waiting to happen. For one, you wouldn’t be able to easily quantify what the “saving” was and as all commission systems do it would encourage meeting the metric only. I.e. low contract sum but costs heavily loaded in year 5 or whenever after any commission is paid.
A view of the Refuk UK claims around Motability (Agent Anderson's Bring Back Invacar) from a thoughtful disabled friend who has been in this field for decades. He also wants reform of the scheme, but without Anderson's poisonous politics.
What's really depressing about this is it targetting the flaws in the scheme in such a way as to put the blame on disabled people! The scheme is basically a way of channelling the welfare budget into a subsidy for the car industry. The reason why you can buy a BMW is that if you couldn't BMW would crucify the government for unfair subsidies. Either Reform knows this and is being really malicious, or it doesn't, in which case its being stupid.
(Can't link - quoting from a private forum.)
Isn't the VAT whacked off which results in higher effective subsidies for high value cars ?
That aspect needs to be capped at a vehicle value of £10k or so.
Kemi has just said that the Tories have a record of protecting the NHS.
With a straight face.
What have they done then to make you say that? Funding for the NHS was never cut, even during 'austerity'.
Ask Google 'NHS waiting list versus party in power'
AI Overview
Analyzing the relationship between the governing political party and the NHS waiting list shows significant long-term increases in the waiting list under Conservative-led governments (pre-1997 and 2010-2024), and substantial reductions under the Labour governments of 1997-2010. However, direct comparisons across decades are challenging due to changes in how waiting lists are measured.
Historical Overview Conservative Governments (1987-1997): The waiting list rose substantially. However, it is noted that the median waiting time for patients, and the number waiting more than a year, actually fell during this period, indicating complex trends in how quickly patients were treated versus the total number on the list.
Labour Governments (1997-2010): The waiting list fell substantially under New Labour, especially after new targets were introduced around 2005. The total waiting list nearly halved by 2009, and median waiting times were lower than under the preceding Conservative governments.
Conservative/Coalition Governments (2010-2024): The NHS waiting list doubled in the decade before the COVID-19 pandemic, from around 2.3 million in January 2010 to 4.6 million in December 2019. Median waiting times also rose during this period. The 18-week treatment target (92% of patients treated within 18 weeks) has not been met since September 2015.
Post-Pandemic (2020 onwards): The waiting list grew rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic, peaking at around 7.8 million in September 2023. The substantial disruption from the pandemic and subsequent industrial action exacerbated an already strained system.
Labour Government (from July 2024): The waiting list was around 7.6 million when Labour took office. Initial data shows a slight decrease in the total list (to around 7.4 million by August 2025) and improvements in the percentage of waits within 18 weeks.
Waiting lists outcome is more than just more money/less money. The Tories inherited a very bad financial situation in 2010 but still increased the funding in the NHS, albeit perhaps not by enough. And as elsewhere the number of people over 65 has increased dramatically since 2000.
Kemi has just said that the Tories have a record of protecting the NHS.
With a straight face.
What have they done then to make you say that? Funding for the NHS was never cut, even during 'austerity'.
It isn't funding, its structure. The Tories presided over an ENHS system where funding reached record highs AND funds available to front line medicine were dangerously low.
A significant driver of this? The faux market structures imposed a decade ago. The bureaucracy burns the cash. I always give Thornaby as a great example - a health centre containing two GP practices. Each with their own management teams and administrators and contracts for services with other parts of the local NHS. An absurd duplication burning cash for no benefit.
Remove all of the market structures and spend the money on healthcare not contract managers and lawyers.
Hi @RochdalePioneers That's really interesting. The GP practice I used to belong to (in north of Scotland) was one of two practices occupying the same premises. Always wondered what the point of it was. Presume something to do with GPs not being directly employed by NHS and, as partners, being able to run the business with an eye to financial return? Too cynical? Alternatively, is it more efficient, somehow, to have two practices? Do they, meaningfully, compete?
TAX 1) Rewrite the tax code - we need to make it much simpler with far fewer discounts and loopholes. Raise more money by setting lower rates that people actually have to pay 2) Asset Value tax. Tax the land and the buildings, not a hypothetical rent from the 90s 3) Non-Dom tax. Please come here, live in swanky apartments in that London. Pay us half a mil a year and no further questions asked 4) Company Value tax. Offer companies a FAT discount off Corporation Tax if they invest in the value of their staff and assets. Do actual training and development so that your employees are the best they can be. Pay them enough money so that they can actually pay their bills. Trained and happy staff are more productive, boosting economic output and reducing in work welfare payments 5) Offshored assets tax, or the "Starbucks" tax. Basically tax them as if they're not actually buying coffee from Luxembourg - which despite their tax set up they are not. With a fat discount if they onshore fully. Radical idea - pay tax in the UK for business done in the UK you degenerate bastards 6) A sex tax. Getting some? Pay out. 7) Investment tax credits. Come and build your AI data server near where we have so much power that we have to switch the turbines off. Huge savings to be offered.
SPEND 1) Scrap the faux-market structures in public services. An end to endless NHS and Education trusts. 2) Create StateCo enterprises to run and modernise the railways, the post office, the roads, power infrastructure etc. Borrow, invest, ROI, Growth 3) HouseCo organisations. Borrow money at state rates, automatic planning permission given to build on redundant council sites. A use it or lose it 6 months deadline on landbanking by Barratts et al. Build affordable apartments and rent them at social rent levels. Thus collapsing the private rental sector and with it correcting house prices 4) Launch municipal funds - councils should be investing in civic infrastructure not property speculation. Copy Manchester - build apartments in run down town and city centres so people live there. The rest will follow as it has in Manchester. 5) Decouple energy prices from gas. Prices drop 30-40% as they have in Spain, freeing up cash to spend elsewhere 6) Abolish the OBR, hire new brains into the Treasury. Abolish the annual budget cycle - a cut to hit this year's budget target which costs more than the cut next year is economic vandalism, yet we do it over and over and over again. No more.
As a starter for 10
On Tax - I would have one rate of tax paid by all. Make it 20%. No changes to higher rates. The more you earn the more you pay.
PB - Explain why I am wrong.
We aren't that far apart. My UBI proposal (which I somehow left off the list) gives everyone a fixed income from the government and then taxes Every Single Penny you earn.
For most people that would mean a flat rate.
If the ultra rich paid 20% tax as you propose then we would be rolling in money. The challenge would be nailing shut their escape routes. Which is why we'd need to tax asset value and do something about scum who pay themselves through a company (hi).
From knowing some ultra-rich people (including relatives), a flat rate with no fiddle factors would probably get most of them to fire the tribes of accountants and lawyers they need. And just pay the tax.
Yup, make inheritance tax 10% except for farmers. No other exemptions at all. We’d all happily pay it.
Given that only around 4% of deaths currently result in inheritance tax, raising that to 100% (minus a few farmers) is going to be pissing a lot of people off as well as generating a lot more bureaucracy. Good news for accountants and lawyers though.
Quite the opposite in practice. People spend hundreds of thousands setting up trusts, paying lawyers and accountants to avoid the 40% tax, that if it were 10% would be mostly accepted.
But the vast majority of people don't pay IHT because their assets don't reach the threshold for IHT. By making it a flat 10%, you bringing in a huge number of people who wouldn't otherwise have paid anything. The people who spend hundreds of thousands setting up trusts, etc, are only a tiny proportion of the population.
Correct.
A 10% universal inheritance tax would almost certainly raise more money than the current system, and most people are unlikely to object to it.
Rachel also needs to take into account the hundreds of milions currently spent on accountants and lawyers, their VAT and income taxes. But who’s feeling sorry for the lawyers?
It seems the country's going to be a lot quieter once all the people supposedly leaving have gone....
We all know Reeves and Starmer should have been honest about raising income tax and perhaps VAT before the election but the shadow cast by 1992 is very long and it would have been manna from heaven for Sunak and Hunt - "Labour will raise your taxes, the Conservatives will cut them" - the social media messages write themselves.
We also know, in the event of their re-election, Hunt would likely have raised taxes as well.
The deficit remains eye watering - no one objects to borrowing for long term capital investment but borrowing to get from one month to the next doesn't work well for individuals or countries. The truth is even if we can bring the deficit and borrowing down we will still be saddled with the annual debt interest payments of £60-70 billion tearing a chunk out of our available expenditure.
The priority for now must be getting the deficit down and while some of the more fanciful ideas on here about slashing civil service headcount by 50% and cutting benefits by the same amount might make some on here feel better, we all know that won't happen under a Labour, Conservative or even Reform Government.
Raising basic rate progressively to 25p, higher rate to nearer 50p and instigating a third higher tax rate is probably where Reeves is going. I'd still be looking at Land Value Taxation or some measure relating to property valuations to replace Stamp Duty and possibly Council Tax. As a small gesture of carrot, I'd put thresholds up by 2x inflation this year and pledge to keep them in line with inflation for the rest of the Parliament.
It looks as though online gaming and FOBTs in betting shops will face higher tax but it may be the lobbying by the horse racing and greyhound industries has done enough to stop a significant rise in betting duty. I suspect fuel duty will go up by more than inflation as well.
The biggest problem is the entrenched belief, among the electorate, that increased taxes will simply disappear into the maw of government, without noticeable improvement.
It's fairly clear that much of Government, local and national has lost control of costs. It's Feast-Or-Famine - either there's no money for X or theres billions spent on something that should cost millions.
The migrant hotels farce is a prefect example of this - an avalanche of money for the owners. I don't blame them - times are tough in the hotel business. If someone is offering you a zero risk, unbelievably profitable multi-year contract, you'd be insane not to take it.
We need to start cutting our cloth according to the.... cloth we actually have.
I know that a British Museum catalogue without a logo, a Richard Rogeresque HQ, some abstract sculpture in the foyer and a mission statement, isn't exciting. Not to mention a "dynamic team" for the Board of Directors on 6 figures each for 2 days of work as year.
But if we ditch those things, we might be able to afford a... British Museum catalogue.
People also have very distorted ideas of where the money goes. Migrant hotels and the British Museum are not why public spending is high. The money goes on healthcare and pensions, both of which are going up with an ageing population.
But you see this pattern through government - the hospitals are both falling down and built for prices that are crazy.
My relative who runs a building business looked at the contract to build a school local to me - the price was higher, per square foot than digging luxury basements. Which is the most expensive thing to do in the construction industry. He said that he could do the job, and throw in a basement swimming pool, under the playground and still make 30%.
I can’t understand why contract management is so bad throughout the public sector.
It’s because “Chief contract negotiator” is a CL6 (sic) position, paying from £45,268 in year 1, to £53,826 in Year 8.
Meanwhile, the guy on the other side is making 1% of the contract value, and attracts people who want to make £10m a year.
Agreed. But you won’t fix that with cuts
Oh I’d be all in favour of central government having a crack team of contract negotiators on unlimited commission based on saving public money.
Let me at it!
Carbon Capture Schemes? gone.
Nuclear power projects - persuade me why they shouldn't be gone....
Carbon capture was always a waste of money - added cost zero benefit
Nuclear power - we shouldn’t be building big ones except the Korean design. Small modular ones we should be investing in to get the factories working so we start exporting them
Carbon capture is a designed to mitigate the amount of CO2 that is released. If you are determined that global temps need to be kept below 'x' degrees then carbon capture might be used as part of the process, even if it is hideously expensive.
It seems the country's going to be a lot quieter once all the people supposedly leaving have gone....
We all know Reeves and Starmer should have been honest about raising income tax and perhaps VAT before the election but the shadow cast by 1992 is very long and it would have been manna from heaven for Sunak and Hunt - "Labour will raise your taxes, the Conservatives will cut them" - the social media messages write themselves.
We also know, in the event of their re-election, Hunt would likely have raised taxes as well.
The deficit remains eye watering - no one objects to borrowing for long term capital investment but borrowing to get from one month to the next doesn't work well for individuals or countries. The truth is even if we can bring the deficit and borrowing down we will still be saddled with the annual debt interest payments of £60-70 billion tearing a chunk out of our available expenditure.
The priority for now must be getting the deficit down and while some of the more fanciful ideas on here about slashing civil service headcount by 50% and cutting benefits by the same amount might make some on here feel better, we all know that won't happen under a Labour, Conservative or even Reform Government.
Raising basic rate progressively to 25p, higher rate to nearer 50p and instigating a third higher tax rate is probably where Reeves is going. I'd still be looking at Land Value Taxation or some measure relating to property valuations to replace Stamp Duty and possibly Council Tax. As a small gesture of carrot, I'd put thresholds up by 2x inflation this year and pledge to keep them in line with inflation for the rest of the Parliament.
It looks as though online gaming and FOBTs in betting shops will face higher tax but it may be the lobbying by the horse racing and greyhound industries has done enough to stop a significant rise in betting duty. I suspect fuel duty will go up by more than inflation as well.
The biggest problem is the entrenched belief, among the electorate, that increased taxes will simply disappear into the maw of government, without noticeable improvement.
It's fairly clear that much of Government, local and national has lost control of costs. It's Feast-Or-Famine - either there's no money for X or theres billions spent on something that should cost millions.
The migrant hotels farce is a prefect example of this - an avalanche of money for the owners. I don't blame them - times are tough in the hotel business. If someone is offering you a zero risk, unbelievably profitable multi-year contract, you'd be insane not to take it.
We need to start cutting our cloth according to the.... cloth we actually have.
I know that a British Museum catalogue without a logo, a Richard Rogeresque HQ, some abstract sculpture in the foyer and a mission statement, isn't exciting. Not to mention a "dynamic team" for the Board of Directors on 6 figures each for 2 days of work as year.
But if we ditch those things, we might be able to afford a... British Museum catalogue.
People also have very distorted ideas of where the money goes. Migrant hotels and the British Museum are not why public spending is high. The money goes on healthcare and pensions, both of which are going up with an ageing population.
But you see this pattern through government - the hospitals are both falling down and built for prices that are crazy.
My relative who runs a building business looked at the contract to build a school local to me - the price was higher, per square foot than digging luxury basements. Which is the most expensive thing to do in the construction industry. He said that he could do the job, and throw in a basement swimming pool, under the playground and still make 30%.
I can’t understand why contract management is so bad throughout the public sector.
It’s because “Chief contract negotiator” is a CL6 (sic) position, paying from £45,268 in year 1, to £53,826 in Year 8.
Meanwhile, the guy on the other side is making 1% of the contract value, and attracts people who want to make £10m a year.
Agreed. But you won’t fix that with cuts
Oh I’d be all in favour of central government having a crack team of contract negotiators on unlimited commission based on saving public money.
Disaster waiting to happen. For one, you wouldn’t be able to easily quantify what the “saving” was and as all commission systems do it would encourage meeting the metric only. I.e. low contract sum but costs heavily loaded in year 5 or whenever after any commission is paid.
Because the government is incapable of structuring incentive schemes that the private sector do all the time?
TAX 1) Rewrite the tax code - we need to make it much simpler with far fewer discounts and loopholes. Raise more money by setting lower rates that people actually have to pay 2) Asset Value tax. Tax the land and the buildings, not a hypothetical rent from the 90s 3) Non-Dom tax. Please come here, live in swanky apartments in that London. Pay us half a mil a year and no further questions asked 4) Company Value tax. Offer companies a FAT discount off Corporation Tax if they invest in the value of their staff and assets. Do actual training and development so that your employees are the best they can be. Pay them enough money so that they can actually pay their bills. Trained and happy staff are more productive, boosting economic output and reducing in work welfare payments 5) Offshored assets tax, or the "Starbucks" tax. Basically tax them as if they're not actually buying coffee from Luxembourg - which despite their tax set up they are not. With a fat discount if they onshore fully. Radical idea - pay tax in the UK for business done in the UK you degenerate bastards 6) A sex tax. Getting some? Pay out. 7) Investment tax credits. Come and build your AI data server near where we have so much power that we have to switch the turbines off. Huge savings to be offered.
SPEND 1) Scrap the faux-market structures in public services. An end to endless NHS and Education trusts. 2) Create StateCo enterprises to run and modernise the railways, the post office, the roads, power infrastructure etc. Borrow, invest, ROI, Growth 3) HouseCo organisations. Borrow money at state rates, automatic planning permission given to build on redundant council sites. A use it or lose it 6 months deadline on landbanking by Barratts et al. Build affordable apartments and rent them at social rent levels. Thus collapsing the private rental sector and with it correcting house prices 4) Launch municipal funds - councils should be investing in civic infrastructure not property speculation. Copy Manchester - build apartments in run down town and city centres so people live there. The rest will follow as it has in Manchester. 5) Decouple energy prices from gas. Prices drop 30-40% as they have in Spain, freeing up cash to spend elsewhere 6) Abolish the OBR, hire new brains into the Treasury. Abolish the annual budget cycle - a cut to hit this year's budget target which costs more than the cut next year is economic vandalism, yet we do it over and over and over again. No more.
As a starter for 10
On Tax - I would have one rate of tax paid by all. Make it 20%. No changes to higher rates. The more you earn the more you pay.
PB - Explain why I am wrong.
We aren't that far apart. My UBI proposal (which I somehow left off the list) gives everyone a fixed income from the government and then taxes Every Single Penny you earn.
For most people that would mean a flat rate.
If the ultra rich paid 20% tax as you propose then we would be rolling in money. The challenge would be nailing shut their escape routes. Which is why we'd need to tax asset value and do something about scum who pay themselves through a company (hi).
From knowing some ultra-rich people (including relatives), a flat rate with no fiddle factors would probably get most of them to fire the tribes of accountants and lawyers they need. And just pay the tax.
Yup, make inheritance tax 10% except for farmers. No other exemptions at all. We’d all happily pay it.
Given that only around 4% of deaths currently result in inheritance tax, raising that to 100% (minus a few farmers) is going to be pissing a lot of people off as well as generating a lot more bureaucracy. Good news for accountants and lawyers though.
Quite the opposite in practice. People spend hundreds of thousands setting up trusts, paying lawyers and accountants to avoid the 40% tax, that if it were 10% would be mostly accepted.
It would be a very minor part of probate arranging a 10% payment to HMRC. And less than the cost of solicitor/funeral in many cases.
I think justifiable if you also introduce a flat 1% property tax to replace CT.
As I say, the vast majority of people currently pay no IHT. This has been the case with the three probate processes that I've been involved in. In each case, the total value of the estate, in the low to mid hundreds of thousands, fell below the relevant IHT threshold. A flat rate of 10% with no exceptions would make a huge number of people liable for IHT to the tune of tens of thousands who weren't previously liable as well as looking like a tax giveaway to the rich. It would be political suicide.
It seems the country's going to be a lot quieter once all the people supposedly leaving have gone....
We all know Reeves and Starmer should have been honest about raising income tax and perhaps VAT before the election but the shadow cast by 1992 is very long and it would have been manna from heaven for Sunak and Hunt - "Labour will raise your taxes, the Conservatives will cut them" - the social media messages write themselves.
We also know, in the event of their re-election, Hunt would likely have raised taxes as well.
The deficit remains eye watering - no one objects to borrowing for long term capital investment but borrowing to get from one month to the next doesn't work well for individuals or countries. The truth is even if we can bring the deficit and borrowing down we will still be saddled with the annual debt interest payments of £60-70 billion tearing a chunk out of our available expenditure.
The priority for now must be getting the deficit down and while some of the more fanciful ideas on here about slashing civil service headcount by 50% and cutting benefits by the same amount might make some on here feel better, we all know that won't happen under a Labour, Conservative or even Reform Government.
Raising basic rate progressively to 25p, higher rate to nearer 50p and instigating a third higher tax rate is probably where Reeves is going. I'd still be looking at Land Value Taxation or some measure relating to property valuations to replace Stamp Duty and possibly Council Tax. As a small gesture of carrot, I'd put thresholds up by 2x inflation this year and pledge to keep them in line with inflation for the rest of the Parliament.
It looks as though online gaming and FOBTs in betting shops will face higher tax but it may be the lobbying by the horse racing and greyhound industries has done enough to stop a significant rise in betting duty. I suspect fuel duty will go up by more than inflation as well.
The biggest problem is the entrenched belief, among the electorate, that increased taxes will simply disappear into the maw of government, without noticeable improvement.
It's fairly clear that much of Government, local and national has lost control of costs. It's Feast-Or-Famine - either there's no money for X or theres billions spent on something that should cost millions.
The migrant hotels farce is a prefect example of this - an avalanche of money for the owners. I don't blame them - times are tough in the hotel business. If someone is offering you a zero risk, unbelievably profitable multi-year contract, you'd be insane not to take it.
We need to start cutting our cloth according to the.... cloth we actually have.
I know that a British Museum catalogue without a logo, a Richard Rogeresque HQ, some abstract sculpture in the foyer and a mission statement, isn't exciting. Not to mention a "dynamic team" for the Board of Directors on 6 figures each for 2 days of work as year.
But if we ditch those things, we might be able to afford a... British Museum catalogue.
People also have very distorted ideas of where the money goes. Migrant hotels and the British Museum are not why public spending is high. The money goes on healthcare and pensions, both of which are going up with an ageing population.
But you see this pattern through government - the hospitals are both falling down and built for prices that are crazy.
My relative who runs a building business looked at the contract to build a school local to me - the price was higher, per square foot than digging luxury basements. Which is the most expensive thing to do in the construction industry. He said that he could do the job, and throw in a basement swimming pool, under the playground and still make 30%.
I can’t understand why contract management is so bad throughout the public sector.
It’s because “Chief contract negotiator” is a CL6 (sic) position, paying from £45,268 in year 1, to £53,826 in Year 8.
Meanwhile, the guy on the other side is making 1% of the contract value, and attracts people who want to make £10m a year.
Agreed. But you won’t fix that with cuts
Oh I’d be all in favour of central government having a crack team of contract negotiators on unlimited commission based on saving public money.
Let me at it!
Carbon Capture Schemes? gone.
Nuclear power projects - persuade me why they shouldn't be gone....
Carbon capture was always a waste of money - added cost zero benefit
Nuclear power - we shouldn’t be building big ones except the Korean design. Small modular ones we should be investing in to get the factories working so we start exporting them
How govt hasn’t funded the RR SMR is crazy. Outside the EU, it’s the first thing that should have been funded. The US and Chinese SMRs are going to end up winning the race.
Yes, for large nuclear plants the Korean solution is now the best, as we see here in UAE.
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
I mean she’s not wrong. We have been living beyond our means for a long time
And yet she chose to increase spending by £60bn per year in the last budget. That's a choice she made and now because her tax rises have failed to yield enough we're left with an even bigger shortfall than what they purported to start with.
This is all her own fault. She could have cut spending on day one, made modest tax rises and moved towards balancing the budget but instead she chose to blow the budget on public sector pay rises and the endless money pit that is the NHS. Now she's back for more tax rises because, whoops, business investment crashed and now the economy is slowing down so not enough tax is being raised.
She's worse than useless, actively harmful to the national economy.
I personally am not bothered about being taxed a bit more if it means we don’t have to cut the NHS
It’s important to think of “The NHS” in terms of outputs though, not in terms of inputs.
Throwing ever increasing piles of money at an unreformed system does nothing to help with the actual problem.
Yes and no. There is still room in the NHS for a bit more funding (c.f. to other comparator nations we spend less as a proportion of GDP). I'm also not totally sure what reforms are needed to make the system more efficient, say, as the NHS is actually pretty efficient. I would like to see social care and the NHS integrated and a return to cottage hospitals. But I am not sure what is so wrong in the NHS that needs huge reform.
There's a very strong disincentive on GPs to pay for tests.
Before I moved to Ireland I talked to my GP (on the phone) about fatigue I was suffering. They saw I was on antidepressants and said fatigue was a normal symptom of depression and ignored me when I said it had become a lot worse. When I saw a GP in Ireland they ran a blood test, found that my ferritin levels were low, prescribed iron tablets and did follow-up test to check that my iron levels went up.
There's a lot of that sort of thing going on, where the NHS is built around rationing health care, and so issues are not identified and treated early on.
It seems the country's going to be a lot quieter once all the people supposedly leaving have gone....
We all know Reeves and Starmer should have been honest about raising income tax and perhaps VAT before the election but the shadow cast by 1992 is very long and it would have been manna from heaven for Sunak and Hunt - "Labour will raise your taxes, the Conservatives will cut them" - the social media messages write themselves.
We also know, in the event of their re-election, Hunt would likely have raised taxes as well.
The deficit remains eye watering - no one objects to borrowing for long term capital investment but borrowing to get from one month to the next doesn't work well for individuals or countries. The truth is even if we can bring the deficit and borrowing down we will still be saddled with the annual debt interest payments of £60-70 billion tearing a chunk out of our available expenditure.
The priority for now must be getting the deficit down and while some of the more fanciful ideas on here about slashing civil service headcount by 50% and cutting benefits by the same amount might make some on here feel better, we all know that won't happen under a Labour, Conservative or even Reform Government.
Raising basic rate progressively to 25p, higher rate to nearer 50p and instigating a third higher tax rate is probably where Reeves is going. I'd still be looking at Land Value Taxation or some measure relating to property valuations to replace Stamp Duty and possibly Council Tax. As a small gesture of carrot, I'd put thresholds up by 2x inflation this year and pledge to keep them in line with inflation for the rest of the Parliament.
It looks as though online gaming and FOBTs in betting shops will face higher tax but it may be the lobbying by the horse racing and greyhound industries has done enough to stop a significant rise in betting duty. I suspect fuel duty will go up by more than inflation as well.
The biggest problem is the entrenched belief, among the electorate, that increased taxes will simply disappear into the maw of government, without noticeable improvement.
It's fairly clear that much of Government, local and national has lost control of costs. It's Feast-Or-Famine - either there's no money for X or theres billions spent on something that should cost millions.
The migrant hotels farce is a prefect example of this - an avalanche of money for the owners. I don't blame them - times are tough in the hotel business. If someone is offering you a zero risk, unbelievably profitable multi-year contract, you'd be insane not to take it.
We need to start cutting our cloth according to the.... cloth we actually have.
I know that a British Museum catalogue without a logo, a Richard Rogeresque HQ, some abstract sculpture in the foyer and a mission statement, isn't exciting. Not to mention a "dynamic team" for the Board of Directors on 6 figures each for 2 days of work as year.
But if we ditch those things, we might be able to afford a... British Museum catalogue.
People also have very distorted ideas of where the money goes. Migrant hotels and the British Museum are not why public spending is high. The money goes on healthcare and pensions, both of which are going up with an ageing population.
But you see this pattern through government - the hospitals are both falling down and built for prices that are crazy.
My relative who runs a building business looked at the contract to build a school local to me - the price was higher, per square foot than digging luxury basements. Which is the most expensive thing to do in the construction industry. He said that he could do the job, and throw in a basement swimming pool, under the playground and still make 30%.
I can’t understand why contract management is so bad throughout the public sector.
It’s because “Chief contract negotiator” is a CL6 (sic) position, paying from £45,268 in year 1, to £53,826 in Year 8.
Meanwhile, the guy on the other side is making 1% of the contract value, and attracts people who want to make £10m a year.
Agreed. But you won’t fix that with cuts
Oh I’d be all in favour of central government having a crack team of contract negotiators on unlimited commission based on saving public money.
Let me at it!
Carbon Capture Schemes? gone.
Nuclear power projects - persuade me why they shouldn't be gone....
Carbon capture was always a waste of money - added cost zero benefit
Nuclear power - we shouldn’t be building big ones except the Korean design. Small modular ones we should be investing in to get the factories working so we start exporting them
How govt hasn’t funded the RR SMR is crazy. Outside the EU, it’s the first thing that should have been funded. The US and Chinese SMRs are going to end up winning the race.
Comments
Emigration by British citizens has been falling since 2020 and is at a lower level than any time since Q4 1991 (the earlier point on the graph). Non-EU emigration has over doubled in this period. EU emigration has quadrupled.
I've never understood why the price is still tied to gas. Maybe I am missing something obvious?
I am not entirely convinced NI will be cut as that would lose a lot of revenue and thus 'waste' the revenue increasing benefits of raising income tax
Increases in income tax, threshold freezes indeed possible reductions in the higher rate and additional rate thresholds , also a possible new band between £45k and £50k seem virtually certain
No, the government isn’t ever going to block L2TP/IPsec, IKEv2, SSTP etc protocols at the ISP level.
They’re going to ban NordVPN and WireShark as companies.
I did enjoy the clips going around of yesterday. Philip stands at the dispatch box talking about knife crime and demanding more people be jailed for it which means deporting the forrin. Gets called out. Says "I didn't say that, withdraw!" as if Hansard are deaf.
Tories attacking Labour on tax rises will be fun to watch. As godawful as this government is, people still remember that the Tories were worse. Hence the polls.
PB - Explain why I am wrong.
I've already worked out roughly how much income tax would be paid on my DC pension even if I retired at 55.
And any reduction in the tax free pension lump sum allowance will affect increasing numbers of people.
For most people that would mean a flat rate.
If the ultra rich paid 20% tax as you propose then we would be rolling in money. The challenge would be nailing shut their escape routes. Which is why we'd need to tax asset value and do something about scum who pay themselves through a company (hi).
Vennells ? Fujitsu ? The taxpayer ?
Oh, and given the prosecution unit at the PO the job of dealing with Vennells etc. "Hunt them down, all nightmare long".
Then bought popcorn.
You would probably get more healthcare per pound by increasing the spend on admin staff, so that you don't get expensive doctors spending so long on their own paperwork. (It's certainly true in education.) But it's a tough sell, and has been for decades.
"Nurse! Nurse! I need my bedpan and my postal ballot."
https://www.independent.co.uk/money/office-for-budget-responsibility-universal-credit-gdp-government-social-care-b2778178.html
All should be targetted.
https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2024/10/26/the-publics-surprising-choice-of-tax-increase-and-why-we-should-ignore-it/
My relative who runs a building business looked at the contract to build a school local to me - the price was higher, per square foot than digging luxury basements. Which is the most expensive thing to do in the construction industry. He said that he could do the job, and throw in a basement swimming pool, under the playground and still make 30%.
Resticting Motability to British-made cars is a good start, as is removing the VAT subsidy that makes “luxury” cars suddenly affordable on Motability that wouldn’t be otherwise.
No one believes manifestos anyway.
I still think people can't comprehend how quickly spending is growing. 4% in real terms simply isn't sustainable - 250% since 2000. It's not inevitable because only a small proportion of that is due to demographics.
Very interesting it was too.
20% psychologically is a good figure - it’s not even a quarter of your income so it feels “ok”.
We also don’t have IHT or CGT but there is the caveat that being a small place with a very high earning industry as a huge part of the economy makes it a lot easier to generate large tax revenues at 20% but still it’s human nature to want to keep as much of what you earn as possible but also to understand that there are those who need help and there are things the state needs to pay for. Finding that sweet spot is always the key that nobody ever really agrees on.
"In 2024, approximately 517,000 people emigrated from the UK, consisting of about 77,000 British citizens, 218,000 EU citizens, and 222,000 non-EU citizens"
Seems those fleeing the UK are those that came and don't like it.
However the same people want to get rid of procurement regulations entirely which would just encourage people running public procurements to give contracts to the contractors they know well.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/bulletins/longterminternationalmigrationprovisional/yearendingdecember2024 shows the big increases in emigration are largely non-EU immigrants returning home, particularly Indian and Chinese people who came here to study. So, basically, we're getting more overseas students, which means immigration and emigration is higher as they come, study and then go home.
So, those figures don't show an increase in HNW individuals leaving the country. To answer FrancisUrquhart's question, "Are they people who were immigrants returning home, are they retirees going to Spain, are they highly educated individuals, rich people?" They are immigrants returning home.
It was a desperately badly run organisation for decades. Had it been in private hands the situation would have been remedied by financial collapse. In the Public Sector it was able to persist through subsidy and the exercise of powers way beyond what was wise or fair.
The blame spreads very wide indeed, and I really do not envy the position of Sir Wyn NiceOldThing as he tries to sift through the evidence and come up wth sensible suggestions.
"The first part of our planning reforms will add an additional £6.8bn to the size of our economy in the next five years."
A quarter of one percent. Over five years. 0.05% a year. The government is not equal to the task it faces.
Either the payment is justified or it is not. What it is notionally spent on seems irrelevant to me. If the person has the means, why should they not use it towards adapting a Beamer rather than a second hand Austin Metro?
Now, Motability made an absolute fortune from this in the past, but - again - that's not the recipients' fault (one does wonder why there are not really competing schemes and competition in this space).
With a straight face.
The point is to create a horrific, savage, nasty, ghastly, hideous result. Pour encourager les autres**
Paula Vennells spending the next 2 decades in court, at her own cost sounds exactly like justice to me.
*Will not contain Lessons. Will not contain Learning. Will not contain Will. May not contain "Be". All wrongs reserved.
**I came across a paper that analysed the performance of friend and relations of Admiral Byng in the RN. It seems that for the next 20 years, there was a marked performance improvement in the lower/mid management level in the RN, especially among them.
Beware Reds under the bed! :lol
The more concerning thing is how fast Britain (and Europe) is falling behind China in technological terms.
https://edition.cnn.com/style/why-republicans-red-democrats-blue/index.html
She'll need to do something to reduce the deficit to regain that credibility.
Meanwhile, the guy on the other side is making 1% of the contract value, and attracts people who want to make £10m a year.
There was a very good, in depth discussion of how it works in one of DK Brown's books - the ship building industry took the government on a ride for the building of the KGV battleships.
I've mentioned before, how a previous Government binned the specialist ammunition buying unit in the MOD. And bought cheap, crap ammo, that jammed guns. I recently found out the cherry on top - they bought cheap ammo, all right. But they paid one of the highest prices (though less than the good stuff) that had been paid for that crap. So they go done, both ways.
*What they used to call a "Ring" in the days when Basil Rathbone was playing Sherlock Holmes.
And I think there are some rather well paid PBers on PIP living with serious medical conditions. I don't begrudge them at all but I wonder if a soft taper (25% perhaps) wouldn't be a good idea.
AI Overview
Analyzing the relationship between the governing political party and the NHS waiting list shows significant long-term increases in the waiting list under Conservative-led governments (pre-1997 and 2010-2024), and substantial reductions under the Labour governments of 1997-2010. However, direct comparisons across decades are challenging due to changes in how waiting lists are measured.
Historical Overview
Conservative Governments (1987-1997): The waiting list rose substantially. However, it is noted that the median waiting time for patients, and the number waiting more than a year, actually fell during this period, indicating complex trends in how quickly patients were treated versus the total number on the list.
Labour Governments (1997-2010): The waiting list fell substantially under New Labour, especially after new targets were introduced around 2005. The total waiting list nearly halved by 2009, and median waiting times were lower than under the preceding Conservative governments.
Conservative/Coalition Governments (2010-2024): The NHS waiting list doubled in the decade before the COVID-19 pandemic, from around 2.3 million in January 2010 to 4.6 million in December 2019. Median waiting times also rose during this period. The 18-week treatment target (92% of patients treated within 18 weeks) has not been met since September 2015.
Post-Pandemic (2020 onwards): The waiting list grew rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic, peaking at around 7.8 million in September 2023. The substantial disruption from the pandemic and subsequent industrial action exacerbated an already strained system.
Labour Government (from July 2024): The waiting list was around 7.6 million when Labour took office. Initial data shows a slight decrease in the total list (to around 7.4 million by August 2025) and improvements in the percentage of waits within 18 weeks.
A significant driver of this? The faux market structures imposed a decade ago. The bureaucracy burns the cash. I always give Thornaby as a great example - a health centre containing two GP practices. Each with their own management teams and administrators and contracts for services with other parts of the local NHS. An absurd duplication burning cash for no benefit.
Remove all of the market structures and spend the money on healthcare not contract managers and lawyers.
I think justifiable if you also introduce a flat 1% property tax to replace CT.
As we've seen, the left don't care about tax generation, it's how much they hit 'rich' individuals and companies that matters to their sense of self-righteousness.
Carbon Capture Schemes? gone.
Nuclear power projects - persuade me why they shouldn't be gone....
Nuclear power - we shouldn’t be building big ones except the Korean design. Small modular ones we should be investing in to get the factories working so we start exporting them
Like everyone on here I do not refuse the tax breaks or benefits I am allowed under the rules (is anyone who thinks benefits spending should be cut planning to forego their State Retirement Pension?)
If PIP was taxed or means tested, I wouldn't object; the Motability scheme per se is not the issue - those whinging about it are just demonstrating the politics of envy.
That aspect needs to be capped at a vehicle value of £10k or so.
A 10% universal inheritance tax would almost certainly raise more money than the current system, and most people are unlikely to object to it.
Rachel also needs to take into account the hundreds of milions currently spent on accountants and lawyers, their VAT and income taxes. But who’s feeling sorry for the lawyers?
Yes, for large nuclear plants the Korean solution is now the best, as we see here in UAE.
Before I moved to Ireland I talked to my GP (on the phone) about fatigue I was suffering. They saw I was on antidepressants and said fatigue was a normal symptom of depression and ignored me when I said it had become a lot worse. When I saw a GP in Ireland they ran a blood test, found that my ferritin levels were low, prescribed iron tablets and did follow-up test to check that my iron levels went up.
There's a lot of that sort of thing going on, where the NHS is built around rationing health care, and so issues are not identified and treated early on.
And say 'could care less' instead of 'couldn't care less' which makes no sense whatsoever.
Not a great track record when it comes to doing things properly.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdxr4qn6d66o
Matt Goodwin in shambles this morning. What a hero.
A rail worker credited with saving multiple lives during a mass stabbing on a train has been named as Samir Zitouni.
The 48-year-old's actions on the Doncaster to London King's Cross service on Saturday evening were described as "nothing short of heroic".
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdxr4qn6d66o