OBR calls in cyber expert over botched release of Budget analysis ... Even though the document was not listed on the OBR website, journalists - including those at the BBC - were able to access by guessing its URL, which was very similar to one used in a previous official document. ... The BBC was able to access the PDF version of the OBR's key report at 11:45 on Wednesday by replacing the word 'March' with 'November' in the web address of a previous edition. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgmn991pz9jo
Dunno what's left for the OBR's expert to discover, except how much the OBR will pay external consultants in order to protect their bosses' jobs.
I often follow that approach so I am ready to download the document as soon as it is ready. I am very glad I didn't do that this time and end up seeing the document before the media reported the leak, or I would currently be having a serious compliance conversation around insider information! Sounds like the OBR screwed this up.
Aren't there ANY PB'ers apart me thinking, There but for the grace of God....
"Foreign tourists visiting popular US national parks like the Grand Canyon and Yosemite will need to pay an extra fee, the Trump administration says.
The Department of the Interior, which runs the country's national parks, said each international visitor will need to pay $100 (£76) per person on top of existing fees to access 11 of the most popular sites.
From 2026, non-residents will also need to pay more than $250 for an annual pass to the parks, while US citizens and permanent residents will continue to pay $80.
The fee hike aims to "put American families first" and reflects President Donald Trump's goal to make the parks more accessible and affordable for US citizens, said the department, external."
Possible that is the intent, to dissuade US tourism to reduce the risk of Americans speaking to people who live in free democratic countries.
The local people in bits of Spain want the tourist taxes raised to "eff off" rates to get rid of the low end tourists.
I'm sure they do, but generally they're in a minority, which is why places which have introduced tourist taxes do so at more modest rates.
I'm not sure if I'm in favour of tourist taxes in general, but I don't think this is the gotcha you think it is for people who support tourist taxes, but oppose Trump's version.
It's quite widespread among locals in such areas, in Spain - they see the low end tourism as very impactful and not creating much in the way of well paid jobs.
It's not about gotchas - just interesting to see people approving of policies by their author.
There has been a long running debate in the US about upping the fees for the national parks. Which aren't just fenced off bits of wilderness, but quite actively managed. Trump has managed to pick a fairly extreme option, as usual for him.
I really don't think this is about the author of the policy. It's about the rate. And generally I don't recall other tourist taxes discriminating on the basis of citizenship, normally domestic tourists also pay such tourist levies - e.g. I don't think only foreigners are charged the tourist tax in Edinburgh. The xenophobic aspect will naturally also rile a lot of people up.
I think you were totally after a gotcha, but you've missed the mark.
It’s common in South America that public attractions, such as museums are free to enter (or have massively reduced rates) if you are a citizen of that country. Foreigners pay full wack.
I think other countries do the same.
We can't really do that one, because no ID cards.
(Minor brexit disbenefit: paying to get into Spanish museums. They can't do free for Spain only without making it free for all EU citizens, whether they want to or not.)
"Foreign tourists visiting popular US national parks like the Grand Canyon and Yosemite will need to pay an extra fee, the Trump administration says.
The Department of the Interior, which runs the country's national parks, said each international visitor will need to pay $100 (£76) per person on top of existing fees to access 11 of the most popular sites.
From 2026, non-residents will also need to pay more than $250 for an annual pass to the parks, while US citizens and permanent residents will continue to pay $80.
The fee hike aims to "put American families first" and reflects President Donald Trump's goal to make the parks more accessible and affordable for US citizens, said the department, external."
Possible that is the intent, to dissuade US tourism to reduce the risk of Americans speaking to people who live in free democratic countries.
The local people in bits of Spain want the tourist taxes raised to "eff off" rates to get rid of the low end tourists.
Tourist taxes make a lot of sense from a pure economics point of view. What does Europe sell that the rest of the world wants and will pay through the nose for? Luxury goods, and tourist destinations. Both can be, in certain circumstances, Veblen goods. Cranking up tourist taxes is an effective way of monetising a valuable asset.
Though we know tourist attractions are also a little price-elastic and very faff-elastic. Britain gets fewer visitors partly because you can’t get here on a Schengen visa.
There's a "polluter pays" justification too. In a city in Edinburgh, there are significant costs to tourism, particularly in regard to housing but also the way we trash our public parks and collapse our public transport system for two months of the year.
Most of the benefits are private, and the employment low wages and temp contracts. I'm sure overall it's a net benefit, but I'm certain we haven't optimised it. STL legislation has gone some way to help.
Lol.
I know several people with businesses in Edinburgh.
They rely on tourism. Without it, There wouldn't be as many nice shops and eateries.
That's consistent with what I said.
It's funny how people can't get past a spreadsheet and look at the wider costs and benefits of economic activity. I think most people in Edinburgh would take the view that tourism is a good thing for the city, but there's work to do to spread the benefits around more evenly.
A tourist tax works well, particularly as it might help stave off the extreme Barcelona approach.
Even my reliably lefty friends are questioning putting taxes up on working people to pay for more welfare. Very few defenders left, just a token Lib Dem(!) who says we need to give Labour a chance while the actual Labour voters are pining for the days Rishi and Hunt.
Spoke to a younger family member today (a HENRY - High Income Not Rich Yet) of impeccable liberal opinions but too busy working to take much interest in politics,.
Stunned at the tax announcement on pensions. And a gradually dawning awareness of being well and truly stuffed by taxes generally. (Has mortgage and student debt).
My impression is that sympathy for welfare recipients is somewhat diminishing.
I wonder if we could be reaching a tipping point when general opinion is going to move on the welfare issue. Judging by the strength of her comments yesterday, Kemi evidently believes so. But is she right?
Does he understand the pension change properly? It's a serious question given the misunderstandings prevalent.
Possibly not. Not sure I do.
The point, I think, is that working people are beginning to take a greater interest in these things, rather than just casting them to the outer reaches of their consciousness - boring and difficult to understand. And that may affect the political zeitgeist.
I dunno, really. But it looks to me as though TAX may actually becoming an issue again. And with it, the economy. It would be a relief from culture wars - but it intensify them?
My understanding is that the big changes on pensions is the limitation on salary sacrifice schemes which may eventually produce a few billion a year in tax (depending on how people react to the changes). Other changes, such as indexing PPF payments for pension funds in distress and making it easier for a DB scheme in surplus to release some of that surplus to members are very small beer. Importantly, despite all the warnings from the Telegraph and others, the tax free lump sum was untouched and tax relief continues to be granted at higher rates for higher rate taxpayers. It was very much the dog that didn't bark.
As usual, Steve Webb is worth listening to on this and he is urging that the government make commitments re pensions for the Parliament, not for a single year, so that people can plan with more confidence.
Talking very much against my own book, I am astonished that such a generous scheme for higher earners was left intact. It is a huge benefit to the better off in our society at the cost of the less well off. It drives inequality like little else and results in the effective tax rate of many higher earners being less than those earning a lot less whilst allowing them to pile up capital that those less well paid can only dream of.
Thank you @Selebian. I had a sneaking suspicion that this observation would not be immensely popular amongst the PB selectorate!
The left/right choice should be better services at a higher cost versus worse services at a lower cost, then people can decide where on the tax spectrum they want to place themselves. The problem is neither party admits the downside to their upside, ie higher taxes or worse services. So we end up in a sterile position.
No. The issue isn't really high or low taxes, neither of our current choices gives us an outcome that we should logically want. If the UK economy had grown faster and steadily this century we wouldn't mind paying 38% overall on our significantly higher GDP and incomes to pay for good services. Growth is the problem, Labour were right to identify it as such, but when Starmer is hyping up 1.5% growth this year being "50% higher than forecast" he may be technically correct, but that we settle for such low ambition shows how far we are from ever fixing out productivity problems.
I don't think so. Expectations of growth might influence where you want to be on the tax versus services spectrum on a jam tomorrow basis. But at any particular time the decision is based on what you want from government and how much you are prepared to pay for it. The equation is still there.
Of course the issue and where you stand will always exist, but it's a particularly contentious subject in the UK because we have done relatively badly in economic terms. I think people would be a lot more relaxed about the overall tax take, but perhaps less so for each person individually, if we had a bigger pie to chop up. It's because we don't have a big enough pie to meet our needs that it's an issue. The solution lies in embiggening the pie, not arguing where to make the cuts.
OBR calls in cyber expert over botched release of Budget analysis ... Even though the document was not listed on the OBR website, journalists - including those at the BBC - were able to access by guessing its URL, which was very similar to one used in a previous official document. ... The BBC was able to access the PDF version of the OBR's key report at 11:45 on Wednesday by replacing the word 'March' with 'November' in the web address of a previous edition. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgmn991pz9jo
Dunno what's left for the OBR's expert to discover, except how much the OBR will pay external consultants in order to protect their bosses' jobs.
I often follow that approach so I am ready to download the document as soon as it is ready. I am very glad I didn't do that this time and end up seeing the document before the media reported the leak, or I would currently be having a serious compliance conversation around insider information! Sounds like the OBR screwed this up.
I've been involved with time-sensitive releases and the closest to this would be to upload the document to a staging area until the Chancellor sat down.
I would like to be tried by jury if I did it. If I didn't do it, I'd like to be tried by judge.
Don't follow the logic of this.
I'd trust the judge to get it correct more than I would a jury. If I actually hadn't done the thing, then I would expect that to be very clear to the judge whereas the jury might just not like the look of me.
Conversely, if I had done it I would expect that to be obvious to a judge who'd heard all the excuses and wouldn't be distractable with irrelevancies, whereas I might get lucky with a gullible, sympathetic, or plain daft jury.
The one case I'm not sure about is when it's my word against another (most likely a sexual assault as otherwise it probably wouldn't have got to trial)... maybe a jury is always best then.
Not sure where the idea to trust a judge to get it correct more than a jury comes from.
Especially since if you are not guilty but on trial there's already been enough to convince the CPS to put you on trial, I'm not sure I'd like to put my faith in just one person alone determining that I am guilty or not guilty.
I'd feel much more confident appealing to show my innocence to 12 individuals than any one.
A judge would certainly have convicted the Colston statue protestors of criminal damage and the police escort of the Duchess of Edinburgh who killed an elderly pedestrian at speed of careless driving causing injury. A jury acquitted them both
Yep if I'm guilty I'm definitely going for the jury option. Give it some cheeky chappie from the dock, get them on my side. Like John Palmer. Goldfinger.
Though Palmer still got assassinated in a gangland shooting anyway
He did. No trial there of any description. Straight to the business end.
My sibling had a short-lived temp job at one of Palmer's scams. Agent said they were very picky about who they took on, it was a callcentre for the "Gold Club", timeshare owners thought they were subscribing to a discount scheme for flights, car hire etc Got fired on day 1 after questioning the ethics of putting people on hold for 5 minutes then telling them there were no discounted flights available for the dates they wanted.
A jury did convict him of fraud in 2001, so the cheeky chappie, man of the people stich must have worn off.
Labour in fourth place is, I suspect, something we'll see more frequently in polling, over the next 12 months.
Social media is full of stories like the one here from the single mom in North London pulling in £6,142 a month (£2,800 wage the rest in benefits) happy she will get more from the state.
I suspect, in spite the happy clappy ‘isn’t it brilliant’ way it was portrayed on the TV news this is going to go down quite poorly in many parts of the country.
Cannot see it doing Labour any favours especially as the press seems adept at picking out beneficiary’s who appear anything but deserving for the rage bait.
OBR calls in cyber expert over botched release of Budget analysis ... Even though the document was not listed on the OBR website, journalists - including those at the BBC - were able to access by guessing its URL, which was very similar to one used in a previous official document. ... The BBC was able to access the PDF version of the OBR's key report at 11:45 on Wednesday by replacing the word 'March' with 'November' in the web address of a previous edition. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgmn991pz9jo
Dunno what's left for the OBR's expert to discover, except how much the OBR will pay external consultants in order to protect their bosses' jobs.
The consultants will write a very expensive, detailed report concluding staff at the OBR could not be expected to understand files uploaded to your web site can still be downloaded even if you don't link to them, as this is a deeply technical issue. They will recommend consultants be retained to train government departments how to take the appropriate steps to ensure this issue does not arise in future.
Of course, you can design things so that an uploaded page is still blocked. Did someone mistakenly untick a 'Block this Page' checkbox?
OBR calls in cyber expert over botched release of Budget analysis ... Even though the document was not listed on the OBR website, journalists - including those at the BBC - were able to access by guessing its URL, which was very similar to one used in a previous official document. ... The BBC was able to access the PDF version of the OBR's key report at 11:45 on Wednesday by replacing the word 'March' with 'November' in the web address of a previous edition. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgmn991pz9jo
Dunno what's left for the OBR's expert to discover, except how much the OBR will pay external consultants in order to protect their bosses' jobs.
LOL.
Countdown to someone in public life suggesting that's tantamount to guessing a password.
Should the BBC hackers be tried by 12 good men and true, or a Lammy-appointed judge?
Interestingly, such URL probing might e considered to come under the computer misuse laws.
The funniest version of that was a case in the US, where an idiot prosecutor tried to claim *reading the data returned by a normal query to a website, but not displayed on the page* was hacking.
I would like to be tried by jury if I did it. If I didn't do it, I'd like to be tried by judge.
When I did jury service (really randomly - I was pressganged off the street by a policeman to make up the numbers) we acquitted the guy on a minor weed dealing charge because we felt the prosecution had failed to prove the case beyond reasonable doubt, even though we all thought he was probably guilty. I suspect the fact the charge seemed fairly minor and the accused a rather pathetic but not obviously evil young man weighed on our decision. I wonder whether a judge, no doubt seeing loads of similar cases each week, might just go fuck it he's guilty.
OBR calls in cyber expert over botched release of Budget analysis ... Even though the document was not listed on the OBR website, journalists - including those at the BBC - were able to access by guessing its URL, which was very similar to one used in a previous official document. ... The BBC was able to access the PDF version of the OBR's key report at 11:45 on Wednesday by replacing the word 'March' with 'November' in the web address of a previous edition. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgmn991pz9jo
Dunno what's left for the OBR's expert to discover, except how much the OBR will pay external consultants in order to protect their bosses' jobs.
The consultants will write a very expensive, detailed report concluding staff at the OBR could not be expected to understand files uploaded to your web site can still be downloaded even if you don't link to them, as this is a deeply technical issue. They will recommend consultants be retained to train government departments how to take the appropriate steps to ensure this issue does not arise in future.
Of course, you can design things so that an uploaded page is still blocked. Did someone mistakenly untick a 'Block this Page' checkbox?
The standard process, very often, for releasing such things is to put them in place, but blocked, unless you have special access. For testing.
Then go live is, as you say, setting to open access .
Even my reliably lefty friends are questioning putting taxes up on working people to pay for more welfare. Very few defenders left, just a token Lib Dem(!) who says we need to give Labour a chance while the actual Labour voters are pining for the days Rishi and Hunt.
Spoke to a younger family member today (a HENRY - High Income Not Rich Yet) of impeccable liberal opinions but too busy working to take much interest in politics,.
Stunned at the tax announcement on pensions. And a gradually dawning awareness of being well and truly stuffed by taxes generally. (Has mortgage and student debt).
My impression is that sympathy for welfare recipients is somewhat diminishing.
I wonder if we could be reaching a tipping point when general opinion is going to move on the welfare issue. Judging by the strength of her comments yesterday, Kemi evidently believes so. But is she right?
Does he understand the pension change properly? It's a serious question given the misunderstandings prevalent.
Possibly not. Not sure I do.
The point, I think, is that working people are beginning to take a greater interest in these things, rather than just casting them to the outer reaches of their consciousness - boring and difficult to understand. And that may affect the political zeitgeist.
I dunno, really. But it looks to me as though TAX may actually becoming an issue again. And with it, the economy. It would be a relief from culture wars - but it intensify them?
My understanding is that the big changes on pensions is the limitation on salary sacrifice schemes which may eventually produce a few billion a year in tax (depending on how people react to the changes). Other changes, such as indexing PPF payments for pension funds in distress and making it easier for a DB scheme in surplus to release some of that surplus to members are very small beer. Importantly, despite all the warnings from the Telegraph and others, the tax free lump sum was untouched and tax relief continues to be granted at higher rates for higher rate taxpayers. It was very much the dog that didn't bark.
As usual, Steve Webb is worth listening to on this and he is urging that the government make commitments re pensions for the Parliament, not for a single year, so that people can plan with more confidence.
Talking very much against my own book, I am astonished that such a generous scheme for higher earners was left intact. It is a huge benefit to the better off in our society at the cost of the less well off. It drives inequality like little else and results in the effective tax rate of many higher earners being less than those earning a lot less whilst allowing them to pile up capital that those less well paid can only dream of.
Thank you @Selebian. I had a sneaking suspicion that this observation would not be immensely popular amongst the PB selectorate!
OBR calls in cyber expert over botched release of Budget analysis ... Even though the document was not listed on the OBR website, journalists - including those at the BBC - were able to access by guessing its URL, which was very similar to one used in a previous official document. ... The BBC was able to access the PDF version of the OBR's key report at 11:45 on Wednesday by replacing the word 'March' with 'November' in the web address of a previous edition. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgmn991pz9jo
Dunno what's left for the OBR's expert to discover, except how much the OBR will pay external consultants in order to protect their bosses' jobs.
LOL.
Countdown to someone in public life suggesting that's tantamount to guessing a password.
Should the BBC hackers be tried by 12 good men and true, or a Lammy-appointed judge?
Interestingly, such URL probing might e considered to come under the computer misuse laws.
The funniest version of that was a case in the US, where an idiot prosecutor tried to claim *reading the data returned by a normal query to a website, but not displayed on the page* was hacking.
There was definitely one case in the US where someone was found guilty of hacking for typing ../ into a URL, but I still can’t find it after a quick look.
I would like to be tried by jury if I did it. If I didn't do it, I'd like to be tried by judge.
Don't follow the logic of this.
I'd trust the judge to get it correct more than I would a jury. If I actually hadn't done the thing, then I would expect that to be very clear to the judge whereas the jury might just not like the look of me.
Conversely, if I had done it I would expect that to be obvious to a judge who'd heard all the excuses and wouldn't be distractable with irrelevancies, whereas I might get lucky with a gullible, sympathetic, or plain daft jury.
The one case I'm not sure about is when it's my word against another (most likely a sexual assault as otherwise it probably wouldn't have got to trial)... maybe a jury is always best then.
Not sure where the idea to trust a judge to get it correct more than a jury comes from.
Especially since if you are not guilty but on trial there's already been enough to convince the CPS to put you on trial, I'm not sure I'd like to put my faith in just one person alone determining that I am guilty or not guilty.
I'd feel much more confident appealing to show my innocence to 12 individuals than any one.
A judge would certainly have convicted the Colston statue protestors of criminal damage and the police escort of the Duchess of Edinburgh who killed an elderly pedestrian at speed of careless driving causing injury. A jury acquitted them both
Yep if I'm guilty I'm definitely going for the jury option. Give it some cheeky chappie from the dock, get them on my side. Like John Palmer. Goldfinger.
Though Palmer still got assassinated in a gangland shooting anyway
Golly, poor kinabalu. I'm going for Topping with a silenced Ruger in Holland Park.
"Foreign tourists visiting popular US national parks like the Grand Canyon and Yosemite will need to pay an extra fee, the Trump administration says.
The Department of the Interior, which runs the country's national parks, said each international visitor will need to pay $100 (£76) per person on top of existing fees to access 11 of the most popular sites.
From 2026, non-residents will also need to pay more than $250 for an annual pass to the parks, while US citizens and permanent residents will continue to pay $80.
The fee hike aims to "put American families first" and reflects President Donald Trump's goal to make the parks more accessible and affordable for US citizens, said the department, external."
Possible that is the intent, to dissuade US tourism to reduce the risk of Americans speaking to people who live in free democratic countries.
The local people in bits of Spain want the tourist taxes raised to "eff off" rates to get rid of the low end tourists.
Tourist taxes make a lot of sense from a pure economics point of view. What does Europe sell that the rest of the world wants and will pay through the nose for? Luxury goods, and tourist destinations. Both can be, in certain circumstances, Veblen goods. Cranking up tourist taxes is an effective way of monetising a valuable asset.
Though we know tourist attractions are also a little price-elastic and very faff-elastic. Britain gets fewer visitors partly because you can’t get here on a Schengen visa.
There's a "polluter pays" justification too. In a city in Edinburgh, there are significant costs to tourism, particularly in regard to housing but also the way we trash our public parks and collapse our public transport system for two months of the year.
Most of the benefits are private, and the employment low wages and temp contracts. I'm sure overall it's a net benefit, but I'm certain we haven't optimised it. STL legislation has gone some way to help.
Lol.
I know several people with businesses in Edinburgh.
They rely on tourism. Without it, There wouldn't be as many nice shops and eateries.
But a lot of these shops are gash shite and the eateries are of no use to us when they increase their prices in the tourist season ...
OBR calls in cyber expert over botched release of Budget analysis ... Even though the document was not listed on the OBR website, journalists - including those at the BBC - were able to access by guessing its URL, which was very similar to one used in a previous official document. ... The BBC was able to access the PDF version of the OBR's key report at 11:45 on Wednesday by replacing the word 'March' with 'November' in the web address of a previous edition. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgmn991pz9jo
Dunno what's left for the OBR's expert to discover, except how much the OBR will pay external consultants in order to protect their bosses' jobs.
I often follow that approach so I am ready to download the document as soon as it is ready. I am very glad I didn't do that this time and end up seeing the document before the media reported the leak, or I would currently be having a serious compliance conversation around insider information! Sounds like the OBR screwed this up.
Aren't there ANY PB'ers apart me thinking, There but for the grace of God....
Of course! I feel very sorry for whoever did this. Everyone makes mistakes, nobody died.
"Her new [property] tax – a toxic mix of two hated levies, council tax and IHT – is equivalent to detonating a time bomb under Middle England."
"Socialism is back, and the property-owning democracy is out. Labour has declared war on social mobility, on petit bourgeois values, on the consumer society and on conservative Britain."
I was hoping that Osborne's Jack-in-a-Box £175k transferrable allowance would go, amongst other things. But no dice.
But to do it properly would require changes to the Gift regime, especially the gifts out of "not required" income being tax free. That is a charter for useless loafing offspring of very wealthy people *.
* See Charlie Gilmour.
No that hits the children of most of Middle England pensioners and like May's dementia tax would be political suicide
But, as already much discussed, unfair to everyone else. Aunties, uncles, those who have less valuable estates to leave and subsidize the ones who benefit.
Step children and adopted children also benefit from Osborne's inheritance tax cut. The Nil Rate Band Residence Inheritance tax exemption was the most popular Tory policy of the 21st century and without it half the estates in the country would now pay inheritance tax
How many of each are there compared with nephews and nieces? And plenty of people don't have direct descendants.
If the Tories were trying to introduce natalist policies it's a bloody stupid one. Cut Sire Start, cap the child benefit, and introduce RNRB. Great thinking.
It was a very effective one and effectively won the Tories most seats at the 2010 general election as overnight swing voters switched from Brown Labour to Cameron Conservatives when Osborne announced the inheritance tax cut. It ensured inheritance to get a deposit for grandchildren for instance.
The child benefit cap was also popular with voters, child benefit should have been increased for all voters not just those on benefits
Doesn't mean that the IHT stuff wasn't a huge lie which distorted the housing market even more, not to mention UK politics and economics.
I would like to be tried by jury if I did it. If I didn't do it, I'd like to be tried by judge.
Don't follow the logic of this.
I'd trust the judge to get it correct more than I would a jury. If I actually hadn't done the thing, then I would expect that to be very clear to the judge whereas the jury might just not like the look of me.
Conversely, if I had done it I would expect that to be obvious to a judge who'd heard all the excuses and wouldn't be distractable with irrelevancies, whereas I might get lucky with a gullible, sympathetic, or plain daft jury.
The one case I'm not sure about is when it's my word against another (most likely a sexual assault as otherwise it probably wouldn't have got to trial)... maybe a jury is always best then.
Not sure where the idea to trust a judge to get it correct more than a jury comes from.
Especially since if you are not guilty but on trial there's already been enough to convince the CPS to put you on trial, I'm not sure I'd like to put my faith in just one person alone determining that I am guilty or not guilty.
I'd feel much more confident appealing to show my innocence to 12 individuals than any one.
A judge would certainly have convicted the Colston statue protestors of criminal damage and the police escort of the Duchess of Edinburgh who killed an elderly pedestrian at speed of careless driving causing injury. A jury acquitted them both
Yep if I'm guilty I'm definitely going for the jury option. Give it some cheeky chappie from the dock, get them on my side. Like John Palmer. Goldfinger.
Though Palmer still got assassinated in a gangland shooting anyway
Golly, poor kinabulu. I'm going for Topping with a silenced Ruger in Holland Park.
Having been lured there by Malmesbury and Bartholomew Roberts.
OBR calls in cyber expert over botched release of Budget analysis ... Even though the document was not listed on the OBR website, journalists - including those at the BBC - were able to access by guessing its URL, which was very similar to one used in a previous official document. ... The BBC was able to access the PDF version of the OBR's key report at 11:45 on Wednesday by replacing the word 'March' with 'November' in the web address of a previous edition. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgmn991pz9jo
Dunno what's left for the OBR's expert to discover, except how much the OBR will pay external consultants in order to protect their bosses' jobs.
I often follow that approach so I am ready to download the document as soon as it is ready. I am very glad I didn't do that this time and end up seeing the document before the media reported the leak, or I would currently be having a serious compliance conversation around insider information! Sounds like the OBR screwed this up.
Aren't there ANY PB'ers apart me thinking, There but for the grace of God....
Of course! I feel very sorry for whoever did this. Everyone makes mistakes, nobody died.
Even my reliably lefty friends are questioning putting taxes up on working people to pay for more welfare. Very few defenders left, just a token Lib Dem(!) who says we need to give Labour a chance while the actual Labour voters are pining for the days Rishi and Hunt.
Spoke to a younger family member today (a HENRY - High Income Not Rich Yet) of impeccable liberal opinions but too busy working to take much interest in politics,.
Stunned at the tax announcement on pensions. And a gradually dawning awareness of being well and truly stuffed by taxes generally. (Has mortgage and student debt).
My impression is that sympathy for welfare recipients is somewhat diminishing.
I wonder if we could be reaching a tipping point when general opinion is going to move on the welfare issue. Judging by the strength of her comments yesterday, Kemi evidently believes so. But is she right?
Does he understand the pension change properly? It's a serious question given the misunderstandings prevalent.
Possibly not. Not sure I do.
The point, I think, is that working people are beginning to take a greater interest in these things, rather than just casting them to the outer reaches of their consciousness - boring and difficult to understand. And that may affect the political zeitgeist.
I dunno, really. But it looks to me as though TAX may actually becoming an issue again. And with it, the economy. It would be a relief from culture wars - but it intensify them?
My understanding is that the big changes on pensions is the limitation on salary sacrifice schemes which may eventually produce a few billion a year in tax (depending on how people react to the changes). Other changes, such as indexing PPF payments for pension funds in distress and making it easier for a DB scheme in surplus to release some of that surplus to members are very small beer. Importantly, despite all the warnings from the Telegraph and others, the tax free lump sum was untouched and tax relief continues to be granted at higher rates for higher rate taxpayers. It was very much the dog that didn't bark.
As usual, Steve Webb is worth listening to on this and he is urging that the government make commitments re pensions for the Parliament, not for a single year, so that people can plan with more confidence.
Talking very much against my own book, I am astonished that such a generous scheme for higher earners was left intact. It is a huge benefit to the better off in our society at the cost of the less well off. It drives inequality like little else and results in the effective tax rate of many higher earners being less than those earning a lot less whilst allowing them to pile up capital that those less well paid can only dream of.
Thank you @Selebian. I had a sneaking suspicion that this observation would not be immensely popular amongst the PB selectorate!
Where is the compassion for the people who earn so much that they can pay almost nothing tax free into their pension? If there's one thing I really despise it is tax breaks for the modestly well off! We all know that real wealth creation happens much further up the income distribution. Why do all these middle managers and country solicitors and other assorted well-spoken leeches deserve any largesse while the people who are putting in the real work get nothing?
The left/right choice should be better services at a higher cost versus worse services at a lower cost, then people can decide where on the tax spectrum they want to place themselves. The problem is neither party admits the downside to their upside, ie higher taxes or worse services. So we end up in a sterile position.
No. The issue isn't really high or low taxes, neither of our current choices gives us an outcome that we should logically want. If the UK economy had grown faster and steadily this century we wouldn't mind paying 38% overall on our significantly higher GDP and incomes to pay for good services. Growth is the problem, Labour were right to identify it as such, but when Starmer is hyping up 1.5% growth this year being "50% higher than forecast" he may be technically correct, but that we settle for such low ambition shows how far we are from ever fixing out productivity problems.
I don't think so. Expectations of growth might influence where you want to be on the tax versus services spectrum on a jam tomorrow basis. But at any particular time the decision is based on what you want from government and how much you are prepared to pay for it. The equation is still there.
Of course the issue and where you stand will always exist, but it's a particularly contentious subject in the UK because we have done relatively badly in economic terms. I think people would be a lot more relaxed about the overall tax take, but perhaps less so for each person individually, if we had a bigger pie to chop up. It's because we don't have a big enough pie to meet our needs that it's an issue. The solution lies in embiggening the pie, not arguing where to make the cuts.
I'm not convinced high productivity is correlated with low taxes. In general high productivity countries tend also to be high welfare and therefore high tax countries (although the reverse is not always true). Interesting thought though.
I would like to be tried by jury if I did it. If I didn't do it, I'd like to be tried by judge.
When I did jury service (really randomly - I was pressganged off the street by a policeman to make up the numbers) we acquitted the guy on a minor weed dealing charge because we felt the prosecution had failed to prove the case beyond reasonable doubt, even though we all thought he was probably guilty. I suspect the fact the charge seemed fairly minor and the accused a rather pathetic but not obviously evil young man weighed on our decision. I wonder whether a judge, no doubt seeing loads of similar cases each week, might just go fuck it he's guilty.
I must say that I find it astonishing that you might have a jury trial for something as trivial as that. If that is the state of play in England there may be more in the arguments for reform than I had realised (* ducks in anticipation of a low flying thunderbolt from @Cyclefree*).
I would like to be tried by jury if I did it. If I didn't do it, I'd like to be tried by judge.
When I did jury service (really randomly - I was pressganged off the street by a policeman to make up the numbers) we acquitted the guy on a minor weed dealing charge because we felt the prosecution had failed to prove the case beyond reasonable doubt, even though we all thought he was probably guilty. I suspect the fact the charge seemed fairly minor and the accused a rather pathetic but not obviously evil young man weighed on our decision. I wonder whether a judge, no doubt seeing loads of similar cases each week, might just go fuck it he's guilty.
I must say that I find it astonishing that you might have a jury trial for something as trivial as that. If that is the state of play in England there may be more in the arguments for reform than I had realised (* ducks in anticipation of a low flying thunderbolt from @Cyclefree*).
Even my reliably lefty friends are questioning putting taxes up on working people to pay for more welfare. Very few defenders left, just a token Lib Dem(!) who says we need to give Labour a chance while the actual Labour voters are pining for the days Rishi and Hunt.
Spoke to a younger family member today (a HENRY - High Income Not Rich Yet) of impeccable liberal opinions but too busy working to take much interest in politics,.
Stunned at the tax announcement on pensions. And a gradually dawning awareness of being well and truly stuffed by taxes generally. (Has mortgage and student debt).
My impression is that sympathy for welfare recipients is somewhat diminishing.
I wonder if we could be reaching a tipping point when general opinion is going to move on the welfare issue. Judging by the strength of her comments yesterday, Kemi evidently believes so. But is she right?
Does he understand the pension change properly? It's a serious question given the misunderstandings prevalent.
Possibly not. Not sure I do.
The point, I think, is that working people are beginning to take a greater interest in these things, rather than just casting them to the outer reaches of their consciousness - boring and difficult to understand. And that may affect the political zeitgeist.
I dunno, really. But it looks to me as though TAX may actually becoming an issue again. And with it, the economy. It would be a relief from culture wars - but it intensify them?
My understanding is that the big changes on pensions is the limitation on salary sacrifice schemes which may eventually produce a few billion a year in tax (depending on how people react to the changes). Other changes, such as indexing PPF payments for pension funds in distress and making it easier for a DB scheme in surplus to release some of that surplus to members are very small beer. Importantly, despite all the warnings from the Telegraph and others, the tax free lump sum was untouched and tax relief continues to be granted at higher rates for higher rate taxpayers. It was very much the dog that didn't bark.
As usual, Steve Webb is worth listening to on this and he is urging that the government make commitments re pensions for the Parliament, not for a single year, so that people can plan with more confidence.
Talking very much against my own book, I am astonished that such a generous scheme for higher earners was left intact. It is a huge benefit to the better off in our society at the cost of the less well off. It drives inequality like little else and results in the effective tax rate of many higher earners being less than those earning a lot less whilst allowing them to pile up capital that those less well paid can only dream of.
Thank you @Selebian. I had a sneaking suspicion that this observation would not be immensely popular amongst the PB selectorate!
Where is the compassion for the people who earn so much that they can pay almost nothing tax free into their pension? If there's one thing I really despise it is tax breaks for the modestly well off! We all know that real wealth creation happens much further up the income distribution. Why do all these middle managers and country solicitors and other assorted well-spoken leeches deserve any largesse while the people who are putting in the real work get nothing?
Ah but just think of those magnificent shoulders you can develop whilst so generously supporting your fellow citizens! It must give you a warm glow inside.
“Personally, I serve day-to-day subject to the confidence of the Chancellor and the Treasury committee.
“If they both conclude, in light of that investigation, they no longer have confidence in me then of course I will resign, which is what you do when you’re the chair of something called the Office for Budget Responsibility.”
Even my reliably lefty friends are questioning putting taxes up on working people to pay for more welfare. Very few defenders left, just a token Lib Dem(!) who says we need to give Labour a chance while the actual Labour voters are pining for the days Rishi and Hunt.
Spoke to a younger family member today (a HENRY - High Income Not Rich Yet) of impeccable liberal opinions but too busy working to take much interest in politics,.
Stunned at the tax announcement on pensions. And a gradually dawning awareness of being well and truly stuffed by taxes generally. (Has mortgage and student debt).
My impression is that sympathy for welfare recipients is somewhat diminishing.
I wonder if we could be reaching a tipping point when general opinion is going to move on the welfare issue. Judging by the strength of her comments yesterday, Kemi evidently believes so. But is she right?
Does he understand the pension change properly? It's a serious question given the misunderstandings prevalent.
Possibly not. Not sure I do.
The point, I think, is that working people are beginning to take a greater interest in these things, rather than just casting them to the outer reaches of their consciousness - boring and difficult to understand. And that may affect the political zeitgeist.
I dunno, really. But it looks to me as though TAX may actually becoming an issue again. And with it, the economy. It would be a relief from culture wars - but it intensify them?
My understanding is that the big changes on pensions is the limitation on salary sacrifice schemes which may eventually produce a few billion a year in tax (depending on how people react to the changes). Other changes, such as indexing PPF payments for pension funds in distress and making it easier for a DB scheme in surplus to release some of that surplus to members are very small beer. Importantly, despite all the warnings from the Telegraph and others, the tax free lump sum was untouched and tax relief continues to be granted at higher rates for higher rate taxpayers. It was very much the dog that didn't bark.
As usual, Steve Webb is worth listening to on this and he is urging that the government make commitments re pensions for the Parliament, not for a single year, so that people can plan with more confidence.
Talking very much against my own book, I am astonished that such a generous scheme for higher earners was left intact. It is a huge benefit to the better off in our society at the cost of the less well off. It drives inequality like little else and results in the effective tax rate of many higher earners being less than those earning a lot less whilst allowing them to pile up capital that those less well paid can only dream of.
Thank you @Selebian. I had a sneaking suspicion that this observation would not be immensely popular amongst the PB selectorate!
Where is the compassion for the people who earn so much that they can pay almost nothing tax free into their pension? If there's one thing I really despise it is tax breaks for the modestly well off! We all know that real wealth creation happens much further up the income distribution. Why do all these middle managers and country solicitors and other assorted well-spoken leeches deserve any largesse while the people who are putting in the real work get nothing?
Still, at least your house is worth only £1,999,999 and will hover around that value for the next decade.
OBR calls in cyber expert over botched release of Budget analysis ... Even though the document was not listed on the OBR website, journalists - including those at the BBC - were able to access by guessing its URL, which was very similar to one used in a previous official document. ... The BBC was able to access the PDF version of the OBR's key report at 11:45 on Wednesday by replacing the word 'March' with 'November' in the web address of a previous edition. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgmn991pz9jo
Dunno what's left for the OBR's expert to discover, except how much the OBR will pay external consultants in order to protect their bosses' jobs.
LOL.
Countdown to someone in public life suggesting that's tantamount to guessing a password.
Should the BBC hackers be tried by 12 good men and true, or a Lammy-appointed judge?
Interestingly, such URL probing might e considered to come under the computer misuse laws.
The funniest version of that was a case in the US, where an idiot prosecutor tried to claim *reading the data returned by a normal query to a website, but not displayed on the page* was hacking.
There was definitely one case in the US where someone was found guilty of hacking for typing ../ into a URL, but I still can’t find it after a quick look.
Sounds similar. The one I was thinking of, a computer science prof noticed that the local government website was leaking all kinds of data into the source HTML/Javascript of the webpages they were serving up. So they were trying to claim that reading the source of a normally served page was wrong, somehow.
I would like to be tried by jury if I did it. If I didn't do it, I'd like to be tried by judge.
When I did jury service (really randomly - I was pressganged off the street by a policeman to make up the numbers) we acquitted the guy on a minor weed dealing charge because we felt the prosecution had failed to prove the case beyond reasonable doubt, even though we all thought he was probably guilty. I suspect the fact the charge seemed fairly minor and the accused a rather pathetic but not obviously evil young man weighed on our decision. I wonder whether a judge, no doubt seeing loads of similar cases each week, might just go fuck it he's guilty.
I must say that I find it astonishing that you might have a jury trial for something as trivial as that. If that is the state of play in England there may be more in the arguments for reform than I had realised (* ducks in anticipation of a low flying thunderbolt from @Cyclefree*).
This was almost 30 years ago.
You can elect trial by jury for quite minor stuff. Rarely happens* because the potential for a stuffer sentence - prosecution is generally done on the basis of near certainty in the result.
*More recently, there have been cases where it is clear that the intent behind asking for a jury trial is to cause the prosecution to be dropped or delayed so much that witnesses become unreliable etc.
OBR calls in cyber expert over botched release of Budget analysis ... Even though the document was not listed on the OBR website, journalists - including those at the BBC - were able to access by guessing its URL, which was very similar to one used in a previous official document. ... The BBC was able to access the PDF version of the OBR's key report at 11:45 on Wednesday by replacing the word 'March' with 'November' in the web address of a previous edition. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgmn991pz9jo
Dunno what's left for the OBR's expert to discover, except how much the OBR will pay external consultants in order to protect their bosses' jobs.
The consultants will write a very expensive, detailed report concluding staff at the OBR could not be expected to understand files uploaded to your web site can still be downloaded even if you don't link to them, as this is a deeply technical issue. They will recommend consultants be retained to train government departments how to take the appropriate steps to ensure this issue does not arise in future.
Of course, you can design things so that an uploaded page is still blocked. Did someone mistakenly untick a 'Block this Page' checkbox?
Depends on what kind of interface their web server has. It's entirely possible to set permissions on a file or page to prevent anyone but admins from accessing it, but if their server interface is built on the 'users are idiots' principle, it may require an admin to actually set those permissions.
My suspicion is the document was uploaded so certain interested parties could be sent a link to read it early, and whoever did this simply didn't understand that guessing URLs has been a thing through the whole existence of the web. It's stupid, but I've seen it done many, many times in organisations who's people really should have known better.
Even my reliably lefty friends are questioning putting taxes up on working people to pay for more welfare. Very few defenders left, just a token Lib Dem(!) who says we need to give Labour a chance while the actual Labour voters are pining for the days Rishi and Hunt.
Spoke to a younger family member today (a HENRY - High Income Not Rich Yet) of impeccable liberal opinions but too busy working to take much interest in politics,.
Stunned at the tax announcement on pensions. And a gradually dawning awareness of being well and truly stuffed by taxes generally. (Has mortgage and student debt).
My impression is that sympathy for welfare recipients is somewhat diminishing.
I wonder if we could be reaching a tipping point when general opinion is going to move on the welfare issue. Judging by the strength of her comments yesterday, Kemi evidently believes so. But is she right?
Does he understand the pension change properly? It's a serious question given the misunderstandings prevalent.
Possibly not. Not sure I do.
The point, I think, is that working people are beginning to take a greater interest in these things, rather than just casting them to the outer reaches of their consciousness - boring and difficult to understand. And that may affect the political zeitgeist.
I dunno, really. But it looks to me as though TAX may actually becoming an issue again. And with it, the economy. It would be a relief from culture wars - but it intensify them?
My understanding is that the big changes on pensions is the limitation on salary sacrifice schemes which may eventually produce a few billion a year in tax (depending on how people react to the changes). Other changes, such as indexing PPF payments for pension funds in distress and making it easier for a DB scheme in surplus to release some of that surplus to members are very small beer. Importantly, despite all the warnings from the Telegraph and others, the tax free lump sum was untouched and tax relief continues to be granted at higher rates for higher rate taxpayers. It was very much the dog that didn't bark.
As usual, Steve Webb is worth listening to on this and he is urging that the government make commitments re pensions for the Parliament, not for a single year, so that people can plan with more confidence.
Talking very much against my own book, I am astonished that such a generous scheme for higher earners was left intact. It is a huge benefit to the better off in our society at the cost of the less well off. It drives inequality like little else and results in the effective tax rate of many higher earners being less than those earning a lot less whilst allowing them to pile up capital that those less well paid can only dream of.
Thank you @Selebian. I had a sneaking suspicion that this observation would not be immensely popular amongst the PB selectorate!
Where is the compassion for the people who earn so much that they can pay almost nothing tax free into their pension? If there's one thing I really despise it is tax breaks for the modestly well off! We all know that real wealth creation happens much further up the income distribution. Why do all these middle managers and country solicitors and other assorted well-spoken leeches deserve any largesse while the people who are putting in the real work get nothing?
Still, at least your house is worth only £1,999,999 and will hover around that value for the next decade.
Ha! There's a house for sale on Jerningham Road for that amount but I doubt it will sell at that value. Our house is about 50m2 smaller and so will be worth materially less. But prices in the area are still trending higher as its charms become better known.
I would like to be tried by jury if I did it. If I didn't do it, I'd like to be tried by judge.
Don't follow the logic of this.
I'd trust the judge to get it correct more than I would a jury. If I actually hadn't done the thing, then I would expect that to be very clear to the judge whereas the jury might just not like the look of me.
Conversely, if I had done it I would expect that to be obvious to a judge who'd heard all the excuses and wouldn't be distractable with irrelevancies, whereas I might get lucky with a gullible, sympathetic, or plain daft jury.
The one case I'm not sure about is when it's my word against another (most likely a sexual assault as otherwise it probably wouldn't have got to trial)... maybe a jury is always best then.
Not sure where the idea to trust a judge to get it correct more than a jury comes from.
Especially since if you are not guilty but on trial there's already been enough to convince the CPS to put you on trial, I'm not sure I'd like to put my faith in just one person alone determining that I am guilty or not guilty.
I'd feel much more confident appealing to show my innocence to 12 individuals than any one.
A judge would certainly have convicted the Colston statue protestors of criminal damage and the police escort of the Duchess of Edinburgh who killed an elderly pedestrian at speed of careless driving causing injury. A jury acquitted them both
Yep if I'm guilty I'm definitely going for the jury option. Give it some cheeky chappie from the dock, get them on my side. Like John Palmer. Goldfinger.
Though Palmer still got assassinated in a gangland shooting anyway
Golly, poor kinabulu. I'm going for Topping with a silenced Ruger in Holland Park.
Having been lured there by Malmesbury and Bartholomew Roberts.
"silenced Ruger"???
Yuri: There are a lot of alcoves in the Koningin Astridpark. You use this word, alcoves? Ken: Alcoves, yes. Sometimes. Yuri: There are not many people around in these alcoves at Christmas time. If I were to murder a man I would murder him here. Are you sure this is the right word, alcoves? Ken: Alcoves, yes. It's kind of like nooks and crannies. Yuri: Nooks and crannies, yes! Perhaps this would be more accurate. Nooks and crannies rather than alcoves. Yes. You are going to do it aren't you? Mr. Waters would be very disappointed... Ken: Of course I'm going to fucking do it. It's what I do
Even my reliably lefty friends are questioning putting taxes up on working people to pay for more welfare. Very few defenders left, just a token Lib Dem(!) who says we need to give Labour a chance while the actual Labour voters are pining for the days Rishi and Hunt.
Spoke to a younger family member today (a HENRY - High Income Not Rich Yet) of impeccable liberal opinions but too busy working to take much interest in politics,.
Stunned at the tax announcement on pensions. And a gradually dawning awareness of being well and truly stuffed by taxes generally. (Has mortgage and student debt).
My impression is that sympathy for welfare recipients is somewhat diminishing.
I wonder if we could be reaching a tipping point when general opinion is going to move on the welfare issue. Judging by the strength of her comments yesterday, Kemi evidently believes so. But is she right?
Does he understand the pension change properly? It's a serious question given the misunderstandings prevalent.
Possibly not. Not sure I do.
The point, I think, is that working people are beginning to take a greater interest in these things, rather than just casting them to the outer reaches of their consciousness - boring and difficult to understand. And that may affect the political zeitgeist.
I dunno, really. But it looks to me as though TAX may actually becoming an issue again. And with it, the economy. It would be a relief from culture wars - but it intensify them?
My understanding is that the big changes on pensions is the limitation on salary sacrifice schemes which may eventually produce a few billion a year in tax (depending on how people react to the changes). Other changes, such as indexing PPF payments for pension funds in distress and making it easier for a DB scheme in surplus to release some of that surplus to members are very small beer. Importantly, despite all the warnings from the Telegraph and others, the tax free lump sum was untouched and tax relief continues to be granted at higher rates for higher rate taxpayers. It was very much the dog that didn't bark.
As usual, Steve Webb is worth listening to on this and he is urging that the government make commitments re pensions for the Parliament, not for a single year, so that people can plan with more confidence.
Talking very much against my own book, I am astonished that such a generous scheme for higher earners was left intact. It is a huge benefit to the better off in our society at the cost of the less well off. It drives inequality like little else and results in the effective tax rate of many higher earners being less than those earning a lot less whilst allowing them to pile up capital that those less well paid can only dream of.
Thank you @Selebian. I had a sneaking suspicion that this observation would not be immensely popular amongst the PB selectorate!
Where is the compassion for the people who earn so much that they can pay almost nothing tax free into their pension? If there's one thing I really despise it is tax breaks for the modestly well off! We all know that real wealth creation happens much further up the income distribution. Why do all these middle managers and country solicitors and other assorted well-spoken leeches deserve any largesse while the people who are putting in the real work get nothing?
Ah but just think of those magnificent shoulders you can develop whilst so generously supporting your fellow citizens! It must give you a warm glow inside.
Always happy to pay my share, David! From each according to their ability to each according to their needs.
“Personally, I serve day-to-day subject to the confidence of the Chancellor and the Treasury committee.
“If they both conclude, in light of that investigation, they no longer have confidence in me then of course I will resign, which is what you do when you’re the chair of something called the Office for Budget Responsibility.”
Interesting he says, “It wasn’t published on our website but there was a link that somebody managed to find." I think I'd argue that it was absolutely definitely published on their website whether there was a link to it anywhere else or not, which suggest @PoodleInASlipstream has called it correctly.
They already check and report your mileage. It's publicly available for each MOT if you know the reg. You certainly need it for your insurance and if you wish to sell the car.
I'm not a fan of the mileage charge at all, but the Telegraph's hyperventilating is getting ridiculous.
"Foreign tourists visiting popular US national parks like the Grand Canyon and Yosemite will need to pay an extra fee, the Trump administration says.
The Department of the Interior, which runs the country's national parks, said each international visitor will need to pay $100 (£76) per person on top of existing fees to access 11 of the most popular sites.
From 2026, non-residents will also need to pay more than $250 for an annual pass to the parks, while US citizens and permanent residents will continue to pay $80.
The fee hike aims to "put American families first" and reflects President Donald Trump's goal to make the parks more accessible and affordable for US citizens, said the department, external."
Possible that is the intent, to dissuade US tourism to reduce the risk of Americans speaking to people who live in free democratic countries.
The local people in bits of Spain want the tourist taxes raised to "eff off" rates to get rid of the low end tourists.
I'm sure they do, but generally they're in a minority, which is why places which have introduced tourist taxes do so at more modest rates.
I'm not sure if I'm in favour of tourist taxes in general, but I don't think this is the gotcha you think it is for people who support tourist taxes, but oppose Trump's version.
It's quite widespread among locals in such areas, in Spain - they see the low end tourism as very impactful and not creating much in the way of well paid jobs.
It's not about gotchas - just interesting to see people approving of policies by their author.
There has been a long running debate in the US about upping the fees for the national parks. Which aren't just fenced off bits of wilderness, but quite actively managed. Trump has managed to pick a fairly extreme option, as usual for him.
I really don't think this is about the author of the policy. It's about the rate. And generally I don't recall other tourist taxes discriminating on the basis of citizenship, normally domestic tourists also pay such tourist levies - e.g. I don't think only foreigners are charged the tourist tax in Edinburgh. The xenophobic aspect will naturally also rile a lot of people up.
I think you were totally after a gotcha, but you've missed the mark.
Is this not just another half-baked America First performance from the orange chump?
The left/right choice should be better services at a higher cost versus worse services at a lower cost, then people can decide where on the tax spectrum they want to place themselves. The problem is neither party admits the downside to their upside, ie higher taxes or worse services. So we end up in a sterile position.
No. The issue isn't really high or low taxes, neither of our current choices gives us an outcome that we should logically want. If the UK economy had grown faster and steadily this century we wouldn't mind paying 38% overall on our significantly higher GDP and incomes to pay for good services. Growth is the problem, Labour were right to identify it as such, but when Starmer is hyping up 1.5% growth this year being "50% higher than forecast" he may be technically correct, but that we settle for such low ambition shows how far we are from ever fixing out productivity problems.
I don't think so. Expectations of growth might influence where you want to be on the tax versus services spectrum on a jam tomorrow basis. But at any particular time the decision is based on what you want from government and how much you are prepared to pay for it. The equation is still there.
Of course the issue and where you stand will always exist, but it's a particularly contentious subject in the UK because we have done relatively badly in economic terms. I think people would be a lot more relaxed about the overall tax take, but perhaps less so for each person individually, if we had a bigger pie to chop up. It's because we don't have a big enough pie to meet our needs that it's an issue. The solution lies in embiggening the pie, not arguing where to make the cuts.
I'm not convinced high productivity is correlated with low taxes. In general high productivity countries tend also to be high welfare and therefore high tax countries (although the reverse is not always true). Interesting thought though.
When I said "where to make the cuts" it meant where to allocate national income, not where to cut services to lower tax.
We seem to have got stuck in a loop of thinking the tax take matters in percentage terms, when what really matters is how big the economy is, what the income distribution looks like, and how much taxation raises. If we want more personal income or more public revenue the thing to do is grow the economy, not waste time arguing about rates. You can plainly see that after any budget we spend most of the time talking about how much people will pay, but very little time about how the economy may grow, what investment should do, how we can become more productive etc.
I think people don't want low taxes per se, because most people recognise that public services need to be well funded, but they do want to feel that the tax they pay is fair, leaves them more than enough to spend, and is well used by the government. We need substantial growth so that people are generally wealthier and then the public sector can be funded properly, and if we ever achieve that I expect that taxation would be much less of an issue.
I would like to be tried by jury if I did it. If I didn't do it, I'd like to be tried by judge.
Don't follow the logic of this.
I'd trust the judge to get it correct more than I would a jury. If I actually hadn't done the thing, then I would expect that to be very clear to the judge whereas the jury might just not like the look of me.
Conversely, if I had done it I would expect that to be obvious to a judge who'd heard all the excuses and wouldn't be distractable with irrelevancies, whereas I might get lucky with a gullible, sympathetic, or plain daft jury.
The one case I'm not sure about is when it's my word against another (most likely a sexual assault as otherwise it probably wouldn't have got to trial)... maybe a jury is always best then.
Not sure where the idea to trust a judge to get it correct more than a jury comes from.
Especially since if you are not guilty but on trial there's already been enough to convince the CPS to put you on trial, I'm not sure I'd like to put my faith in just one person alone determining that I am guilty or not guilty.
I'd feel much more confident appealing to show my innocence to 12 individuals than any one.
A judge would certainly have convicted the Colston statue protestors of criminal damage and the police escort of the Duchess of Edinburgh who killed an elderly pedestrian at speed of careless driving causing injury. A jury acquitted them both
Yep if I'm guilty I'm definitely going for the jury option. Give it some cheeky chappie from the dock, get them on my side. Like John Palmer. Goldfinger.
Though Palmer still got assassinated in a gangland shooting anyway
Golly, poor kinabulu. I'm going for Topping with a silenced Ruger in Holland Park.
Having been lured there by Malmesbury and Bartholomew Roberts.
"silenced Ruger"??? Yuri: There are a lot of alcoves in the Koningin Astridpark. You use this word, alcoves? Ken: Alcoves, yes. Sometimes. Yuri: There are not many people around in these alcoves at Christmas time. If I were to murder a man I would murder him here. Are you sure this is the right word, alcoves? Ken: Alcoves, yes. It's kind of like nooks and crannies. Yuri: Nooks and crannies, yes! Perhaps this would be more accurate. Nooks and crannies rather than alcoves. Yes. You are going to do it aren't you? Mr. Waters would be very disappointed... Ken: Of course I'm going to fucking do it. It's what I do
Ha, so you admit it. Set me up for the hit. Last thing I see in this world as I fall is a smoking gun and a pair of red corduroy trousers.
I would like to be tried by jury if I did it. If I didn't do it, I'd like to be tried by judge.
When I did jury service (really randomly - I was pressganged off the street by a policeman to make up the numbers) we acquitted the guy on a minor weed dealing charge because we felt the prosecution had failed to prove the case beyond reasonable doubt, even though we all thought he was probably guilty. I suspect the fact the charge seemed fairly minor and the accused a rather pathetic but not obviously evil young man weighed on our decision. I wonder whether a judge, no doubt seeing loads of similar cases each week, might just go fuck it he's guilty.
I must say that I find it astonishing that you might have a jury trial for something as trivial as that. If that is the state of play in England there may be more in the arguments for reform than I had realised (* ducks in anticipation of a low flying thunderbolt from @Cyclefree*).
This was almost 30 years ago.
You can elect trial by jury for quite minor stuff. Rarely happens* because the potential for a stuffer sentence - prosecution is generally done on the basis of near certainty in the result.
*More recently, there have been cases where it is clear that the intent behind asking for a jury trial is to cause the prosecution to be dropped or delayed so much that witnesses become unreliable etc.
Having read The Secret Barrister it is difficult to know which bit is worse. Anything that involves the Criminal Justice System, the DPP, a jury, solicitors, prosecutors, magistrates, judges, CJS IT, the Spanish Inquisition. All run on a shoestring with desperation and good will.
They fill an informed innocent with fear. And a guilty accused with hope.
And one tends to think that if it is a Labour led solution it is liable to be shite.
They already check and report your mileage. It's publicly available for each MOT if you know the reg. You certainly need it for your insurance and if you wish to sell the car.
I'm not a fan of the mileage charge at all, but the Telegraph's hyperventilating is getting ridiculous.
“Personally, I serve day-to-day subject to the confidence of the Chancellor and the Treasury committee.
“If they both conclude, in light of that investigation, they no longer have confidence in me then of course I will resign, which is what you do when you’re the chair of something called the Office for Budget Responsibility.”
In what sense is that an offer to resign? Look at those qualifications: I'll do the right thing only if the investigation shows it was my fault in which case please let me get my papers in so it looks better on my cv than being sacked. Either resign or don't resign.
Just scrap the spend on digital ID and put it into the Justice Dept.
I don't think that ius the right way to think. The justice system should be sorted out as a high priority in its own right.
What I am not quite sure about is how one clears the backlog quickly without needing to recruit lots more staff at all the choke points in the legal sausage machine. And ending with a reasonable balance of stuff which is still useful in the future rather than being 'wasted'. THe Nightingale Hospitals were never used - though that can't be called waste: it wasn't predictable at the time.
The clear impression I get is of years, especially under Mr Osborne, of skimping and shutting down everywhere the HO could.
For instance modernising jury selection to the legal equivalent of ERNIE* doesn't help with a shortage of criminal lawyers, so the pay rates for defence counsel need to be increased (baaad acc to the DT and DM, which is as we all know what SKS is most terrified of, surpassing all else).
But if one worked through things ... eg nissen huts for courtrooms like Nightingale Hospitals ... or simply had a go at modernising the system permanently as one went along ...
*Which does fail in the sense of seeing justice to be done in front of you, in contrast to paper lots in a bowl. But if people are happy with Premium Bonds ...?
“Just today, Isleworth crown court listed a case offering a trial date in October 2029,” she said. “The right approach now is to fix the infrastructure of the courts, focus on the many efficiency measures that could improve productivity, and open back up court rooms that have been shut for a year or more to claw back wasted time.”
The MoJ’s report on the figures said the demand on criminal courts continued to grow, with more than 30,000 cases entering crown courts in the latest quarter. It said courts were dealing with cases more quickly but not fast enough to keep up with the growing number of cases.
It noted a 13% increase in sexual offences reaching court, a 14% increase in robberies and a 12% rise in drug offences compared with the previous year. The number of rape cases reaching court hit a peak of 1,291, a 21% increase on the previous year, the report said.
The number of cases in the backlog involving sexual offences rose year on year from 11,062 to 13,238, an increase of 20%, while cases for violence against the person increased from 21,150 to 24,364, up 15%.
David Lammy, the justice secretary, said victims of crime were waiting too long for justice.
Lammy, who is also the deputy prime minister, said: “Today’s statistics show the crown court backlog has hit a new record high and it lays bare the unacceptable wait victims face.”
He said the government was investing record amounts into the court system, but added: “Money alone cannot turn the tide on the rising backlog, which is why we asked Sir Brian Leveson to propose bold and ambitious reform, to put our justice system back on sustainable ground.”..
"Money alone can't turn the tide".. well, sure, but we haven't actually tried to see what it might do. In inflation adjusted terms, the Ministry of Justice budget is still below what it was in 2010, so "investing record amounts" actually means record nominal amounts.
The share of the MoJ budget for courts is around 2.3bn, so an odd billion would make a huge difference. 50% of that on the courts, and 50% on legal aid, IMO, since the dearth of new criminal lawyers - who provide the judges of the future - is also a significant problem. And if we are going to have more District Judges (whether replacing juries or not really is beside the point), they have to come from somewhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judiciary_of_England_and_Wales#District_judges
The left/right choice should be better services at a higher cost versus worse services at a lower cost, then people can decide where on the tax spectrum they want to place themselves. The problem is neither party admits the downside to their upside, ie higher taxes or worse services. So we end up in a sterile position.
No. The issue isn't really high or low taxes, neither of our current choices gives us an outcome that we should logically want. If the UK economy had grown faster and steadily this century we wouldn't mind paying 38% overall on our significantly higher GDP and incomes to pay for good services. Growth is the problem, Labour were right to identify it as such, but when Starmer is hyping up 1.5% growth this year being "50% higher than forecast" he may be technically correct, but that we settle for such low ambition shows how far we are from ever fixing out productivity problems.
Even this year, where net migration is expected to fall to only (!!) 430k that is an increase of roughly 0.6% in our population, all other things being equal. That makes per capita growth less than 1% per annum which is truly shocking. And the government reduced tax relief on investment. Shocking. Just shocking.
Where did you get this figure of 430k?
The published figures show +204k in the 12/12 to end June.
12.71 per hour 45 hours per week =29.7k + 8k service charge (taxed) 37,740 +15% NI Contributions = 5661 +5% Pension = 1887 Paid by company £37,289
Total wage £45,289
People still question why a burger is over £20
Including the £8k in customer service charges as part of the wage cost to the employer is ... a choice certainly.
Alot of places add this as standard to cover costs and help lower the cost of the food to attract punters. The only places I go to that don’t are pubs.
It goes through the payroll and, as he says, gets taxed.
They already check and report your mileage. It's publicly available for each MOT if you know the reg. You certainly need it for your insurance and if you wish to sell the car.
I'm not a fan of the mileage charge at all, but the Telegraph's hyperventilating is getting ridiculous.
For the first 3 years there's no MOT though.
Meh. It's not a huge issue imo - you'll still likely be popping in for a service.
The bigger problem is how it affects long distance, rural journeys where there isn't an alternative - the Telegraph are missing a trick there.
I would like to be tried by jury if I did it. If I didn't do it, I'd like to be tried by judge.
Don't follow the logic of this.
I'd trust the judge to get it correct more than I would a jury. If I actually hadn't done the thing, then I would expect that to be very clear to the judge whereas the jury might just not like the look of me.
Conversely, if I had done it I would expect that to be obvious to a judge who'd heard all the excuses and wouldn't be distractable with irrelevancies, whereas I might get lucky with a gullible, sympathetic, or plain daft jury.
The one case I'm not sure about is when it's my word against another (most likely a sexual assault as otherwise it probably wouldn't have got to trial)... maybe a jury is always best then.
Not sure where the idea to trust a judge to get it correct more than a jury comes from.
Especially since if you are not guilty but on trial there's already been enough to convince the CPS to put you on trial, I'm not sure I'd like to put my faith in just one person alone determining that I am guilty or not guilty.
I'd feel much more confident appealing to show my innocence to 12 individuals than any one.
A judge would certainly have convicted the Colston statue protestors of criminal damage and the police escort of the Duchess of Edinburgh who killed an elderly pedestrian at speed of careless driving causing injury. A jury acquitted them both
Yep if I'm guilty I'm definitely going for the jury option. Give it some cheeky chappie from the dock, get them on my side. Like John Palmer. Goldfinger.
Though Palmer still got assassinated in a gangland shooting anyway
Golly, poor kinabulu. I'm going for Topping with a silenced Ruger in Holland Park.
Having been lured there by Malmesbury and Bartholomew Roberts.
"silenced Ruger"??? Yuri: There are a lot of alcoves in the Koningin Astridpark. You use this word, alcoves? Ken: Alcoves, yes. Sometimes. Yuri: There are not many people around in these alcoves at Christmas time. If I were to murder a man I would murder him here. Are you sure this is the right word, alcoves? Ken: Alcoves, yes. It's kind of like nooks and crannies. Yuri: Nooks and crannies, yes! Perhaps this would be more accurate. Nooks and crannies rather than alcoves. Yes. You are going to do it aren't you? Mr. Waters would be very disappointed... Ken: Of course I'm going to fucking do it. It's what I do
Ha, so you admit it. Set me up for the hit. Last thing I see in this world as I fall is a smoking gun and a pair of red corduroy trousers.
OBR calls in cyber expert over botched release of Budget analysis ... Even though the document was not listed on the OBR website, journalists - including those at the BBC - were able to access by guessing its URL, which was very similar to one used in a previous official document. ... The BBC was able to access the PDF version of the OBR's key report at 11:45 on Wednesday by replacing the word 'March' with 'November' in the web address of a previous edition. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgmn991pz9jo
Dunno what's left for the OBR's expert to discover, except how much the OBR will pay external consultants in order to protect their bosses' jobs.
LOL.
Countdown to someone in public life suggesting that's tantamount to guessing a password.
Should the BBC hackers be tried by 12 good men and true, or a Lammy-appointed judge?
Interestingly, such URL probing might e considered to come under the computer misuse laws.
The funniest version of that was a case in the US, where an idiot prosecutor tried to claim *reading the data returned by a normal query to a website, but not displayed on the page* was hacking.
There was definitely one case in the US where someone was found guilty of hacking for typing ../ into a URL, but I still can’t find it after a quick look.
Sounds similar. The one I was thinking of, a computer science prof noticed that the local government website was leaking all kinds of data into the source HTML/Javascript of the webpages they were serving up. So they were trying to claim that reading the source of a normally served page was wrong, somehow.
IIRC they were dropping the entire database into the web browser as a json document & then filtering it client side. The governor of the state spent some time going after the journalist in question for “hacking” but was forced to back down eventually. Not before the journalist in question (or their employer?) had incurred significant legal expenses though.
Labour in fourth place is, I suspect, something we'll see more frequently in polling, over the next 12 months.
Social media is full of stories like the one here from the single mom in North London pulling in £6,142 a month (£2,800 wage the rest in benefits) happy she will get more from the state.
I suspect, in spite the happy clappy ‘isn’t it brilliant’ way it was portrayed on the TV news this is going to go down quite poorly in many parts of the country.
Cannot see it doing Labour any favours especially as the press seems adept at picking out beneficiary’s who appear anything but deserving for the rage bait.
Elucidating, without making any judgements, this is the one. It's very much a London article.
In a good month when UC gives full entitlement, Thea has a total of £6,142.00, from £2,800 in take-home pay and £3,342 in universal credit plus child benefit. Her monthly expenses such as childcare, rent, council tax, energy and food etc are usually around £6000. She says: "So it’s living very much on the edge."
The strange thing here is that the Benefit Cap does not apply to households earning more than £846 per month after tax. That is, presumably, one of those things designed to encourage people into work.
That's £40104 per year benefit, and a gross salary of just under £40k for £2800 per month take home. So were she not earning, she would get much less benefit, like £14k less (assuming no adjustments or exemptions, which are usually disability or pension related).
She will need a 3 bedroom dwelling assuming one child at least over 10 (1 for self, 1 for each sex of children sharing), and be entitled to the appropriate Housing Allowance rate for that, which will be 30th percentile of the market for that type of property, minus rent increases and inflation for however many years it has not been kept up to date (usually updated once every 3-4 years).
Labour in fourth place is, I suspect, something we'll see more frequently in polling, over the next 12 months.
Social media is full of stories like the one here from the single mom in North London pulling in £6,142 a month (£2,800 wage the rest in benefits) happy she will get more from the state.
I suspect, in spite the happy clappy ‘isn’t it brilliant’ way it was portrayed on the TV news this is going to go down quite poorly in many parts of the country.
Cannot see it doing Labour any favours especially as the press seems adept at picking out beneficiary’s who appear anything but deserving for the rage bait.
Elucidating, without making any judgements, this is the one. It's very much a London article.
In a good month when UC gives full entitlement, Thea has a total of £6,142.00, from £2,800 in take-home pay and £3,342 in universal credit plus child benefit. Her monthly expenses such as childcare, rent, council tax, energy and food etc are usually around £6000. She says: "So it’s living very much on the edge."
The strange thing here is that the Benefit Cap does not apply to households earning more than £846 per month after tax. That is, presumably, one of those things designed to encourage people into work.
That's £40104 per year benefit, and a gross salary of just under £40k for £2800 per month take home. So were she not earning, she would get much less benefit, like £14k less (assuming no adjustments or exemptions, which are usually disability or pension related).
She will need a 3 bedroom dwelling assuming one child at least over 10 (1 for self, 1 for each sex of children sharing), and be entitled to the appropriate Housing Allowance rate for that, which will be 30th percentile of the market for that type of property, minus rent increases and inflation for however many years it has not been kept up to date (usually updated once every 3-4 years).
"Her new [property] tax – a toxic mix of two hated levies, council tax and IHT – is equivalent to detonating a time bomb under Middle England."
"Socialism is back, and the property-owning democracy is out. Labour has declared war on social mobility, on petit bourgeois values, on the consumer society and on conservative Britain."
I was hoping that Osborne's Jack-in-a-Box £175k transferrable allowance would go, amongst other things. But no dice.
But to do it properly would require changes to the Gift regime, especially the gifts out of "not required" income being tax free. That is a charter for useless loafing offspring of very wealthy people *.
* See Charlie Gilmour.
No that hits the children of most of Middle England pensioners and like May's dementia tax would be political suicide
But, as already much discussed, unfair to everyone else. Aunties, uncles, those who have less valuable estates to leave and subsidize the ones who benefit.
Step children and adopted children also benefit from Osborne's inheritance tax cut. The Nil Rate Band Residence Inheritance tax exemption was the most popular Tory policy of the 21st century and without it half the estates in the country would now pay inheritance tax
How many of each are there compared with nephews and nieces? And plenty of people don't have direct descendants.
If the Tories were trying to introduce natalist policies it's a bloody stupid one. Cut Sire Start, cap the child benefit, and introduce RNRB. Great thinking.
It was a very effective one and effectively won the Tories most seats at the 2010 general election as overnight swing voters switched from Brown Labour to Cameron Conservatives when Osborne announced the inheritance tax cut. It ensured inheritance to get a deposit for grandchildren for instance.
The child benefit cap was also popular with voters, child benefit should have been increased for all voters not just those on benefits
Doesn't mean that the IHT stuff wasn't a huge lie which distorted the housing market even more, not to mention UK politics and economics.
No it was a much needed change so government didn’t take even more in death tax from the hard working middle class and there families, The fact it annoyed socialists like you was also a bonus
Labour in fourth place is, I suspect, something we'll see more frequently in polling, over the next 12 months.
Social media is full of stories like the one here from the single mom in North London pulling in £6,142 a month (£2,800 wage the rest in benefits) happy she will get more from the state.
I suspect, in spite the happy clappy ‘isn’t it brilliant’ way it was portrayed on the TV news this is going to go down quite poorly in many parts of the country.
Cannot see it doing Labour any favours especially as the press seems adept at picking out beneficiary’s who appear anything but deserving for the rage bait.
Elucidating, without making any judgements, this is the one. It's very much a London article.
In a good month when UC gives full entitlement, Thea has a total of £6,142.00, from £2,800 in take-home pay and £3,342 in universal credit plus child benefit. Her monthly expenses such as childcare, rent, council tax, energy and food etc are usually around £6000. She says: "So it’s living very much on the edge."
The strange thing here is that the Benefit Cap does not apply to households earning more than £846 per month after tax. That is, presumably, one of those things designed to encourage people into work.
That's £40104 per year benefit, and a gross salary of just under £40k for £2800 per month take home. So were she not earning, she would get much less benefit, like £14k less (assuming no adjustments or exemptions, which are usually disability or pension related).
She will need a 3 bedroom dwelling assuming one child at least over 10 (1 for self, 1 for each sex of children sharing), and be entitled to the appropriate Housing Allowance rate for that, which will be 30th percentile of the market for that type of property, minus rent increases and inflation for however many years it has not been kept up to date (usually updated once every 3-4 years).
Hmmm - £6,142 take home a month is the equivalent of £115k salary (or something like that).
The left/right choice should be better services at a higher cost versus worse services at a lower cost, then people can decide where on the tax spectrum they want to place themselves. The problem is neither party admits the downside to their upside, ie higher taxes or worse services. So we end up in a sterile position.
No. The issue isn't really high or low taxes, neither of our current choices gives us an outcome that we should logically want. If the UK economy had grown faster and steadily this century we wouldn't mind paying 38% overall on our significantly higher GDP and incomes to pay for good services. Growth is the problem, Labour were right to identify it as such, but when Starmer is hyping up 1.5% growth this year being "50% higher than forecast" he may be technically correct, but that we settle for such low ambition shows how far we are from ever fixing out productivity problems.
Even this year, where net migration is expected to fall to only (!!) 430k that is an increase of roughly 0.6% in our population, all other things being equal. That makes per capita growth less than 1% per annum which is truly shocking. And the government reduced tax relief on investment. Shocking. Just shocking.
Where did you get this figure of 430k?
The published figures show +204k in the 12/12 to end June.
That was the ONS figure for the year ending 31st December 2024 which Co-Pilot used for 2025 (I should have checked, I admit it). I agree that there was a lower figure in June.
Can I just say that the amount of time that poor lawyers have to spend hanging around the courts to no purpose waiting for Juries is a disgrace.
What we need is a Jury vending machine.
You pop £1 in a slot, and a Jury comes marching out.
EDIT: Seriously, this is classic Operations Research. "What are expensive experts spending time on, that is not their job? Then get that stuff done for them."
Even my reliably lefty friends are questioning putting taxes up on working people to pay for more welfare. Very few defenders left, just a token Lib Dem(!) who says we need to give Labour a chance while the actual Labour voters are pining for the days Rishi and Hunt.
Spoke to a younger family member today (a HENRY - High Income Not Rich Yet) of impeccable liberal opinions but too busy working to take much interest in politics,.
Stunned at the tax announcement on pensions. And a gradually dawning awareness of being well and truly stuffed by taxes generally. (Has mortgage and student debt).
My impression is that sympathy for welfare recipients is somewhat diminishing.
I wonder if we could be reaching a tipping point when general opinion is going to move on the welfare issue. Judging by the strength of her comments yesterday, Kemi evidently believes so. But is she right?
Does he understand the pension change properly? It's a serious question given the misunderstandings prevalent.
Possibly not. Not sure I do.
The point, I think, is that working people are beginning to take a greater interest in these things, rather than just casting them to the outer reaches of their consciousness - boring and difficult to understand. And that may affect the political zeitgeist.
I dunno, really. But it looks to me as though TAX may actually becoming an issue again. And with it, the economy. It would be a relief from culture wars - but it intensify them?
My understanding is that the big changes on pensions is the limitation on salary sacrifice schemes which may eventually produce a few billion a year in tax (depending on how people react to the changes). Other changes, such as indexing PPF payments for pension funds in distress and making it easier for a DB scheme in surplus to release some of that surplus to members are very small beer. Importantly, despite all the warnings from the Telegraph and others, the tax free lump sum was untouched and tax relief continues to be granted at higher rates for higher rate taxpayers. It was very much the dog that didn't bark.
As usual, Steve Webb is worth listening to on this and he is urging that the government make commitments re pensions for the Parliament, not for a single year, so that people can plan with more confidence.
Talking very much against my own book, I am astonished that such a generous scheme for higher earners was left intact. It is a huge benefit to the better off in our society at the cost of the less well off. It drives inequality like little else and results in the effective tax rate of many higher earners being less than those earning a lot less whilst allowing them to pile up capital that those less well paid can only dream of.
Thank you @Selebian. I had a sneaking suspicion that this observation would not be immensely popular amongst the PB selectorate!
I meant to actually reply to the post. Salary sacrifice has been great for me and may be even more so with my new employer as they have a number of schemes covering things* that I'd never realised could be paid for in that way. But, it does seem bizarre that I can get the 40%+ (with a bit of NI relief) discount on things through this while lower earners get a bit over 20% and the lowest paid can't do it at all (as it would take them below minimum wage).
There's probably a better way of doing it, something more like gift aid where - I believe - it's a flat basic rate enhancement, whatever the tax bracket of the person donating.
*I haven't yet got into the details as I can't sign up until completed probation, but include EVs and some tech/home purchases - maybe there's not the full tax relief on these
ETA: I've conflated salary sacrifice and tax relief on pension contributions there (the former, of course, has been limite for pensions at least) but the general point stands, I think - why do those of us who earn more get more help? Outwith salary sacrifice the point on minimum wage workers doesn't apply of course, but they are still excluded from the salary sacrifice pension relief including NI, only able to get the tax relief through conventional contribution means.
Labour in fourth place is, I suspect, something we'll see more frequently in polling, over the next 12 months.
Social media is full of stories like the one here from the single mom in North London pulling in £6,142 a month (£2,800 wage the rest in benefits) happy she will get more from the state.
I suspect, in spite the happy clappy ‘isn’t it brilliant’ way it was portrayed on the TV news this is going to go down quite poorly in many parts of the country.
Cannot see it doing Labour any favours especially as the press seems adept at picking out beneficiary’s who appear anything but deserving for the rage bait.
Elucidating, without making any judgements, this is the one. It's very much a London article.
In a good month when UC gives full entitlement, Thea has a total of £6,142.00, from £2,800 in take-home pay and £3,342 in universal credit plus child benefit. Her monthly expenses such as childcare, rent, council tax, energy and food etc are usually around £6000. She says: "So it’s living very much on the edge."
The strange thing here is that the Benefit Cap does not apply to households earning more than £846 per month after tax. That is, presumably, one of those things designed to encourage people into work.
That's £40104 per year benefit, and a gross salary of just under £40k for £2800 per month take home. So were she not earning, she would get much less benefit, like £14k less (assuming no adjustments or exemptions, which are usually disability or pension related).
She will need a 3 bedroom dwelling assuming one child at least over 10 (1 for self, 1 for each sex of children sharing), and be entitled to the appropriate Housing Allowance rate for that, which will be 30th percentile of the market for that type of property, minus rent increases and inflation for however many years it has not been kept up to date (usually updated once every 3-4 years).
Hmmm - £6,142 take home a month is the equivalent of £115k salary (or something like that).
To me it’s the £2,800 in salary. To take home that net, you must be on around £45k.
Yet the government contribution is still higher than your own?
Labour in fourth place is, I suspect, something we'll see more frequently in polling, over the next 12 months.
Social media is full of stories like the one here from the single mom in North London pulling in £6,142 a month (£2,800 wage the rest in benefits) happy she will get more from the state.
I suspect, in spite the happy clappy ‘isn’t it brilliant’ way it was portrayed on the TV news this is going to go down quite poorly in many parts of the country.
Cannot see it doing Labour any favours especially as the press seems adept at picking out beneficiary’s who appear anything but deserving for the rage bait.
Elucidating, without making any judgements, this is the one. It's very much a London article.
In a good month when UC gives full entitlement, Thea has a total of £6,142.00, from £2,800 in take-home pay and £3,342 in universal credit plus child benefit. Her monthly expenses such as childcare, rent, council tax, energy and food etc are usually around £6000. She says: "So it’s living very much on the edge."
The strange thing here is that the Benefit Cap does not apply to households earning more than £846 per month after tax. That is, presumably, one of those things designed to encourage people into work.
That's £40104 per year benefit, and a gross salary of just under £40k for £2800 per month take home. So were she not earning, she would get much less benefit, like £14k less (assuming no adjustments or exemptions, which are usually disability or pension related).
She will need a 3 bedroom dwelling assuming one child at least over 10 (1 for self, 1 for each sex of children sharing), and be entitled to the appropriate Housing Allowance rate for that, which will be 30th percentile of the market for that type of property, minus rent increases and inflation for however many years it has not been kept up to date (usually updated once every 3-4 years).
To add an example, in Enfield Borough (one of the lower priced ones in North London) the Housing Allowance is £1690 for a 3 bed need, and £1396 for a 2 bed. You then get that even if the property is larger.
As a comparison, here in Ashfield (N Notts area), a 3 bed LHA is £585, and 2 bed LHA is £550. Nottingham is £750 and £650. All numbers are per Calendar Month.
They already check and report your mileage. It's publicly available for each MOT if you know the reg. You certainly need it for your insurance and if you wish to sell the car.
I'm not a fan of the mileage charge at all, but the Telegraph's hyperventilating is getting ridiculous.
This will be a mileage inspection at an MOT inspection at the end of 1st and 2nd years, not just at your annual MOT...
OBR calls in cyber expert over botched release of Budget analysis ... Even though the document was not listed on the OBR website, journalists - including those at the BBC - were able to access by guessing its URL, which was very similar to one used in a previous official document. ... The BBC was able to access the PDF version of the OBR's key report at 11:45 on Wednesday by replacing the word 'March' with 'November' in the web address of a previous edition. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgmn991pz9jo
Dunno what's left for the OBR's expert to discover, except how much the OBR will pay external consultants in order to protect their bosses' jobs.
LOL.
Countdown to someone in public life suggesting that's tantamount to guessing a password.
Should the BBC hackers be tried by 12 good men and true, or a Lammy-appointed judge?
Interestingly, such URL probing might e considered to come under the computer misuse laws.
The funniest version of that was a case in the US, where an idiot prosecutor tried to claim *reading the data returned by a normal query to a website, but not displayed on the page* was hacking.
There was definitely one case in the US where someone was found guilty of hacking for typing ../ into a URL, but I still can’t find it after a quick look.
Christ. I a long deceased acquaintance used to routinely do things like that to get discounts etc, in my student days. There were websites that passed discounts in HTTP POST queries, or time stamps and the like that could be manipulated to access expired discounts and so on. And Ithe acquaintance would use the gmail + in addresses to benefit multiple time from newsletter sign up discounts and the like
ETA: Heh, the strikethrough 'I' looks like a cross for the long-deceased acquaintance
Labour in fourth place is, I suspect, something we'll see more frequently in polling, over the next 12 months.
Social media is full of stories like the one here from the single mom in North London pulling in £6,142 a month (£2,800 wage the rest in benefits) happy she will get more from the state.
I suspect, in spite the happy clappy ‘isn’t it brilliant’ way it was portrayed on the TV news this is going to go down quite poorly in many parts of the country.
Cannot see it doing Labour any favours especially as the press seems adept at picking out beneficiary’s who appear anything but deserving for the rage bait.
Elucidating, without making any judgements, this is the one. It's very much a London article.
In a good month when UC gives full entitlement, Thea has a total of £6,142.00, from £2,800 in take-home pay and £3,342 in universal credit plus child benefit. Her monthly expenses such as childcare, rent, council tax, energy and food etc are usually around £6000. She says: "So it’s living very much on the edge."
The strange thing here is that the Benefit Cap does not apply to households earning more than £846 per month after tax. That is, presumably, one of those things designed to encourage people into work.
That's £40104 per year benefit, and a gross salary of just under £40k for £2800 per month take home. So were she not earning, she would get much less benefit, like £14k less (assuming no adjustments or exemptions, which are usually disability or pension related).
She will need a 3 bedroom dwelling assuming one child at least over 10 (1 for self, 1 for each sex of children sharing), and be entitled to the appropriate Housing Allowance rate for that, which will be 30th percentile of the market for that type of property, minus rent increases and inflation for however many years it has not been kept up to date (usually updated once every 3-4 years).
To add an example, in Enfield Borough (one of the lower priced ones in North London) the Housing Allowance is £1690 for a 3 bed need, and £1396 for a 2 bed. You then get that even if the property is larger.
As a comparison, here in Ashfield (N Notts area), a 3 bed LHA is £585, and 2 bed LHA is £550. Nottingham is £750 and £650. All numbers are per Calendar Month.
I think the best way to control these costs is to develop a functional housing market, which requires more supply but also less shovelling money at the demand side.
Can I just say that the amount of time that poor lawyers have to spend hanging around the courts to no purpose waiting for Juries is a disgrace.
What we need is a Jury vending machine.
You pop £1 in a slot, and a Jury comes marching out.
EDIT: Seriously, this is classic Operations Research. "What are expensive experts spending time on, that is not their job? Then get that stuff done for them."
Operational, not Operations: we are British not Americans
Can I just say that the amount of time that poor lawyers have to spend hanging around the courts to no purpose waiting for Juries is a disgrace.
What we need is a Jury vending machine.
You pop £1 in a slot, and a Jury comes marching out.
EDIT: Seriously, this is classic Operations Research. "What are expensive experts spending time on, that is not their job? Then get that stuff done for them."
Operational, not Operations: we are British not Americans
I have a post graduate degree in it. For you, it is more a hobby, ja?
Labour in fourth place is, I suspect, something we'll see more frequently in polling, over the next 12 months.
Social media is full of stories like the one here from the single mom in North London pulling in £6,142 a month (£2,800 wage the rest in benefits) happy she will get more from the state.
I suspect, in spite the happy clappy ‘isn’t it brilliant’ way it was portrayed on the TV news this is going to go down quite poorly in many parts of the country.
Cannot see it doing Labour any favours especially as the press seems adept at picking out beneficiary’s who appear anything but deserving for the rage bait.
Elucidating, without making any judgements, this is the one. It's very much a London article.
In a good month when UC gives full entitlement, Thea has a total of £6,142.00, from £2,800 in take-home pay and £3,342 in universal credit plus child benefit. Her monthly expenses such as childcare, rent, council tax, energy and food etc are usually around £6000. She says: "So it’s living very much on the edge."
The strange thing here is that the Benefit Cap does not apply to households earning more than £846 per month after tax. That is, presumably, one of those things designed to encourage people into work.
That's £40104 per year benefit, and a gross salary of just under £40k for £2800 per month take home. So were she not earning, she would get much less benefit, like £14k less (assuming no adjustments or exemptions, which are usually disability or pension related).
She will need a 3 bedroom dwelling assuming one child at least over 10 (1 for self, 1 for each sex of children sharing), and be entitled to the appropriate Housing Allowance rate for that, which will be 30th percentile of the market for that type of property, minus rent increases and inflation for however many years it has not been kept up to date (usually updated once every 3-4 years).
She’s hardly living in poverty by the definition and will now get more.
The article has people from Nuneaton, Nottingham and Otley and talks about people across the U.K.
It is certainly skewed to London as three people are London based.
Labour in fourth place is, I suspect, something we'll see more frequently in polling, over the next 12 months.
Social media is full of stories like the one here from the single mom in North London pulling in £6,142 a month (£2,800 wage the rest in benefits) happy she will get more from the state.
I suspect, in spite the happy clappy ‘isn’t it brilliant’ way it was portrayed on the TV news this is going to go down quite poorly in many parts of the country.
Cannot see it doing Labour any favours especially as the press seems adept at picking out beneficiary’s who appear anything but deserving for the rage bait.
Elucidating, without making any judgements, this is the one. It's very much a London article.
In a good month when UC gives full entitlement, Thea has a total of £6,142.00, from £2,800 in take-home pay and £3,342 in universal credit plus child benefit. Her monthly expenses such as childcare, rent, council tax, energy and food etc are usually around £6000. She says: "So it’s living very much on the edge."
The strange thing here is that the Benefit Cap does not apply to households earning more than £846 per month after tax. That is, presumably, one of those things designed to encourage people into work.
That's £40104 per year benefit, and a gross salary of just under £40k for £2800 per month take home. So were she not earning, she would get much less benefit, like £14k less (assuming no adjustments or exemptions, which are usually disability or pension related).
She will need a 3 bedroom dwelling assuming one child at least over 10 (1 for self, 1 for each sex of children sharing), and be entitled to the appropriate Housing Allowance rate for that, which will be 30th percentile of the market for that type of property, minus rent increases and inflation for however many years it has not been kept up to date (usually updated once every 3-4 years).
She’s hardly living in poverty by the definition and will now get more.
The article has people from Nuneaton, Nottingham and Otley and talks about people across the U.K.
It is certainly skewed to London as three people are London based.
That's fair comment, although the benefits cases were all afaics London, and the others elsewhere.
Can I just say that the amount of time that poor lawyers have to spend hanging around the courts to no purpose waiting for Juries is a disgrace.
What we need is a Jury vending machine.
You pop £1 in a slot, and a Jury comes marching out.
EDIT: Seriously, this is classic Operations Research. "What are expensive experts spending time on, that is not their job? Then get that stuff done for them."
Operational, not Operations: we are British not Americans
I have a post graduate degree in it. For you, it is more a hobby, ja?
Even my reliably lefty friends are questioning putting taxes up on working people to pay for more welfare. Very few defenders left, just a token Lib Dem(!) who says we need to give Labour a chance while the actual Labour voters are pining for the days Rishi and Hunt.
Spoke to a younger family member today (a HENRY - High Income Not Rich Yet) of impeccable liberal opinions but too busy working to take much interest in politics,.
Stunned at the tax announcement on pensions. And a gradually dawning awareness of being well and truly stuffed by taxes generally. (Has mortgage and student debt).
My impression is that sympathy for welfare recipients is somewhat diminishing.
I wonder if we could be reaching a tipping point when general opinion is going to move on the welfare issue. Judging by the strength of her comments yesterday, Kemi evidently believes so. But is she right?
Does he understand the pension change properly? It's a serious question given the misunderstandings prevalent.
Possibly not. Not sure I do.
The point, I think, is that working people are beginning to take a greater interest in these things, rather than just casting them to the outer reaches of their consciousness - boring and difficult to understand. And that may affect the political zeitgeist.
I dunno, really. But it looks to me as though TAX may actually becoming an issue again. And with it, the economy. It would be a relief from culture wars - but it intensify them?
My understanding is that the big changes on pensions is the limitation on salary sacrifice schemes which may eventually produce a few billion a year in tax (depending on how people react to the changes). Other changes, such as indexing PPF payments for pension funds in distress and making it easier for a DB scheme in surplus to release some of that surplus to members are very small beer. Importantly, despite all the warnings from the Telegraph and others, the tax free lump sum was untouched and tax relief continues to be granted at higher rates for higher rate taxpayers. It was very much the dog that didn't bark.
As usual, Steve Webb is worth listening to on this and he is urging that the government make commitments re pensions for the Parliament, not for a single year, so that people can plan with more confidence.
Talking very much against my own book, I am astonished that such a generous scheme for higher earners was left intact. It is a huge benefit to the better off in our society at the cost of the less well off. It drives inequality like little else and results in the effective tax rate of many higher earners being less than those earning a lot less whilst allowing them to pile up capital that those less well paid can only dream of.
Thank you @Selebian. I had a sneaking suspicion that this observation would not be immensely popular amongst the PB selectorate!
I meant to actually reply to the post. Salary sacrifice has been great for me and may be even more so with my new employer as they have a number of schemes covering things* that I'd never realised could be paid for in that way. But, it does seem bizarre that I can get the 40%+ (with a bit of NI relief) discount on things through this while lower earners get a bit over 20% and the lowest paid can't do it at all (as it would take them below minimum wage).
There's probably a better way of doing it, something more like gift aid where - I believe - it's a flat basic rate enhancement, whatever the tax bracket of the person donating.
*I haven't yet got into the details as I can't sign up until completed probation, but include EVs and some tech/home purchases - maybe there's not the full tax relief on these
ETA: I've conflated salary sacrifice and tax relief on pension contributions there (the former, of course, has been limite for pensions at least) but the general point stands, I think - why do those of us who earn more get more help? Outwith salary sacrifice the point on minimum wage workers doesn't apply of course, but they are still excluded from the salary sacrifice pension relief including NI, only able to get the tax relief through conventional contribution means.
Your salary sacrified bit never paid tax in the first place, so it is OK to conflate them imo.
Can I just say that the amount of time that poor lawyers have to spend hanging around the courts to no purpose waiting for Juries is a disgrace.
What we need is a Jury vending machine.
You pop £1 in a slot, and a Jury comes marching out.
EDIT: Seriously, this is classic Operations Research. "What are expensive experts spending time on, that is not their job? Then get that stuff done for them."
My assumption is they are waiting for the jury to reach a verdict.
Can anybody recommend any good books about Airey Neave please?
I read a book by him once - 'Little Cyclone', about his escape through occupied France; essentially the storyline of Secret Army. It was a good story, but writing wasn't his forte.
Can anybody recommend any good books about Airey Neave please?
THere's always his own writings about his escape from Colditz and his work in MI9 - They have hteir Exits and Saturday at MI9 but they prob don't cover the political era.
Patrick Bishop's biog I seem to remember reading - it was acceptable enough but I didn't feel the need to keep it. There is another biog by Routledge which I have not read.
Thanks.
I recently fell down a social media rabbit hole and some Faragist type (very anti Ukraine/NATO) said that according to that prize idiot Enoch Powell, Airey Neave was assassinated by the Yanks to ensure a united Ireland would join NATO.
I mean why they didn't assassinate Roy Mason is bugging me, what was so special about Lt. Col Neave?
Neave was prominent in wanting to take a more aggressive, military approach to the IRA, beliving that he could 'win the war' by flooding the province with troops including the special forces. That's why he became a target.
edit/ Given his various wartime experiences with underground movements, you could argue that his political view on that was surprisingly naive?
We cannot really call it naive since it was never attempted.
No one has ever attempted using honesty boxes in supermarkets - does that mean we can't call it naive?
The very agreeable little shop, now replaced by an equally agreeable restaurant/cafe, at Lochbuie ran entirely on an honesty box. The only place I know where this could be done with venison.
Still some honesty boxes in north Cumberland at the end of farm tracks and smallholdings.
Yes, i can attest to that. Eggs, cakes etc all over the place in west and north cumberland.
Comments
(Minor brexit disbenefit: paying to get into Spanish museums. They can't do free for Spain only without making it free for all EU citizens, whether they want to or not.)
It's funny how people can't get past a spreadsheet and look at the wider costs and benefits of economic activity. I think most people in Edinburgh would take the view that tourism is a good thing for the city, but there's work to do to spread the benefits around more evenly.
A tourist tax works well, particularly as it might help stave off the extreme Barcelona approach.
Agent said they were very picky about who they took on, it was a callcentre for the "Gold Club", timeshare owners thought they were subscribing to a discount scheme for flights, car hire etc
Got fired on day 1 after questioning the ethics of putting people on hold for 5 minutes then telling them there were no discounted flights available for the dates they wanted.
A jury did convict him of fraud in 2001, so the cheeky chappie, man of the people stich must have worn off.
I suspect, in spite the happy clappy ‘isn’t it brilliant’ way it was portrayed on the TV news this is going to go down quite poorly in many parts of the country.
Cannot see it doing Labour any favours especially as the press seems adept at picking out beneficiary’s who appear anything but deserving for the rage bait.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/skint-pregnant-mum-four-budget-36309267
The funniest version of that was a case in the US, where an idiot prosecutor tried to claim *reading the data returned by a normal query to a website, but not displayed on the page* was hacking.
Then go live is, as you say, setting to open access .
I'm going for Topping with a silenced Ruger in Holland Park.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/11/27/obr-chief-offers-to-resign-over-budget-fiasco/
“Personally, I serve day-to-day subject to the confidence of the Chancellor and the Treasury committee.
“If they both conclude, in light of that investigation, they no longer have confidence in me then of course I will resign, which is what you do when you’re the chair of something called the Office for Budget Responsibility.”
https://x.com/banks_chef/status/1993808722360193430
New Kitchen Porter wage breakdown
12.71 per hour
45 hours per week
=29.7k
+ 8k service charge (taxed)
37,740
+15% NI Contributions = 5661
+5% Pension = 1887
Paid by company £37,289
Total wage £45,289
People still question why a burger is over £20
*More recently, there have been cases where it is clear that the intent behind asking for a jury trial is to cause the prosecution to be dropped or delayed so much that witnesses become unreliable etc.
My suspicion is the document was uploaded so certain interested parties could be sent a link to read it early, and whoever did this simply didn't understand that guessing URLs has been a thing through the whole existence of the web. It's stupid, but I've seen it done many, many times in organisations who's people really should have known better.
Yuri: There are a lot of alcoves in the Koningin Astridpark. You use this word, alcoves?
Ken: Alcoves, yes. Sometimes.
Yuri: There are not many people around in these alcoves at Christmas time. If I were to murder a man I would murder him here. Are you sure this is the right word, alcoves?
Ken: Alcoves, yes. It's kind of like nooks and crannies.
Yuri: Nooks and crannies, yes! Perhaps this would be more accurate. Nooks and crannies rather than alcoves. Yes. You are going to do it aren't you? Mr. Waters would be very disappointed...
Ken: Of course I'm going to fucking do it. It's what I do
Papers please!..💩
I'm not a fan of the mileage charge at all, but the Telegraph's hyperventilating is getting ridiculous.
We seem to have got stuck in a loop of thinking the tax take matters in percentage terms, when what really matters is how big the economy is, what the income distribution looks like, and how much taxation raises. If we want more personal income or more public revenue the thing to do is grow the economy, not waste time arguing about rates. You can plainly see that after any budget we spend most of the time talking about how much people will pay, but very little time about how the economy may grow, what investment should do, how we can become more productive etc.
I think people don't want low taxes per se, because most people recognise that public services need to be well funded, but they do want to feel that the tax they pay is fair, leaves them more than enough to spend, and is well used by the government. We need substantial growth so that people are generally wealthier and then the public sector can be funded properly, and if we ever achieve that I expect that taxation would be much less of an issue.
They fill an informed innocent with fear.
And a guilty accused with hope.
And one tends to think that if it is a Labour led solution it is liable to be shite.
https://www.parliament.uk/business/commons/committee-corridor-podcast/a-criminal-justice-system-in-crisis2/
Not very much seems to have changed - except the backlog is now something like 80k rather than 50k.
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2025/sep/25/crown-court-england-wales-law-justice-politics
..Riel Karmy-Jones KC, the chair of the Criminal Bar Association, said the system was crumbling and unsustainable.
“Just today, Isleworth crown court listed a case offering a trial date in October 2029,” she said. “The right approach now is to fix the infrastructure of the courts, focus on the many efficiency measures that could improve productivity, and open back up court rooms that have been shut for a year or more to claw back wasted time.”
The MoJ’s report on the figures said the demand on criminal courts continued to grow, with more than 30,000 cases entering crown courts in the latest quarter. It said courts were dealing with cases more quickly but not fast enough to keep up with the growing number of cases.
It noted a 13% increase in sexual offences reaching court, a 14% increase in robberies and a 12% rise in drug offences compared with the previous year. The number of rape cases reaching court hit a peak of 1,291, a 21% increase on the previous year, the report said.
The number of cases in the backlog involving sexual offences rose year on year from 11,062 to 13,238, an increase of 20%, while cases for violence against the person increased from 21,150 to 24,364, up 15%.
David Lammy, the justice secretary, said victims of crime were waiting too long for justice.
Lammy, who is also the deputy prime minister, said: “Today’s statistics show the crown court backlog has hit a new record high and it lays bare the unacceptable wait victims face.”
He said the government was investing record amounts into the court system, but added: “Money alone cannot turn the tide on the rising backlog, which is why we asked Sir Brian Leveson to propose bold and ambitious reform, to put our justice system back on sustainable ground.”..
"Money alone can't turn the tide".. well, sure, but we haven't actually tried to see what it might do.
In inflation adjusted terms, the Ministry of Justice budget is still below what it was in 2010, so "investing record amounts" actually means record nominal amounts.
The share of the MoJ budget for courts is around 2.3bn, so an odd billion would make a huge difference. 50% of that on the courts, and 50% on legal aid, IMO, since the dearth of new criminal lawyers - who provide the judges of the future - is also a significant problem.
And if we are going to have more District Judges (whether replacing juries or not really is beside the point), they have to come from somewhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judiciary_of_England_and_Wales#District_judges
The published figures show +204k in the 12/12 to end June.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/nov/27/net-migration-to-uk-drops-69-year-on-year-ons-says?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other
It goes through the payroll and, as he says, gets taxed.
The bigger problem is how it affects long distance, rural journeys where there isn't an alternative - the Telegraph are missing a trick there.
https://www.tiktok.com/@yourmoviesbox/video/7214231995172375814 ?
Though that's obviously Hollywood license.
No qualified CPA would invest in the extra cost of 0.5 BMG when Lapua .338 does much the same for less cost and weight
IIRC they were dropping the entire database into the web browser as a json document & then filtering it client side. The governor of the state spent some time going after the journalist in question for “hacking” but was forced to back down eventually. Not before the journalist in question (or their employer?) had incurred significant legal expenses though.
In a good month when UC gives full entitlement, Thea has a total of £6,142.00, from £2,800 in take-home pay and £3,342 in universal credit plus child benefit. Her monthly expenses such as childcare, rent, council tax, energy and food etc are usually around £6000. She says: "So it’s living very much on the edge."
The strange thing here is that the Benefit Cap does not apply to households earning more than £846 per month after tax. That is, presumably, one of those things designed to encourage people into work.
That's £40104 per year benefit, and a gross salary of just under £40k for £2800 per month take home. So were she not earning, she would get much less benefit, like £14k less (assuming no adjustments or exemptions, which are usually disability or pension related).
She will need a 3 bedroom dwelling assuming one child at least over 10 (1 for self, 1 for each sex of children sharing), and be entitled to the appropriate Housing Allowance rate for that, which will be 30th percentile of the market for that type of property, minus rent increases and inflation for however many years it has not been kept up to date (usually updated once every 3-4 years).
You pop £1 in a slot, and a Jury comes marching out.
EDIT: Seriously, this is classic Operations Research. "What are expensive experts spending time on, that is not their job? Then get that stuff done for them."
There's probably a better way of doing it, something more like gift aid where - I believe - it's a flat basic rate enhancement, whatever the tax bracket of the person donating.
*I haven't yet got into the details as I can't sign up until completed probation, but include EVs and some tech/home purchases - maybe there's not the full tax relief on these
ETA: I've conflated salary sacrifice and tax relief on pension contributions there (the former, of course, has been limite for pensions at least) but the general point stands, I think - why do those of us who earn more get more help? Outwith salary sacrifice the point on minimum wage workers doesn't apply of course, but they are still excluded from the salary sacrifice pension relief including NI, only able to get the tax relief through conventional contribution means.
Yet the government contribution is still higher than your own?
NEW THREAD
As a comparison, here in Ashfield (N Notts area), a 3 bed LHA is £585, and 2 bed LHA is £550. Nottingham is £750 and £650. All numbers are per Calendar Month.
£6b a year Guardian is saying.
ETA: Heh, the strikethrough 'I' looks like a cross for the long-deceased acquaintance
As a comparison, here in Ashfield (N Notts area), a 3 bed LHA is £585, and 2 bed LHA is £550. Nottingham is £750 and £650. All numbers are per Calendar Month.
I think the best way to control these costs is to develop a functional housing market, which requires more supply but also less shovelling money at the demand side.
Jury service is a goddam nuisance, speaking as someone who's been "called up" twice.
The article has people from Nuneaton, Nottingham and Otley and talks about people across the U.K.
It is certainly skewed to London as three people are London based.