Ian Osborne
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True that, but Labour's attitude at the time made it impossible for them to offer a credible challenge.
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UK - December 2019 General Election
- Thread starter The Don
- Start date
True that, but Labour's attitude at the time made it impossible for them to offer a credible challenge.
Archie Gemmill Goal
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-Dishonest leafleting
-Childish social media
-Refusing to work with Corbyn, but saying they will back Johnson
-Gleefully wanting to blow up the world
And that's just off the top of my head from the last week or so.
Vixen
Penultimate Amazing
You charge VAT on school fees regardless of the charitable status of the school
Inheritance Tax is one of those (very few) things where this forum has caused to to fundamentally change my beliefs. I had thought that it was reasonable for parents to pass their wealth onto their descendants but forum members, in particular Darat, have convinced me that the ability to pass wealth intergenerationally in an unfettered manner is a major driver for inequality.
If this wealth transfer is tempered by taxation then inequality is reduced - moreso if that taxation is used effectively to further reduce inequality.
If an estate is worth several hundred thousand pounds then IMO the transfer of that wealth should be subject to tax.
My father's estate isn't worth anything like that, £40k in savings and a terraced house in a North East England town in need of complete refurbishment is it. I'm a comfortably-off fifty-something, why shouldn't I pay tax on suddenly receiving several hundred thousand pounds in assets ?
As for the argument about "keeping the family home for future generations", does this hold water in most cases ?
My issue is that it's not a matter of providing routers, it's a matter of comprehensively upgrading the national telecommunications infrastructure. This is where OpenReach has completely dropped the ball.
For example we have fibre installed into the cabinet in the village. This was comparatively easy to do because it was replacing a single communications trunk from the exchange. The problem lies between the cabinet and the hundreds of homes served from the cabinet. The wiring is old, a mixture of materials, much of it doesn't work at all and newly-trained engineers simply cannot cope with it.
To deliver "free broadband", the government will have to replace hundreds of thousands of miles of cable in a project likely to cost tens of billions of pounds. Successive governments have demonstrated a complete inability to deliver large technology infrastructure projects like this. I expect that this will be the same - billions of pounds spent with no appreciable benefit to the end users.
In the EU, one still pays tax on inheritance but it's stepped, so instead of having just one band for the top end, it has multiple bands, so - off the top of my head - anything left under €20K after all costs and expenses, incurs zero tax; between 20k- 50K maybe 17% tax, 20% for the next band, etc., and it's only if it is over £1m you can expect to be walloped. So in effect, the government still gets plenty of tax revenue from let's say 40% of the population, rather than just 5% (of whom the majority of the remaining 95% have almost certainly shielded a huge amount from HM Inspector of Taxes) as in the UK.
Just 'going after the rich' will not be a vote winning and smacks of the politics of envy.
Far better IMV is to stop making dementia sufferers sell their house to get 24/7 care, leaving nothing for the descendants who might have given up huge amounts of time for their care.
As for the broadband issue, surely the infrastructure needs to be modernised sooner or later, so why not commit to it properly?
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Archie Gemmill Goal
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I've had a chance to have a quick look at the "headline" policies in the Labour manifesto. My take on them are as follows:
£75bn to build 150,000 new council and social homes a year, within five years
A laudable aim - isn't going to happen but it's better than the Tories who haven't built a single affordable home.
An immediate 5% pay rise for public sector workers, with year-on-year above-inflation pay rises to follow
Whilst I agree that public sector workers could use a pay rise after "Austerity", how do they propose to fund this ?
Introducing a "real living wage" of at least £10 an hour
Good
Reviewing the retirement age for people in hard manual jobs
As long as nothing comes of it, this'll be fine but otherwise it'll be a minefield of what is hard manual labour, whether it's age or sex discrimination, and whether or not it is affordable.
Introducing a second homes tax
OK but I'll need to read the manifesto to understand what this means for people like me who rent out properties.
Reversing inheritance tax cuts and imposing VAT on private school fees
OK sounds good
Giving EU nationals living in UK the automatic right to stay
Sounds great
Reinstating 3,000 bus routes that have been cut
I'd like to see the details of this and how it's supposed to be funded. The idea of empty busses driving around at the public expense doesn't really appeal to me - surely there's a 21st century solution to this issue
Free broadband for all, delivered by part-nationalising BT
Absolutely terrifying
A £3bn plan to offer adults in England free access to retraining
Sounds great as long as the retraining actually enhances the economy rather than just being a boondoggle for training suppliers.
A pledge to reduce all primary school classes to fewer than 30 children
OK, but the arbitrary number smacks of cargo-cult culture
Free personal at-home care in England for over-65s most in need of it
It's the "most in need" that worries me. They won't want means testing so it's likely that everyone, no matter how wealthy, will receive it. Another case of me reading the manifesto in detail
A pledge to renew the Trident nuclear deterrent and spend at least 2% of GDP on defence
No, no, a million times no
Reducing the voting age to 16
Fine
The second home thing seems to be a substantial increase in council tax for unoccupied homes according to the press anyway.
Labour's policy on Trident is incoherent currently, renew it but say you would never use it.
This here.
I have absolutely no intention of moving to a cottage in the middle of nowhere in Powys.
Don't most people have their own homes by the time their folks shuffle off? Do people really move back to the old home? I somehow doubt it.
The biggest effect will be on the likes of family farms. In that case, though, isn't that a business?
Andy_Ross
Penultimate Amazing
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It leaves the option available for any future leader though and the threat is still there.
As nice as the town in which Daddy Don lived is (and it really is), I don't want to move into a much smaller house that needs tens of thousands spending on it, hundreds of miles from where I currently live.
Probably, either as owners or renters.
Some may want to, but they're likely to be in the minority IMO.
Yes, this is the example repeatedly mentioned in the past, but they're in the minority and as you point out they're likely to be businesses.
Archie Gemmill Goal
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I'm not convinced on inheritance tax, the really rich seem to find ways around it as with most bloody taxes. I'm not a fan of taxes which kick in fully based on a threshold either.
Dave Rogers
Bandaged ice that stampedes inexpensively through
Really? It sounds to me like the whole of nuclear deterrence theory encapsulated in a single statement.
Dave
Well you only pay taxes on the value of the estate over the threshold. It's not like the old stamp duty which did apply at the highest value for the complete transaction.
Archie Gemmill Goal
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Is it? I stand corrected then.
You remove their charitable status.
Not at all, check the polling figures. Thatcher (whether appropriately or not) rode the wave of the success of the Falklands campaign.
There isn't an EU tax rate.
Combined with the capital gains tax changes I think it will start to help. The issue that really needs to be addressed in regards to inheritance is trusts. I know several people who don't live in their "own" house, the house is held by the family trust. This is nothing less than tax evasion, but because of who benefits from these types of trusts, such as prime ministers and chancellor of the Exchequer it is not going to change.
Archie Gemmill Goal
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And I think that's the fundamental issue on pretty much everything. The people with the power are the people who benefit from the system and they aren't suddenly going to decide to change the system unless they are pretty much forced to.
Information Analyst
Penultimate Amazing
Seems to be aimed at addressing the many years of freeze/below inflation rises, but obviously there would have to be a limit on how long such rises would last.
Yes, a lot of routes have been reduced/cut for good reason.
Free broadband for all, delivered by part-nationalising BT
Absolutely terrifying
That and the fact that BT don't own all the infrastructure, and where would it leave the other companies as a whole?
ISTR that 30 was a long-standing standard back in the day. Larger classes generally merit teaching assistants in addition to the teachers, while smaller ones would mean more teachers and less TAs. That might have unpopular unintended consequences.
Have an income-based cap similar to the current ones on Child Benefit/free childcare?
A pledge to renew the Trident nuclear deterrent and spend at least 2% of GDP on defence
No, no, a million times no
We're already spending 2.1%. I think it's time we looked at options other than a submarine-based deterrent, if we are to retain one at all.
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Round our way there's this:
https://www.fastershire.com/
Which is high speed broadband across Gloucestershire and Herefordshire. There's cables still being laid for it (they're only just doing near us at the moment).
Where does this fall into that I wonder.
They exist because BT didn't want to take on the job.
Different EU countries have different rules. Which country or countries are you describing ?
If 5% of people end up paying, it sounds like the other 95% should be pretty happy. I think if I was a left-wing party trying to attract support I'd construct policies aimed at the 95% of have-nots rather than the elite 5% who, eccentrics aside, would likely not be my target.
Of course Brexit was founded on the politics of envy, just directed at a different group.
Again, a tiny proportion of the population - the noise of which is greatly amplified by the right wing press.
I agree, which is why it absolutely should not be a huge government-led technology infrastructure project because, like all of the other ones, they'll **** it up and spend a fortune
Information Analyst
Penultimate Amazing
I'll mention this before Wobs does:
https://www.broadbandchoices.co.uk/guides/broadband/hull-broadband