Sticky tape makes me think of Dads army for some reason. I'm going to start sitting in the cupboard under the stairs in the evenings if this is how things are going
Thanks @Fat Controller you saved me the effort of saying the same thing. The Greens don't even have policies. They ask their members what they would like to do and then vote on them at their conference. 'Ban landlords' - brilliant idea. No thoughts about what would happen. Public sector couldn't possibly buy all that housing stock. 'Ban cars' - even better idea..... Monster Raving Loony party would make a more effective Government.
I saw the bloke who is leader of the Greens on TV a few days ago, he seem OK, but so does the Lib Dem bloke, nice people. But are nice people what we need? What we actually need is a leader, with some kind of aspiration. I'm unsure about Reform, but to be honest I cant see them making anymore of a hash of it than all the others that have had a bash. Its down to trial and error as far as the electorate are concerned, as the usual Labour and Conservative bunch have proved they don't have a clue. Someone said the country has become ungovernable a while back, I just wonder if they are onto something, we dont have a course to prosperity, too much time pandering to strange idealistic ideas rather than the reality of what the working public is enduring. Russia and other countries are having a good laugh at the western countries, while we run ourselves into the ground trying to do the "right" thing.
Since Covid, extreme wealth in the hands of a few billionaires has increased because profits from their companies have increased as well as interest earnings on their individual wealth. Meanwhile, wages have not increased at the same rate but productivity, in general, has so workers are now working harder and producing more but not only do their pay packets not have a proportionate increase in value but their purchasing power has diminished as prices rise. At the same time, governments seek to reduce spending on social services and increase their taxes whilst not spending anything like enough to improve housing, transport, health systems, support for the less physically or mentally able and so on. It seems evident to me that making the wealthy pay just 1% on their personal wealth would go a long way to providing extra funding for all and that making wage increases align with productivity and profits should be something for all empoyees and not just the chief exec. The Economic Policy Institute reports that since 1978, chief exec pay in the USA has increased by 1085% in real terms whereas their workers' pay has gone up just 24% in that same period. I dare say a similar comparison in the UK would reveal similar results.
The trouble with that is that they have clever accountants and lawyers that will convert it into a non-taxable type of fund or move it overseas. I always wonder what people really mean by the 'super rich' and how do we draw a line. A friend of mine lives in a three bedroom house where the area has gradually, over a lot of years, gone from not being very salubrious to being a sought after place to live. The value of his house has gone up to £1.25m. He moved there 50 years ago because it was in a run down area and it was the only place he good get a mortgage for. He doesn't have any money to pay a tax on the value of the house, unless he sells it and I don't approve of anything that forces someone to sell the house they have lived in for most of their adult life just to pay a tax. The government will get a big chunk when he dies, anyway! I don't think any political party has yet come up with a practical way to tax the very rich and make it work.
@shiney - remember the 60s when the Labour government was taxing incomes above a certain level at 95%? George Harrison wrote a song about it. If the system could take 95% then from those with high earnings they can surely manage 1% now and there must be someone in HMRC clever enough to work out how to reduce avoidance and stop evasion. I agree that living in a property whose value has soared over time should not be taxable. Nor should the poor and low to middle earners have to foot the bill for government incontinence. A huge amount of public money is wasted on ill thought out policies and ill managed initiatives and projects and this leads to increased borrowing and greater debt. The London Economic says: France’s deficit reached 5.8% of its GDP in 2024 and its national debt is 114% of its GDP. Only Greece and Italy have higher public debt in the eurozone. This is not just a French story. The United Kingdom is staring down an equally grim ledger. Growth has stalled, interest payments on debt are consuming ever-larger chunks of public spending, and the promises of both left and right alike are collapsing under the weight of fiscal reality. Populists, of course, like to imagine they can bend numbers to their will. Nigel Farage has promised to upend the system, to break with the orthodoxy. But the hard arithmetic of debt will force him – if he ever holds the levers of power – into the same unglamorous role as every finance minister before him: making cuts, raising taxes, and disappointing the voters who believed in the promise of easy answers.
For most of recent history (the last 200 years) we have had a graduated system of tax on income where, in the 1940's and 1960's the highest rate was well over £100%. (Clement Atlee and Harold Wilson) Most of the high taxes were on the top slice of income and not assets. To tax assets, as some are calling for, is where the avoidance would certainly occur. Higher rates of tax on the upper slices of income would be easier to administer and has been in the past. Although there are effective ways around that as well. You can blame William Pitt the Younger for introducing income tax. @Obelix-Vendée On the question of politics and Prime Ministers, it looks as though France is aiming at breaking our record of the amount of them in the shortest time. Lecornu has managed 22 days fewer than Liz Truss and I can't see anyone in the near future expecting to do the job for long.
@shiney, I'd say superrich is defined by assets over £50 million. The Greens have never done joined-up thinking and the current leader has some worrying ideas, eg about the definition of a woman. The Lib Dems have no plans to narrow the wealth gap and would just be Tory-lite. Ed Davey going to Davos in January ruled him out as a credible alternative for me. All the parties have the same overall mission - keep wealth with the wealthy. Where they differ is the tinkering around the edges. I am in favour of a wealth tax, but I would prefer a very simple tax policy with no loopholes. I would also like a fairer Council Tax system, with properties graded from A-Z. That a 20 bedroom mansion is in the same category as a 4 bed detached in an affluent area is another example of taxes favouring the superrich.
@ViewAhead Phew! That lets me off, then but I don't know about you. The council tax is still calculated on what the value of the property was in 1991 which is silly but in most cases wouldn't make any difference if it is all on the same basis but where it goes wrong is that if most properties in an area had been extended prior to 1991 and therefore revalued in 1991 the ones that hadn't been extended will be classified in that higher tax band. They don't value each individual property but do it as a group of properties. Revaluation on an individual property basis would likely be prohibitively expensive for a local council to do although I would almost certainly gain by it. When we moved here 53 years ago there were about 20 houses in two miles of road and almost all were two bedroomed bungalows. Now most are houses with between four and six bedrooms. We only added one bedroom . I appealed my council tax and the answer was, basically, 'tough, we only value the area!'
Re Council Tax - as already said, the valuation of houses/areas is well out of date but so is the system of basing it on a property rather than the number of people living in it.
I seem to recall when Greece were put into 'special measures' by the EU for breaking their fiscal rules. It turned out that the first two countries to break the rules were Germany and France. Oddly, no action was taken against them.
