What the hell do I pay tax for??

and they won't be happy until they have us eating our garbage and then charging us for their estimate of the cost of processing our disposal of same - call it a loo tax....

 

Money isnt tight thats just a ruse aimed at the masses. UK plc is loaded with cash .

Heres a few examples (estimated). We gave the EEC £12 Billions, £12 Billions on foreign aid, £ Billions in charitable donations by business and individuals, will be spending at least £50 Billions on a train to get Londoners up North a bit quicker,Renewing Trident that could cost upto £100 Billions,will be giving farmers c. £4 Billions so they can keep driving their £50,000 4x4`s.

A local farmer to us retired 5 years ago and is a family friend and he still gets £200,000 a year despite the fact he sold up and lives in the nearby town. Why?

Where I live the recycling centre was closed and is a 20 mile round trip, the local swimming pool was sold off,theres never any new jobs created,wages are low,theres no museums/sports facilities etc and to add the final insult to injury its just been announced we have the worst roads in Scotland.

And I forgot to add the green waste pick was cancelled last year and these jokers are toying with possibly collecting household bins once a month now,barstewards!

All this and I pay £1800 a year council tax for sweet **** all.

 

Our tip is only open from, I think 8am, but I know it closes at 4pm.
Weekends you need to join the queue, it can take an hour sometimes to get into what is really a tiny place, when you bear in mind the area it covers.
They even widened the road some time ago so the queueing traffic would still allow a bit of normal traffic flow.
I see loads of flytipping, often just bin bags launched from car windows on country roads, although rouge builders are the worst.

I think we now have to pay to dump soil/rubble at our local tip, but the rest is free at the moment.

 

Ours is free

We get lots of flying tipping, some out siders but mustly locals/home owners that are to lazy to go to the tip/dump/recycling centre
Mustly garden waste, they dig it up from there garden and 20 feet the other side of the road is all the waste

once a year here

no sweeping here, even the cow poo gets left on the roads, not by the cows but the tractors and muck spreaders

what are street lights

 

Does your Mother in Law allow that?

 

..........................

But these are a council issue, not central government.

To be fair most of the trunk roads (which are the responsibility of the Highways Agency) that I've used over the last few years are not too bad. But the rural roads around here (except the ones leading to Camerons country pile) are bad - these are the responsibility of the County Council. The problem is that in this country we are basically dependent upon the roads for our transport needs. Dr. Beeching made sure of that. As much as we all moan about the amount of tax on the price of a gallon of fuel our roads take a hammering and it is the fairest way of going about funding a largish chunk of it.

Unfortunately a combination of people living longer, dopey mothers who have a season ticket for their sprogs at their local GP surgery, the ever increasing pharmaceutical bill, too many pen pushers and the army of lawyers milking the NHS for damages mean that there will never be enough money in the NHS for it to be what it was.

Rubbish - the UK is skint. Sorry, but we are and have been since the turn of the 1990's.

Yup, it looks like a lot of money but it is mere pennies when you consider the sheer size of the UK economy. In fact, when you consider that the building blocks of the UK "wealth" was built on the old "Empires" colonisation of the countries that now receive that aid it is actually an embarrassingly small sum.

So may we assume that as you near the end you will turn down the offer of hospice care and instead rely on your family to nurse you through your final days? In the UK we have fairly low rates of income tax and a fairly average rate of VAT/GST - the charitable sector is effectively our opportunity to decide individually where a small portion of our earnings go to rather than the government of the day arbitrarily deciding for us.

On the whole I agree with you here. If we only have £50 billion to spend on the rail network then it should be invested in the provincial lines first, not flippant luxuries such as this.

That is a toughie ain't it? On the one hand we do need an effective deterrent but imagine what that sum of money could do for families who are in genuine poverty or for the life chances of children growing up in sink estates around the UK.

If you're sure of your facts shop him. He may be a family friend but he is as bad, if not worse, than all the benefit cheats that are bleeding our welfare system dry.

That's not really true is it. I don't think that I'm getting particularly good value out of my £1857 either but when you consider what that money has to pay for it's a pretty tight margin. The truth is that there is a level of waste at all levels of government (local and central) but by far the biggest challenge is that the salaries of public sector workers is dictated by the salaries of the private sector. That is the reality of living in a market economy (AKA capitalist).

PLEASE NOTE - none of the above is meant to be argumentative. It is just the way that I see it (rightly or wrongly).

If you really want me to go off on one then start a thread off on the recent proposal of more grammar schools!

 

I think we need more garammar schools

 

£ 1.6 Trillion in debt and yet we spend tens of billions extra on a train, an unprovan french/chinese nuclear power plant, foreign aid, interfeering in other peoples wars, bad contracts (pfi), excess bureucracy(local&national),allow tax avoidance for the rich and general ineptitude.
( Duke of westminser died leaving £9Billion to his son and yes there was no inheritance tax payable) ?

We laugh at the French with their "lazy" ways and their 35 hour week yet they infact have a better rate of productivity than UKplc.

And now the weakness of the pound will slowly cause inflation to rise forcing interest rates up again and a massive rise in government spending on our debt repayments. Payments on 1.6 trillion at just 5% (average historical rate) will be £80 Billions a year

Of course when this happens its game over,time to dig up your lawn and plant veg so you have something to eat

 

Do you think you could all keep your voices down a bit, please? It seems that every bad idea/ retrograde step from the UK is adopted here with gleeful enthusiasm, while the French government and councils scrupulously avoid any beneficial (to residents) changes.Refuse collection charges, tip charges, town centre parking charges, you name it....they're being introduced. That's without all the hidden income taxes!
It's time for a revolution. Or two.

 

Steady on @WeeTam , you're starting to sound like Comrade Jeremy

Not as daft as it sounds. Reduce the working week from forty to thirty five hours and that results in one new job for every nine or so employees (making allowances for employer costs). As a result the states benefit bill goes down as the individuals productivity increases. One of our local suppliers did a similar thing a few months ago and as a result there efficiency has gone up immeasurably. However............

That is the inevitable result of Brexit. We just have to get used to it.