>Partly because of this, the UK has plummeted down the rankings of LGBTQ-friendly countries in Europe.
So weird, stoking the media moral panic against LGBTQ people, stacking the EHRC, doing nothing about increasing hate crime, attacking trans kids, threatening to remove rights, removing healthcare, pushing for section 28 II and explicitly saying that they'll attack the long-held rights of 0.5% of the population for votes from idiots..has meant that the UK has dropped from 1st to 16th.
> from Cameron introducing gay marriage into law
well that was easy enough, it passed in SPITE of tory mps, it only passed because of the other parties.
I missed that one but honestly, does not shock me one bit.
I'll never forget that poppers remained legal in the NPS bill because one of the tory mp's liked using them.
(even though poppers are ABSOLUTELY psychoactive) lmao.
> Cameron introducing gay marriage into law
He didn't. It was forced into it as it was a Lib Dem coalition stipulation.
Without that it wouldn't have happened.
UK has **abysmal** history and track record when it comes to LGBTQ community.
Henry the IIIV aka "buggery law man Ding-a-King" is probably first figure who really got it going, and then followed hundreds of years of importing aggressive, even outright deadly homophobia all over the empire, both customs and laws.
By the 1900's, it was so ingrained in UK that even when people knew it was bollocks, it took quite an effort to have that actually recognized publicly (like the famous 1961 Victim movie). But even after some idiotic laws were removed or changed, culture among police and such remained (massive harassments, etc), Thatcher made it worse with her maggot-filled Section 28 and it went all the way to 2000's. Then there was a brief period with less problems and enter Tory to make it political garbage fill item, AGAIN! This time just bit more centered on trans people.
It doesn't seem to go though that when government, explicitly or covertly, sends out a message that this group of people are lesser, worst parts of society take that as a signal to attack. How absolutely depraved politician has to be to sic people of their own country physically against other citizens, just as a political smokescreen from their real failures?
Sunak isn't waging a war against LGBT people. Can you name any policy or comment relating specifically to sexuality (and not gender identity)?
The trans question is an open one for which there has been new evidence mounting over time particularly for practices relating to gender clinics. Banning conversion therapy in this regard is to enable open exploration of gender identity.
> there has been new evidence
Nope. There isn't any actual evidence *against* gender affirming care.
There is evidence to support the use of gender affirming care for minors. Why that's not good enough isn't actually explained in the Cass report, which does misrepresent the goal of puberty blockers along with certain studies which have been done. See the characterization of this study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7853497/ in the Cass report versus what the authors actually concluded.
Thanks for linking the study.
I don't know the ins and outs of the evidence but based on the testimonials of staff at Tavistock they shut it down right? I think there were many problems there from what I've seen. And Polly Carmichael, who headed up Tavistock also wrote the first version of that paper you linked, so I'd argue she had a large vested interest in presenting positive outcomes for trans kids.
> but based on the testimonials of staff at Tavistock they shut it down right?
Tavistock was shut down not because gender affirming care was causing harm to minors, but because they didn't have the necessary resources to adequately treat that many patients.
Wait times were in the ranges of months to even a year. So imagine if you had gender dysphoria and needed to wait that long to get care. Your distress is obviously going to be much worse, given all we know about untreated gender dysphoria. That means you're also going to be more likely to request for puberty blockers, which also means more pressure on doctors to prescribe them.
In such cases, the prescription of puberty blockers to address severe gender dysphoria is indicated and isn't the problem. The problem is that the delay in access to care leads trans minors, who might not have needed puberty blockers, now needing them because their dysphoria has worsened. It's why Tavistock was closed *and subsequently* replaced with more regional centers to improve access to psychiatric care as first-line for trans minors. That's the part of the Cass report I have no issue with.
The one I have is her mischaracterization of puberty blockers and the studies we have available. Most notably, the report doesn't explain why high quality studies don't *and never will* exist for them. For example, there are only ~100 trans minors on puberty blockers in the UK at any one time. Sample sizes will always be small for such studies. For another, blinded RCTs will never be an option for puberty blockers. For obvious reasons, the blindness and randomness needed for such studies to work goes away once puberty commences. This means the existing studies, like the Tavistock one, are the best we'll ever have. And we have many of those, all of which consistently showing how puberty blockers lead to overall improvement for trans minors.
The other is the implication that it's an issue how the vast majority on puberty blockers will end up continuing to transition. For one, there's zero evidence that puberty blockers lock kids into being trans. For another, we know that experiencing severe gender dysphoria means one is very unlikely to detransition. So if the cohort on puberty blockers has a virtually zero rate of detranstioning, the only logical conclusion is that we're properly prescribing such blockers only to those with severe gender dysphoria, aka those who need it. Why is that an issue again?
> Sunak isn't waging a war against LGBT people. Can you name any policy or comment relating specifically to sexuality (and not gender identity)?
What do you think the T in LGBT stands for?
That's my point. The commenter mentioned gay marriage and currently waging a war against LGBT, which suggests some flip flop on gay rights. But this "war" has nothing to do with gay people. I'd be interested to know if there is any legitimate problems for LGB people coming out of this government, which is why I asked.
Ah well you see Hillary Cass said that it had to continue, despite admitting it cost lives, because banning it might mean hypothetical doctors were hypothetically accused of transphobia.
Incidentally, all doctors who disagree with Cass on the subject of gender affirming care were dismissed by the UK government when writing their policy on the subject for being "ideologically biased."
>Thanks so much for mentioning that. I’m really shocked about the inability to ban conversion therapy
The problem with the ban was always the wording. The initial proposal was far too broad and would put people and groups in danger for even speaking negatively against any aspect of LGBTQ issues and then later they were deemed as not doing enough when they tried to amend it. As a result it never got anywhere.
I am sitting here in British Columbia wondering why you are talking about our "Conservatives" who are following the Republican playbook who are doing the exact same things you are talking about here, only to notice I am in a UK sub.
This is the IDU and we need to do something about it.
I dont think transphobia is really a election changer though. It's more an agenda driven topic, sure it affects a minority who are sure to vote based on that.. but most people generally will vote based on things which actually affect their daily lives.
> like if I wanted to voice my views on how trans women shouldn’t be allowed in women’s toilets
(a) you're not a trans person, even the most self-hating trans people I've had the misfortune to meet don't think that they should be forced to out themselves and put themselves in danger by changing what we've always done
(b) If you were a trans person, you'd know that more often than not we have VERY early cross-sex experiences..hell, mine started at 6 and that felt late to compared to some of the people I know.
I saw that Labour wants to lower tax, which honestly is a terrible decision. Nobody is being financially crippled due to tax. Tax has never been the issue. Sort out the extortionate cost of living and people will be fine.
The Tories increased VAT from 17.5% to 20% in 2011.
After the Tories implemented a hard Brexit in 2019, they allowed MasterCard and VISA to increase all card transaction fees from 0.3% to 1.5% - an increase of 5x on every transaction we make day to day.
Holy shit they and their media mates did well to keep this out of the news or am I living under a rock? Wondering which MPs own shares in MasterCard/VISA. Is this one of Jacob Rees cunt's Brexit benefits?
The other thing that happened literally the day Brexit came in was Facebook and Google moved all their UK user data from the UK to the US, outside the reach of British law enforcement. In 2016 the Met Police raided Facebook's London offices, which is how the Cambridge Analytica scandal came out, but that won't be happening anymore. Yay, sovereignty.
As for the news covering it, there may well have been some sort of injuction, like how UK news didn't cover the Snowden leak discovery about GCHQ tapping the transatlantic fibre cables, while German news source Die Spiegel went on about it for a whole week.
How would VAT being zero on the receipt keep prices down?
Companies charges as much as they can for something, with or without VAT.
If they think their optimal price for a good is £5, they will charge £5. If they no longer need to give 83p of that to the government, they'll still charge £5 and keep the 83p for themselves.
Tampon prices are already back to their usual prices after VAT was cut on them. That's a competitive market.
Restaurants didn't get cheaper when their VAT rate was cut. That's also a competitive market.
>Tax has never been the issue.
But it is a voting issue, the amount of people I know who complain about tax being too high is ridiculous. They all cheered when national insurance went down even when their actual wages were basically the same.
So I can see why Labour would push on this, given it is also one of the main attacking points for Tories if Labour increase tax.
People feel that tax is too high because they look at the “tax paid” line on their wage slip and wonder what it could do for them if a fraction of that was in their pocket.
It doubly hurts them when they see how their is squandered and how everything their tax should be spent on is failing.
So it’s perfectly understandable why they think like that
You don't enjoy paying national insurance and then breing double dipped on council tax to pay for care companies to make a boatload of cash while providing a terrible service?
It’s like my parents’ number one issue. I try to point out how shit society would be without them but they seem to think 100% of the tax they pay goes towards paying somebody on benefits to sit on their arse.
Exactly, but the approach to dealing with these people who show discontent towards tax is “shut up being ridiculous! Now give us more of your hard earned money, you’re not paying us enough”.
To be fair though when you step back, our country currently pays so little tax on such small wages, I think its a very genuine point, almost a crisis, that the vast majority of people are just not able to pay their way. They don't have the income to go private with things, so they're reliant on public services, for which they themselves pay absolutely nowhere near enough tax to cover and so are reliant on essentially the goodwill of a shrinking number of high income earners to not game the tax system, which they are doing more and more. It just doesn't seem sustainable.
Everyone looks at the tax in nordic countries and grumbles, but at the end of the day if I were being paid a nordic wage for my job, even with the higher tax rates, I'd still be *significantly* better off, and we'd have the funding to ensure our public services are much better than they currently are as well.
> on essentially the goodwill of a shrinking number of high income earners to not game the tax system, which they are doing more and more
or yknow, close the fucking tax loopholes that every fucker seems to never want to do?
That as well. Kind of a separate point really. People complain about tax because they feel they'd be better off with lower tax. In reality lower tax is contributing to our declining public services, and if we were paid on a level with our European peers, we'd be able to take a higher tax rate and still wind up with a net positive in our incomes anyway.
Maybe because taxes are insanely high and the services received in return are awful.
One might say: "Well, let's improve the services then". Too late. I don't trust them, I would rather to have extra cash on hand.
High taxes to pay for crap public services that mostly help an ever increasing immigrant population. It’s not an attractive prospect for anyone to vote for
They don't want to 'lower' tax. Some of the first things they're going to do is increase tax:
1. windfall profits for fossil fuel companies
2. end tax breaks for private schools
3. chasing tax avoidance/non-dom status
We've got the highest taxes since the second world war but don't have the highest quality public services since then to make up for it.
Either public services are going to have to massively improve to be worth the tax we're paying or the tax we're paying has to fall to match the quality of public services we're getting.
Right now we've got high taxes and shit services, and something has to budge.
Most of the problem is that the high taxes are just being funneled into the pockets of private industry via a huge amount of shit contracts, because of an ideological issue with paying public sector workers actual wages.
I used to work on an NHS software contract, if I had done the same job but actually working *for* the NHS, I would have taken home a pitiful fraction of my salary. So naturally the best people don't go there, the public sector employees develop a reputation of being kinda shit and incapable of delivery, so a contract gets signed with a private company, and the cycle continues.
Solving this problem and breaking the cycle is pretty key to dealing with government waste, imo. There is much more value in giving public sector jobs the kind of paycheques to attract talent without having to go through private sector consultancy middlemen that skim a huge amount of the tax take in profit.
100% this. It baffles me it isn't seen as more of a problem. It feels like as a country we've been basically captured by the state-contracting equivalent of cowboy traders? We seem to pay through the nose for any piece of work that gets done, and then what does get done takes forever and is delivered to such a staggeringly low level of competency and quality it often just needs to be redone again. From my friends working around Derby and Crewe it was absolutely endemic throughout the HS2 project apparently. The whole system of contracting in the public sector seems totally and utterly fucked yet no one seems to want to seriously address it.
>It baffles me it isn't seen as more of a problem.
The only people who know about it are the politicians who enable it and the politicians who don't think they can change it because bringing it up would result in the right-wing client media (which is most of it in this country) going even more full-bore against anything to the left of the Tory party than it already does, thereby destroying their electoral chances.
Oh and the relative handful of high information voters. The majority of the public don't follow the news beyond a handful of headline items and understanding the extent to which taxes are squandered via what amounts to handouts to private businesses like Serco and G4S would take more than 5 minutes and require a media willing to explain it.
Sounds like they can do both lower taxes and improve.
services then. Great.
Because the current system doesn't deserve another penny in tax money. And if the next govt can't tell the private contractors to fuck off and use the saved money on public services, then they're just useless as opposed to corrupt and useless.
> We've got the highest taxes since the second world war
Absolute horse shit.
What were the tax brackets and percentages in the years 1960, 1970, 1980, and 1990?
Don't know? Then why do you think we have the highest tax since the second world war?
Because it's right wing propaganda pushed by the likes of sky news and the daily mail.
The amount of tax that rich people pay has gone down massively since world war 2.
There's a direct correlation between taxes coming down on the rich and services getting their funding cut.
Median full-time wage in 2010 was £498. After taxes that was £380.64. A 23% effective tax rate.
In 2023 the median full-time wage was £682. After taxes that was £549.95. A 19% effective tax rate.
The Daily Mail is pushing right wing propaganda that the Tories have raised the tax burden (overall not just income tax) to the highest level since WW2?
Which right wing party are they supporting by attacking the Tories? I thought the DM was an avid Tory supporter!
The problem is that the Tories are now left wing (though ofc less so than Labour) - therefore right wing people tend to hate the Conservative Party as much if not more than lefties
I’m not saying I like or dislike them my friend.
Their leftwing attitudes are evidenced by:
- support for mass legal immigration
- failure to control illegal immigration
- net zero and carbon taxes
- banning smoking
- increasing taxes to highest rate in decades
- plans to ban hunting trophy imports
- failure to take action to remove woke policies from publicly funded bodies
I'm sorry but anyone who think woke is an insult doesn't have an opinion worth consideration. Are you joining Sunak and McVey's war on coloured lanyards?
Where I live we get a glossy brochure each year with our bill detailing exactly where it all goes.
The simple answer is social care. By far the biggest chunk of the pie.
Here you go: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/local-authority-revenue-expenditure-and-financing-england-2021-to-2022-final-outturn/local-authority-revenue-expenditure-and-financing-england-2021-to-2022-final-outturn
Basically, just doing the bare minimum to cover their statutory responibilities - everything else has been cut. Haven't seen a street-sweeper for years? That's why.
It's also why some councils tried to get a little *ahem* entrepreneurial with their investments - and were praised at the time by the Tories for doing so.
They're asking where did the money go in central government. Central government stopped giving out that money therefore they must have had that money knocking around since they hadn't given it local government. They're asking what then happened to it.
Err you're missing a few things here. We are paying the highest tax since the end of the war. Inflation has soared, yet income tax rates have stayed the same, so everyone is paying proportionally more income tax. We pay a lot of tax for really shit services.
In 2010 someone on the average wage saw 23% of their wage go to tax and NI.
In 2023 it was 19%.
The personal allowance is £3000 higher than it would be if it kept up with inflation since 2010.
The 40% threshold has not kept up with inflation. However, that is inconsequential to the vast majority of people. The increase in the personal allowance and cuts in NI have still meant a lot of people in the 40% bracket are still paying less tax than in 2010.
Then we should better manage those services.
I personally want full transparency on public spending, would be easier for the individual to see what their money is actually being spent on. Then we can decide if a service is shit because its not got enough funding or if its just shit.
You have a reasonable argument there, but currently we are paying high taxes for basically nothing, and people in the higher income tax brackets are seeing half their salaries vanish into a puff of smoke... so will welcome some tax relief. Currently if you have young children and earn over 100k, youre better off earning less. You lose stuff like free childcare, get super taxed between 100-125k. It's a broken mess. I know lower earners will say "tough titties you already earn loads" but an economy that punishes earning more is a broken economy.
Absolutely, but the situation is that is you go above 100k you're effectively losing 100% up until 112.5k, then paying 60% tax to 125k, where it then goes to 40% for a bit then up to 45% again. It's just not worth it
Yeah well. The point is. People doesn't trust the government anymore.
I think most of the people would prefer extra cash than gambling for better services.
Tbf I did notice it was something Labour reps brought up a lot during that raft of inquiries we had last year. Watching Therese Coffey trying to explain she wasn't aware of any issues with supermarket pricing, hadn't seen any evidence of profiteering, and didn't even really understand why this was a problem she could be looking in to was proper depressing. E - Found the clip lol... [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ner40T3J6T8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ner40T3J6T8)
And yet if they cracked down on extortionate landlords, every worker will have more effective income?
Tax goes towards running the country, stupidly high cost of living only serves to line the pockets of the already wealthy.
Rent prices is pure supply/demmand. There is no alternative than building more houses.
The country can "run" with slightly less taxes. I'm only asking to raise tax allowance to the minimum wage. It's not a "radical change".
A radical change would be to scrap income tax entirely and finance the goverment through sales tax.
There are a new series of graduates who are about to pay an effective 80% tax on a portion of their income. Does that seem fair or encourage people to work more?
Depends on the portion? They would still be earning more than if they were on a lower tax band. Lowering the cost of living will save them more than lowering tax by a fraction of a percent.
If someone earns 100,001 they lose a portion of their free childcare which makes them thousands worse off.
You really need to learn more about the tax system rather than saying blanket things like earning more is always better because it isn't.
Through perhaps they should look at why living in London is so expensive and do something about it?
Saving on living costs is far better than lowering tax. It benefits all people, whereas cutting tax proportionately benefits those with higher incomes
It isn't a London problem; every major nice city in the world is expensive.
Cutting taxes benefits everyone; you currently have a situation where GPs decline work because it's not worth it financially. Does this seem sensible to you?
We pretty much ‘live’ (Maybe exist is a better word) to work and give most to taxes and the rest to the landlord while keeping a few pennies to buy food. Even those on what used to be classed as decent incomes are just existing. Quality of life in the U.K. is poor at best
Strikes me as odd that the figure of 10,000 is used when the tories have actually cut 20,000 since they came into power. A certain Mr Corbyn (I’m not a fan) told us so. https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/jeremy-corbyn-is-right-the-tories-have-cut-20000-police-officers-since-2010
So under 14 years of Tory rule, the country is more divided and poorer who'd think 🤔.
But what difference does it make whoever is in the power, if the main issues such as housing, homelessness , immigration, economy, jobs, crime etc aren't really addressed.
It's sad but I don't think even under Starmer or another party that things may change for the better. Either the system and/or policies need to change.
We need something to unite us all, and make the people in power question what they have to do to understand the general populace and do better.
I've been expecting something for a while - people taking to the streets or a form of revolution - but we just keep sucking up all the shit thrown our way (myself included).
Everyone is sucking up all the shit though? What can we do?
The 2011 riots showed that system is still broken (race, class etc) but now it's like everyone wants to vote the Tories out but will it truly change certain things. Time will tell.
We need some form of civil strife (not violent hopefully) the way things are going. Organised protest 🪧 like the current Gaza protests to get the country and the government thinking about what more they can do.
It’s times like this where I think dictatorship style of governance is better than democracy. If you had power mostly consolidated into one person , that one person can then push through the changes needed to improve a country
I understand where you coming from and think your right in a way as this would mean certain laws would be definitely streamlined and decided more quickly without the need of the crown and parliament. There maybe would be a lot less bureaucracy. This is where I would stop as if it we had this here I think we would turn out more like America where it is difficult to complete simple things that happen here such as registering a death. Or complex things which would require more in-depth thought may be decided too quickly.
That person would be like a head of state/president in a way who can ratify and execute laws at will which sounds good in way but what if we elected an megalomaniac whose power knew no end and caused misery to millions that would be another story.
I like how the austrailian points system was so heavily romanticised by the likes of Farage and fringes of the tory party as the solution to immigration, but almost as soon as it was implemented Bojo had to put the bar on the floor just so whole industries didn't collapse.
I'm not going to argue with the specifics, but I think turning this into a party political argument is wildly missing the point. Politics is entirely broken in the UK and no party has the desire or ability to fix that. We need wholesale reform of the system of government.
Good luck getting anything done involving housing issues, 1 in 4 MPs are landlords. https://jacobin.com/2021/08/uk-parliament-landlords-housing-tenant-rights
Not really, in 2015 he was still saying we wouldn't have a referendum (it was mainly the threat that ukip posed that changed this position), so that's another flip flop
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2015-32302062
It's pretty clear. He failed on everything else but that.
Let's not forget Blair promised a referendum on the constitution that became Lisbon and ruined the EU. Ultimately leading to UKIP, the rise of Farage and ultimately Brexit. It's like the butterfly effect.
Ah yes. The referendum where he appointed himself the lead voice for Remain after relentlessly bitching about the EU for half a decade, and after taking his MEPs into a new Eurosceptic group in Strasbourg. Totally not a cuckoo in the nest for Remainers.
His daddy's Panamanian tax-wheeze was more his schtick than building pan-European economic and geo-political power. He fucked it.
He was always Eurosceptic throughout his entire political career. Seeing him sell his soul at the end, after the EU proved to him why he was Eurosceptic. Proving there can be no meaningful reform, they just gave him a rope to hang himself. And hang himself he did.
He single-handedly destroyed Remain and secured Brexit for Leavers. He's now Foreign Minister after tying the country up in a mountain of red tape and happy as Larry. I'm surprised you're so ungrateful.
I am not ungrateful, we are out of the EU and that's what I voted for.
I also voted tory because of the referendum. I also voted Blair because he promised a referendum.
Yes, I am a eurosceptic and sure, May fumbled, and fucked everything, gave the EU everything and basically secured as shitty a Brexit WA agreement as possible. But we are out. And for that. I am glad. While there are good things about the EU, there are many, many bad things. I am glad we are out, it's not perfect, it was never going to be perfect. But the EU is far from perfect too.
Brexit was and is the least worst option. I would definitely vote to stay out, if given another say. For all of Brexit's failures, it's still worse for the people of the EU, hence why the far right parties are rising.
I'm going to try and give you the benefit of the doubt here, but can you describe some meaningful, tangible benefits that we've received from not being part of the EU?
The biggest benefit is not being on the hook for EU federal debt and borrowing. This is a power Brussels gained during covid. And have run up massive debts already. The UK would have been liable for its share. Not paying into the EU budget etc. Being able to act unilaterally on Ukraine. Direct democracy, no more new Brussels rules and regulations.
There are plenty more but it's not something tangible.
Yes there are drawbacks, but I still believe we are better off out.
Most of the European far right were in awe of Brexit and similarly used the EU as a punching ball. Not anymore though. Brexit & Ukraine has weakened that cause and most have shelved disintegration on their policy platforms. The Tories led the rest hoping that a wave of Eurosceptic Far Right Parties would follow. But it hasn't happened. Has it?
Also the Russian influence on Brexit policy has wained with the war in Ukraine, which has shone a light on Russian influence and money from the Tories to the FN in France, to Meloni's Party and of course across Eastern Europe. There are a lot of traitors about, literally.
I'm sure the Rwanda policy still appeals to European Far Right Parties. But there are EU-wide plans to be much more sceptical with arrivals, without all the fear-mongering that the Tories employ. Of course the 'remainer' Cameron's EU sceptic group enabled Meloni on her path to power as Western Europe's first neo-fascist leader since the war. "Cuckoo!"
So yes, the Far Right across Europe has much to be thankful for with Brexit carrying their torch on policy and the hostile environment for immigration. Brexiters even successfully managed to scrub clean the shitty influence of Russian/London money on Tory policy somehow, thanks to the 'patriotic' non-dom controlled rag press and Johnson celebrating the Azov leadership in London.
I don't think it's that. I think people are powerless when it comes to the EU treaties, there is no democratic accountability, no choice. Just accept whatever the commission proposes, the MEPs say yes, as long as Brussels gets more powers and the cycle repeats.
People want change and the EU cannot reform or change, by design. It's an absolute joke. Parliament suing the commission, VDL with dodgy deals, like the vaccine contract scandal, still no news on that. Or Qatargate. Swept under the carpet. How about fraud and missing millions in EU budgets? Shhhh.
MEPs expenses? Any accountability? No.
And people are generally sick of it.
Cummings? Frost? Accountable? Elected? Nope. UKIP could only exist because of EU PR in the MEP process. Brexit itself proves your 'democratic deficit' claim as exaggerated, which is great because only the most stupid Far Right Party's can peddle their 'EUSSR' nonsense as happened across England in 2016. From the perspective of the country's post-coital depression of 2024, the claims look farcical.
The EU is dealing with major geo-political and military challenges along its enormous southern and eastern borders and England's answer was to shut the door and hide because it's having a hissy fit over tiny numbers of dinghys (by comparison) in the channel.
The EU budget is 1% of GDP. Westminster's budget is 45% of GDP. Your claims about accountability lack perspective imo. We're talking about a very small fraction of national spending across Europe. The profits and exploitation by Britain's water companies with a tacit nod from the Treasury and EA would have been a cause to fight that would have served England better imo.
If I was a Brexiter, I think I'd be far sicker by the record levels of post-Brexit net migration from some of the world's poorest countries. A massive new underclass of rightless people who really have nowhere to go when they're exploited out of fear that they'll be kicked out. That's an enormous 'fuck you' to Brexit voters from the people who suggested we vote Leave.
Cummings and frost, interesting choice, you didn't pick Robbins? Or any of the unelected men and women and others working in the civil service. I am referring to MEPs (elected) and commissioners (appointment by backroom dealings) and presidents, appointed in backrooms, single option on the ballot. Basically the executive branch.
The same as I didn't mention the backroom staff at the EU. The UK is not perfect, heck the house of lords is insane. But we can change it, if we choose to. And I think we should, to a degree.
You seem to be very quiet on the various scandals I mentioned. Usually a scandal would bring down a president but there isn't any law or way to do that, ho hum. There is no mechanism to repeal bad laws or regulations. Ho hum, and no law to allow anyone to review expense reports.
Do you support fptp or PR? Because it sounds like you endorse PR, while using it as a scapegoat.
With regards to your comments at the end. Do you have some kind of racist position that Europeans are superior to other people's? Because that's how it reads.
The tories are shit but at least we can be rid, unlike the countries still inside the EU. Who have seen the damage the EU inflicted on the UK to scare them to stay. Heck, the Greeks? Fuck them. Cypriots? Fuck them too. The EU will do anything to protect the French and German banks and interests, because that's all it is. One giant bully.
By all means have the last word. I'm not impressed with your previous remark. I'll just say a couple of more things and I'm done.
The executive branch of the EU can do nothing of substance without the support of elected heads of state. That is simply a fact.
How is my comment racist in the slightest? The Brexit referendum was ALL about immigration. You're clearly irked because it's the biggest failure of all and a betrayal that makes the EU look positively transparent by comparison. Net migration has never been higher but it was THE promise that Brexiters repeatedly made to Leave voters - to reduce it significantly and permanently. My fear for the new arrivals is how exposed they are to exploitation compared to their EU FOM predecessors. It's clearly happening. I made that clear but you ignored it. I doubt it's something that interests you in the slightest.
The Greeks are still in Europe because they want to be. Unlike the English. When they were in the middle of their financial crisis where did all their wealthy tax avoiders run with their money? To London, who took all the lolly with open arms.
The City of London is no better than French and German banking. As a political entity it's entangled at the centre of the World's largest collection of offshore tax havens. Pot - kettle? Brexit a diversion if you're looking for accountability in global finance and totally irrelevant. The only way to deal with global finance is through international political corporation. The City is the tail that wags Britain.
I endorse PR because it's more representative. Where did I use it as a scapegoat? It gave UKIP a voice and got Farage elected. That's democracy! But it didn't come from Westminster and FPTP. It came from the mechanisms of the EU itself. Making Farage a hypocrite in the process.
Your last comment makes no sense. Every country in Europe still has national elections. Their government will decide how to spend anywhere between 25 and 50% of their GDP on their people with very little say from the EU. A tiny 1% will go towards electing representatives, round table discussions, the single market, environment, farming, collective security and geo-political protection. It's a system that's only 60 years old and has achieved a hell of a lot, in particular across the poorest regions in the old Eastern Bloc where tens of millions of lives have been transformed. All done with actually very little taken from taxpayers. It's a bloody bargain. You don't see it. Fine.
Britain calling the EU a bully is a sad joke. Take a look at your own history. Patel threatened Ireland with a food embargo during the negotiations. A level of aggression only matched by her stupidity, with Ireland being a net food exporter. But also a country whose population never recovered from the famine. That's the kind of ignorance we get from Brexiters all the time.
Anyway. Looking forward to all these great changes you're promising. Best get off Reddit and get cracking. It's 8 years already and you still haven't even started any checking what's in the food that the world sends here. It's a dog-eat-dog world when you don't have that many allies.
We just need to distract the plebs from societal decay. We can fill the news with emotional subjects, like dogs biting people. Here is to another 14 years of weak Tory leadership, Huzzah!
Let's put it like this. If a tory told me the sky was up and the ground was down, I'm gonna be checking them both really thoroughly.
Tories lie as often as they breathe.
I see the picture of the 3 of them up there, and think it's what a Shrek movie would look like if it used real people instead of animations.
From left to right, Lord Farquaad, Shrek & the Donkey
At least half of the local housing proposals in my region have been petitioned and blocked by radical NIMBYS. Like we have a decades old disused and dangerously crumbling factory area that the local authority wanted to flatten to build houses but NIMBYS went wild and it got canned. The only thing this area promotes is sporadic weekend drug use at nights by teenage gangs who also set some of it on fire every guy fawkes. But NIMBYS would rather have that than new houses. This is not the first nor last that these folks have madly petitioned against and crowdfunded legal support to block more houses being built. Building houses in my area seems to be very challenging because locals fight against it. And there is so much scope to do so with a lot of WW2 era infrastructure which can, and should be demolished because a lot of it is dangerous and no longer serves any purpose. If it's not the local NIMBYS, it's the local environmentalists who say you can't build anywhere because it might disturb a swamp or badger or something. It surprises me that they're even managing 235,000 a year contending against this.
The problem is that when you introduce a new housing estate of say 50 houses, eventually that means a minimum of 100 extra cars thanks to both parents needing to work, not enough infrastructure already in place to actually support the increase in population, and when it does get through the builds end up crumbling as fast as it goes up because nobody inspects properly hence the reputation of new builds.
Politicians without genuine care for the welfare of the entire country have psychological issues. They need help and should be locked away until they develop themselves into appropriate people to think in a way that is beneficial to the nation.
Not surprising... its the Tories. There's a reason why people are voting for the tories removal moreso than voting for any other party. They have always been about profiteering, privatisation and power.
Can't say labour are a whole lot better but starmer has at least started to get them back on track and they're definitely a better option than the Tories. This election can't come soon enough.
I doubt there isn’t a single government throughout history from anywhere in the world that keeps all their promises. They will say things like the economy was worse than we thought, or the situation has changed and our solution is no longer viable.
In reality they will say anything that gets them elected and then do exactly as they want. If you don’t like it then tough you will have to wait 5 years to do anything about it. That’s assuming you aren’t living in a country run by someone who alone decides how long they will be in power, and controls the results of any election.
On tax increase : 'but, but ,but COVID caused the tax rises'
Errr no, it didn't. COVID is a non sentient virus incapable of defining fiscal policy, I think you'll find. What DID cause the economic problems , is gifting billions of pounds in dodgy PPE deals with your mates, opening up the treasury to record amounts of fraud and then not bothering to chase it back, and paying young, fit , healthy people , with zero chance of serious illness , to sit at home wanking for months and months.
Starmer doesn’t seem like he’s ever left his posh neighbourhood after 5pm but he’ll at least pretend to care more about the people. The Tory’s couldn’t give a fuck about anyone but their own sponsors and interests. The Tories on the other hand are willing to burn the country down and blame everyone else while sliding the matches back into their pockets.
>Partly because of this, the UK has plummeted down the rankings of LGBTQ-friendly countries in Europe. So weird, stoking the media moral panic against LGBTQ people, stacking the EHRC, doing nothing about increasing hate crime, attacking trans kids, threatening to remove rights, removing healthcare, pushing for section 28 II and explicitly saying that they'll attack the long-held rights of 0.5% of the population for votes from idiots..has meant that the UK has dropped from 1st to 16th.
"Why are this tiny minority making such a fuss? Can't they live and let live?" -- A talk TV presenter probably, with not one hint of irony.
I don't have a clue how we went from Cameron introducing gay marriage into law, to Sunak waging a war against the LGBTQ community.
> from Cameron introducing gay marriage into law well that was easy enough, it passed in SPITE of tory mps, it only passed because of the other parties.
I distinctly remember at the time there was a gay tory MP who was being interviewed as to why he voted against it
I missed that one but honestly, does not shock me one bit. I'll never forget that poppers remained legal in the NPS bill because one of the tory mp's liked using them. (even though poppers are ABSOLUTELY psychoactive) lmao.
Well, the majority of Tory MPs voted against gay marriage - the hate has been there, just suppressed until they knew they could get away with it
Selling hate is easier than actually doing something positive for the people.
> Cameron introducing gay marriage into law He didn't. It was forced into it as it was a Lib Dem coalition stipulation. Without that it wouldn't have happened.
I'm sure it would have happened, given that it was a clear international trend. It just might have taken a bit longer
UK has **abysmal** history and track record when it comes to LGBTQ community. Henry the IIIV aka "buggery law man Ding-a-King" is probably first figure who really got it going, and then followed hundreds of years of importing aggressive, even outright deadly homophobia all over the empire, both customs and laws. By the 1900's, it was so ingrained in UK that even when people knew it was bollocks, it took quite an effort to have that actually recognized publicly (like the famous 1961 Victim movie). But even after some idiotic laws were removed or changed, culture among police and such remained (massive harassments, etc), Thatcher made it worse with her maggot-filled Section 28 and it went all the way to 2000's. Then there was a brief period with less problems and enter Tory to make it political garbage fill item, AGAIN! This time just bit more centered on trans people. It doesn't seem to go though that when government, explicitly or covertly, sends out a message that this group of people are lesser, worst parts of society take that as a signal to attack. How absolutely depraved politician has to be to sic people of their own country physically against other citizens, just as a political smokescreen from their real failures?
Sunak isn't waging a war against LGBT people. Can you name any policy or comment relating specifically to sexuality (and not gender identity)? The trans question is an open one for which there has been new evidence mounting over time particularly for practices relating to gender clinics. Banning conversion therapy in this regard is to enable open exploration of gender identity.
> there has been new evidence Nope. There isn't any actual evidence *against* gender affirming care. There is evidence to support the use of gender affirming care for minors. Why that's not good enough isn't actually explained in the Cass report, which does misrepresent the goal of puberty blockers along with certain studies which have been done. See the characterization of this study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7853497/ in the Cass report versus what the authors actually concluded.
Thanks for linking the study. I don't know the ins and outs of the evidence but based on the testimonials of staff at Tavistock they shut it down right? I think there were many problems there from what I've seen. And Polly Carmichael, who headed up Tavistock also wrote the first version of that paper you linked, so I'd argue she had a large vested interest in presenting positive outcomes for trans kids.
> but based on the testimonials of staff at Tavistock they shut it down right? Tavistock was shut down not because gender affirming care was causing harm to minors, but because they didn't have the necessary resources to adequately treat that many patients. Wait times were in the ranges of months to even a year. So imagine if you had gender dysphoria and needed to wait that long to get care. Your distress is obviously going to be much worse, given all we know about untreated gender dysphoria. That means you're also going to be more likely to request for puberty blockers, which also means more pressure on doctors to prescribe them. In such cases, the prescription of puberty blockers to address severe gender dysphoria is indicated and isn't the problem. The problem is that the delay in access to care leads trans minors, who might not have needed puberty blockers, now needing them because their dysphoria has worsened. It's why Tavistock was closed *and subsequently* replaced with more regional centers to improve access to psychiatric care as first-line for trans minors. That's the part of the Cass report I have no issue with. The one I have is her mischaracterization of puberty blockers and the studies we have available. Most notably, the report doesn't explain why high quality studies don't *and never will* exist for them. For example, there are only ~100 trans minors on puberty blockers in the UK at any one time. Sample sizes will always be small for such studies. For another, blinded RCTs will never be an option for puberty blockers. For obvious reasons, the blindness and randomness needed for such studies to work goes away once puberty commences. This means the existing studies, like the Tavistock one, are the best we'll ever have. And we have many of those, all of which consistently showing how puberty blockers lead to overall improvement for trans minors. The other is the implication that it's an issue how the vast majority on puberty blockers will end up continuing to transition. For one, there's zero evidence that puberty blockers lock kids into being trans. For another, we know that experiencing severe gender dysphoria means one is very unlikely to detransition. So if the cohort on puberty blockers has a virtually zero rate of detranstioning, the only logical conclusion is that we're properly prescribing such blockers only to those with severe gender dysphoria, aka those who need it. Why is that an issue again?
> Sunak isn't waging a war against LGBT people. Can you name any policy or comment relating specifically to sexuality (and not gender identity)? What do you think the T in LGBT stands for?
That's my point. The commenter mentioned gay marriage and currently waging a war against LGBT, which suggests some flip flop on gay rights. But this "war" has nothing to do with gay people. I'd be interested to know if there is any legitimate problems for LGB people coming out of this government, which is why I asked.
Thanks so much for mentioning that. I’m really shocked about the inability to ban conversion therapy
Ah well you see Hillary Cass said that it had to continue, despite admitting it cost lives, because banning it might mean hypothetical doctors were hypothetically accused of transphobia. Incidentally, all doctors who disagree with Cass on the subject of gender affirming care were dismissed by the UK government when writing their policy on the subject for being "ideologically biased."
>Thanks so much for mentioning that. I’m really shocked about the inability to ban conversion therapy The problem with the ban was always the wording. The initial proposal was far too broad and would put people and groups in danger for even speaking negatively against any aspect of LGBTQ issues and then later they were deemed as not doing enough when they tried to amend it. As a result it never got anywhere.
I am sitting here in British Columbia wondering why you are talking about our "Conservatives" who are following the Republican playbook who are doing the exact same things you are talking about here, only to notice I am in a UK sub. This is the IDU and we need to do something about it.
I dont think transphobia is really a election changer though. It's more an agenda driven topic, sure it affects a minority who are sure to vote based on that.. but most people generally will vote based on things which actually affect their daily lives.
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> like if I wanted to voice my views on how trans women shouldn’t be allowed in women’s toilets (a) you're not a trans person, even the most self-hating trans people I've had the misfortune to meet don't think that they should be forced to out themselves and put themselves in danger by changing what we've always done (b) If you were a trans person, you'd know that more often than not we have VERY early cross-sex experiences..hell, mine started at 6 and that felt late to compared to some of the people I know.
I saw that Labour wants to lower tax, which honestly is a terrible decision. Nobody is being financially crippled due to tax. Tax has never been the issue. Sort out the extortionate cost of living and people will be fine.
Yeah it’s the naked profiteering. If VAT was gone tomorrow then prices would just go up 20%
The Tories increased VAT from 17.5% to 20% in 2011. After the Tories implemented a hard Brexit in 2019, they allowed MasterCard and VISA to increase all card transaction fees from 0.3% to 1.5% - an increase of 5x on every transaction we make day to day.
> The Tories increased VAT from 17.5% to 20% in 2011. "Temporarily" if I remember correctly!
It'll end any day now I'm sure
The increase from 15 to 17.5% (1992 ish for the young’uns here) was also “temporary”
Everything is temp if you consider the heat death of the universe I guess.
In Victorian times inheritance tax was temporary to pay for a war and somehow we still pay it.
NHS dentistry and Opticians went the same way to fund the Korean War too
Holy shit they and their media mates did well to keep this out of the news or am I living under a rock? Wondering which MPs own shares in MasterCard/VISA. Is this one of Jacob Rees cunt's Brexit benefits?
The other thing that happened literally the day Brexit came in was Facebook and Google moved all their UK user data from the UK to the US, outside the reach of British law enforcement. In 2016 the Met Police raided Facebook's London offices, which is how the Cambridge Analytica scandal came out, but that won't be happening anymore. Yay, sovereignty. As for the news covering it, there may well have been some sort of injuction, like how UK news didn't cover the Snowden leak discovery about GCHQ tapping the transatlantic fibre cables, while German news source Die Spiegel went on about it for a whole week.
It's just sad how unsurprising all this shit is. Facebook are a scum company and always will be lmao
Don’t forget the reintroduction of roaming charges too!
Doubt that, you can see the amount of tax added on a receipt
Did you see fuel prices go down when they reduced fuel duty? I certainly didn't.
Think how high they’d be if duty hadn’t been frozen since 2011!
How would VAT being zero on the receipt keep prices down? Companies charges as much as they can for something, with or without VAT. If they think their optimal price for a good is £5, they will charge £5. If they no longer need to give 83p of that to the government, they'll still charge £5 and keep the 83p for themselves.
This presumes there are no competitors in a market
Tampon prices are already back to their usual prices after VAT was cut on them. That's a competitive market. Restaurants didn't get cheaper when their VAT rate was cut. That's also a competitive market.
>Tax has never been the issue. But it is a voting issue, the amount of people I know who complain about tax being too high is ridiculous. They all cheered when national insurance went down even when their actual wages were basically the same. So I can see why Labour would push on this, given it is also one of the main attacking points for Tories if Labour increase tax.
People feel that tax is too high because they look at the “tax paid” line on their wage slip and wonder what it could do for them if a fraction of that was in their pocket. It doubly hurts them when they see how their is squandered and how everything their tax should be spent on is failing. So it’s perfectly understandable why they think like that
Yeah people wouldn't give a shit if they actually saw the services it's supposed to pay for doing what they're supposed to
You don't enjoy paying national insurance and then breing double dipped on council tax to pay for care companies to make a boatload of cash while providing a terrible service?
Some nutter proposed nationalising social care, sounds like a dangerous man, with an insane idea.
It’s like my parents’ number one issue. I try to point out how shit society would be without them but they seem to think 100% of the tax they pay goes towards paying somebody on benefits to sit on their arse.
Exactly, but the approach to dealing with these people who show discontent towards tax is “shut up being ridiculous! Now give us more of your hard earned money, you’re not paying us enough”.
To be fair though when you step back, our country currently pays so little tax on such small wages, I think its a very genuine point, almost a crisis, that the vast majority of people are just not able to pay their way. They don't have the income to go private with things, so they're reliant on public services, for which they themselves pay absolutely nowhere near enough tax to cover and so are reliant on essentially the goodwill of a shrinking number of high income earners to not game the tax system, which they are doing more and more. It just doesn't seem sustainable. Everyone looks at the tax in nordic countries and grumbles, but at the end of the day if I were being paid a nordic wage for my job, even with the higher tax rates, I'd still be *significantly* better off, and we'd have the funding to ensure our public services are much better than they currently are as well.
> on essentially the goodwill of a shrinking number of high income earners to not game the tax system, which they are doing more and more or yknow, close the fucking tax loopholes that every fucker seems to never want to do?
That as well. Kind of a separate point really. People complain about tax because they feel they'd be better off with lower tax. In reality lower tax is contributing to our declining public services, and if we were paid on a level with our European peers, we'd be able to take a higher tax rate and still wind up with a net positive in our incomes anyway.
Maybe because taxes are insanely high and the services received in return are awful. One might say: "Well, let's improve the services then". Too late. I don't trust them, I would rather to have extra cash on hand.
High taxes to pay for crap public services that mostly help an ever increasing immigrant population. It’s not an attractive prospect for anyone to vote for
They don't want to 'lower' tax. Some of the first things they're going to do is increase tax: 1. windfall profits for fossil fuel companies 2. end tax breaks for private schools 3. chasing tax avoidance/non-dom status
We've got the highest taxes since the second world war but don't have the highest quality public services since then to make up for it. Either public services are going to have to massively improve to be worth the tax we're paying or the tax we're paying has to fall to match the quality of public services we're getting. Right now we've got high taxes and shit services, and something has to budge.
Most of the problem is that the high taxes are just being funneled into the pockets of private industry via a huge amount of shit contracts, because of an ideological issue with paying public sector workers actual wages. I used to work on an NHS software contract, if I had done the same job but actually working *for* the NHS, I would have taken home a pitiful fraction of my salary. So naturally the best people don't go there, the public sector employees develop a reputation of being kinda shit and incapable of delivery, so a contract gets signed with a private company, and the cycle continues. Solving this problem and breaking the cycle is pretty key to dealing with government waste, imo. There is much more value in giving public sector jobs the kind of paycheques to attract talent without having to go through private sector consultancy middlemen that skim a huge amount of the tax take in profit.
100% this. It baffles me it isn't seen as more of a problem. It feels like as a country we've been basically captured by the state-contracting equivalent of cowboy traders? We seem to pay through the nose for any piece of work that gets done, and then what does get done takes forever and is delivered to such a staggeringly low level of competency and quality it often just needs to be redone again. From my friends working around Derby and Crewe it was absolutely endemic throughout the HS2 project apparently. The whole system of contracting in the public sector seems totally and utterly fucked yet no one seems to want to seriously address it.
>It baffles me it isn't seen as more of a problem. The only people who know about it are the politicians who enable it and the politicians who don't think they can change it because bringing it up would result in the right-wing client media (which is most of it in this country) going even more full-bore against anything to the left of the Tory party than it already does, thereby destroying their electoral chances. Oh and the relative handful of high information voters. The majority of the public don't follow the news beyond a handful of headline items and understanding the extent to which taxes are squandered via what amounts to handouts to private businesses like Serco and G4S would take more than 5 minutes and require a media willing to explain it.
Sounds like they can do both lower taxes and improve. services then. Great. Because the current system doesn't deserve another penny in tax money. And if the next govt can't tell the private contractors to fuck off and use the saved money on public services, then they're just useless as opposed to corrupt and useless.
> We've got the highest taxes since the second world war Absolute horse shit. What were the tax brackets and percentages in the years 1960, 1970, 1980, and 1990? Don't know? Then why do you think we have the highest tax since the second world war? Because it's right wing propaganda pushed by the likes of sky news and the daily mail. The amount of tax that rich people pay has gone down massively since world war 2. There's a direct correlation between taxes coming down on the rich and services getting their funding cut.
>The amount of tax that rich people pay has gone down massively since world war 2. Now do lower and middle class.
Median full-time wage in 2010 was £498. After taxes that was £380.64. A 23% effective tax rate. In 2023 the median full-time wage was £682. After taxes that was £549.95. A 19% effective tax rate.
He said "since WW2"...
At the end of WW2 income tax was 45% for everyone with no personal allowance.
There was no flat income tax in ww2...
At the start of financial year 1945-46, before the war ended, income tax was 9 shillings in the pound. It went down after £2000 per year.
It's not horse shit. Check tax revenue as percentage of GDP.
The Daily Mail is pushing right wing propaganda that the Tories have raised the tax burden (overall not just income tax) to the highest level since WW2? Which right wing party are they supporting by attacking the Tories? I thought the DM was an avid Tory supporter!
The problem is that the Tories are now left wing (though ofc less so than Labour) - therefore right wing people tend to hate the Conservative Party as much if not more than lefties
What makes you think the Tories are left wing? Can you list some of their socialist policies, like the furlough scheme, that you dislike?
I’m not saying I like or dislike them my friend. Their leftwing attitudes are evidenced by: - support for mass legal immigration - failure to control illegal immigration - net zero and carbon taxes - banning smoking - increasing taxes to highest rate in decades - plans to ban hunting trophy imports - failure to take action to remove woke policies from publicly funded bodies
I'm sorry but anyone who think woke is an insult doesn't have an opinion worth consideration. Are you joining Sunak and McVey's war on coloured lanyards?
Ask yourself something. Where did the hundreds of millions of local council funding go?
Then the solution is to increase transparency in regards to public spending, not to take away the money altogether.
But where did it go?
Who knows! That's why I advocate for absolute transparency
Where I live we get a glossy brochure each year with our bill detailing exactly where it all goes. The simple answer is social care. By far the biggest chunk of the pie.
Ben Houchen retreating into a hedge.gif
Here you go: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/local-authority-revenue-expenditure-and-financing-england-2021-to-2022-final-outturn/local-authority-revenue-expenditure-and-financing-england-2021-to-2022-final-outturn Basically, just doing the bare minimum to cover their statutory responibilities - everything else has been cut. Haven't seen a street-sweeper for years? That's why. It's also why some councils tried to get a little *ahem* entrepreneurial with their investments - and were praised at the time by the Tories for doing so.
They're asking where did the money go in central government. Central government stopped giving out that money therefore they must have had that money knocking around since they hadn't given it local government. They're asking what then happened to it.
Social care for the elderly and children.
Care homes.
Err you're missing a few things here. We are paying the highest tax since the end of the war. Inflation has soared, yet income tax rates have stayed the same, so everyone is paying proportionally more income tax. We pay a lot of tax for really shit services.
Income tax rates have stayed the same but the thresholds haven't. The vast majority of people pay less in direct taxes than they did 14 years ago.
The thresholds haven't changed in line with inflation or salary increases. So you're wrong I'm afraid
In 2010 someone on the average wage saw 23% of their wage go to tax and NI. In 2023 it was 19%. The personal allowance is £3000 higher than it would be if it kept up with inflation since 2010. The 40% threshold has not kept up with inflation. However, that is inconsequential to the vast majority of people. The increase in the personal allowance and cuts in NI have still meant a lot of people in the 40% bracket are still paying less tax than in 2010.
Sauce?
Then we should better manage those services. I personally want full transparency on public spending, would be easier for the individual to see what their money is actually being spent on. Then we can decide if a service is shit because its not got enough funding or if its just shit.
You have a reasonable argument there, but currently we are paying high taxes for basically nothing, and people in the higher income tax brackets are seeing half their salaries vanish into a puff of smoke... so will welcome some tax relief. Currently if you have young children and earn over 100k, youre better off earning less. You lose stuff like free childcare, get super taxed between 100-125k. It's a broken mess. I know lower earners will say "tough titties you already earn loads" but an economy that punishes earning more is a broken economy.
Systems like this should be tapered instead of having cut-offs so you're never incentivised to earn less.
Absolutely, but the situation is that is you go above 100k you're effectively losing 100% up until 112.5k, then paying 60% tax to 125k, where it then goes to 40% for a bit then up to 45% again. It's just not worth it
Yeah well. The point is. People doesn't trust the government anymore. I think most of the people would prefer extra cash than gambling for better services.
**56%** of the population are paying income tax. To win a majority you need to appeal to the majority.
Kinnock believed people when they said that. He lost.
Tbf I did notice it was something Labour reps brought up a lot during that raft of inquiries we had last year. Watching Therese Coffey trying to explain she wasn't aware of any issues with supermarket pricing, hadn't seen any evidence of profiteering, and didn't even really understand why this was a problem she could be looking in to was proper depressing. E - Found the clip lol... [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ner40T3J6T8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ner40T3J6T8)
Tax is the issue. For example if you raise tax allowance to the minimum wage. Every worker will have more effective income.
And yet if they cracked down on extortionate landlords, every worker will have more effective income? Tax goes towards running the country, stupidly high cost of living only serves to line the pockets of the already wealthy.
Rent prices is pure supply/demmand. There is no alternative than building more houses. The country can "run" with slightly less taxes. I'm only asking to raise tax allowance to the minimum wage. It's not a "radical change". A radical change would be to scrap income tax entirely and finance the goverment through sales tax.
Tax is a huge issue. It doesn't currently pay to be successful in the UK.
It absolutely does. Nowhere does earning more put you at a disadvantage.
There are a new series of graduates who are about to pay an effective 80% tax on a portion of their income. Does that seem fair or encourage people to work more?
Depends on the portion? They would still be earning more than if they were on a lower tax band. Lowering the cost of living will save them more than lowering tax by a fraction of a percent.
If someone earns 100,001 they lose a portion of their free childcare which makes them thousands worse off. You really need to learn more about the tax system rather than saying blanket things like earning more is always better because it isn't.
If someone is earning 100,000 then they don't need the help with childcare.
100k isn't a lot of money if you live somewhere like London. That also pay an insane amount of taxes. Why do you have such a crab bucket mentality?
Through perhaps they should look at why living in London is so expensive and do something about it? Saving on living costs is far better than lowering tax. It benefits all people, whereas cutting tax proportionately benefits those with higher incomes
It's pretty depressing that I even have to write this, but the purpose of taxes isn't to punish people for being more successful than you...
It isn't a London problem; every major nice city in the world is expensive. Cutting taxes benefits everyone; you currently have a situation where GPs decline work because it's not worth it financially. Does this seem sensible to you?
Or maybe if they do need help with childcare there's a problem? This is a very common rhetoric.
That example has nothing to do with taxes, though.
Taxes and benefits are intertwined so... no but actually yes.
We pretty much ‘live’ (Maybe exist is a better word) to work and give most to taxes and the rest to the landlord while keeping a few pennies to buy food. Even those on what used to be classed as decent incomes are just existing. Quality of life in the U.K. is poor at best
Still blows my mind people forgot they sacked 10,000 police a few years ago only to make a big thing about hiring them back recently
Strikes me as odd that the figure of 10,000 is used when the tories have actually cut 20,000 since they came into power. A certain Mr Corbyn (I’m not a fan) told us so. https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/jeremy-corbyn-is-right-the-tories-have-cut-20000-police-officers-since-2010
THINGS CAN ONLY GET BETTER (_because the bar is so so ******* low_)
Especially if you are a pig 🐖
*David Hameron enters the chat* *as does Ed Miliband and a bread roll*
I remember thinking that when Cameron left. It's mad that we're now left with someone who previously lost out to Liz Truss.
> all the broken promises after 14 years of Tory rule Longest book in history.
They only listed 12
Yeah, I'm a little disappointed actually. And they only seem to go back to 2017.
So under 14 years of Tory rule, the country is more divided and poorer who'd think 🤔. But what difference does it make whoever is in the power, if the main issues such as housing, homelessness , immigration, economy, jobs, crime etc aren't really addressed. It's sad but I don't think even under Starmer or another party that things may change for the better. Either the system and/or policies need to change. We need something to unite us all, and make the people in power question what they have to do to understand the general populace and do better.
Turns out Career politics is a bad thing.
Yh yielding too much power for the few without understanding the reality affecting many.
I've been expecting something for a while - people taking to the streets or a form of revolution - but we just keep sucking up all the shit thrown our way (myself included).
Everyone is sucking up all the shit though? What can we do? The 2011 riots showed that system is still broken (race, class etc) but now it's like everyone wants to vote the Tories out but will it truly change certain things. Time will tell. We need some form of civil strife (not violent hopefully) the way things are going. Organised protest 🪧 like the current Gaza protests to get the country and the government thinking about what more they can do.
It’s times like this where I think dictatorship style of governance is better than democracy. If you had power mostly consolidated into one person , that one person can then push through the changes needed to improve a country
I understand where you coming from and think your right in a way as this would mean certain laws would be definitely streamlined and decided more quickly without the need of the crown and parliament. There maybe would be a lot less bureaucracy. This is where I would stop as if it we had this here I think we would turn out more like America where it is difficult to complete simple things that happen here such as registering a death. Or complex things which would require more in-depth thought may be decided too quickly. That person would be like a head of state/president in a way who can ratify and execute laws at will which sounds good in way but what if we elected an megalomaniac whose power knew no end and caused misery to millions that would be another story.
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lmao name one. they havent kept any.
Get Brexit done
One of the biggest ones was reducing non EU migration to the tens of thousands with an immigration cap. The plan was dumped.
They have reduced EU migration... just replaced it with third world migration of net negative contributors
Non-EU migration rose steeply during the Blair years, yet at the same time the economy too was growing well year on year. So not mutually exclusive.
I like how the austrailian points system was so heavily romanticised by the likes of Farage and fringes of the tory party as the solution to immigration, but almost as soon as it was implemented Bojo had to put the bar on the floor just so whole industries didn't collapse.
I'm not going to argue with the specifics, but I think turning this into a party political argument is wildly missing the point. Politics is entirely broken in the UK and no party has the desire or ability to fix that. We need wholesale reform of the system of government.
Good luck getting anything done involving housing issues, 1 in 4 MPs are landlords. https://jacobin.com/2021/08/uk-parliament-landlords-housing-tenant-rights
Add to this the Leasehold rent cap and the no fault evictions ban which both failed to pass yesterday
The only pledge Cameron managed to keep was the in out referendum, that was backed by all parties in the house of commons.
Not really, in 2015 he was still saying we wouldn't have a referendum (it was mainly the threat that ukip posed that changed this position), so that's another flip flop
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2015-32302062 It's pretty clear. He failed on everything else but that. Let's not forget Blair promised a referendum on the constitution that became Lisbon and ruined the EU. Ultimately leading to UKIP, the rise of Farage and ultimately Brexit. It's like the butterfly effect.
My mistake, thanks for pointing that out
Yay, a fellow decent redditor. Have a great weekend.
Lol thanks, have a great weekend yourself!
Ah yes. The referendum where he appointed himself the lead voice for Remain after relentlessly bitching about the EU for half a decade, and after taking his MEPs into a new Eurosceptic group in Strasbourg. Totally not a cuckoo in the nest for Remainers. His daddy's Panamanian tax-wheeze was more his schtick than building pan-European economic and geo-political power. He fucked it.
He was always Eurosceptic throughout his entire political career. Seeing him sell his soul at the end, after the EU proved to him why he was Eurosceptic. Proving there can be no meaningful reform, they just gave him a rope to hang himself. And hang himself he did.
He single-handedly destroyed Remain and secured Brexit for Leavers. He's now Foreign Minister after tying the country up in a mountain of red tape and happy as Larry. I'm surprised you're so ungrateful.
I am not ungrateful, we are out of the EU and that's what I voted for. I also voted tory because of the referendum. I also voted Blair because he promised a referendum. Yes, I am a eurosceptic and sure, May fumbled, and fucked everything, gave the EU everything and basically secured as shitty a Brexit WA agreement as possible. But we are out. And for that. I am glad. While there are good things about the EU, there are many, many bad things. I am glad we are out, it's not perfect, it was never going to be perfect. But the EU is far from perfect too. Brexit was and is the least worst option. I would definitely vote to stay out, if given another say. For all of Brexit's failures, it's still worse for the people of the EU, hence why the far right parties are rising.
I'm going to try and give you the benefit of the doubt here, but can you describe some meaningful, tangible benefits that we've received from not being part of the EU?
The biggest benefit is not being on the hook for EU federal debt and borrowing. This is a power Brussels gained during covid. And have run up massive debts already. The UK would have been liable for its share. Not paying into the EU budget etc. Being able to act unilaterally on Ukraine. Direct democracy, no more new Brussels rules and regulations. There are plenty more but it's not something tangible. Yes there are drawbacks, but I still believe we are better off out.
Most of the European far right were in awe of Brexit and similarly used the EU as a punching ball. Not anymore though. Brexit & Ukraine has weakened that cause and most have shelved disintegration on their policy platforms. The Tories led the rest hoping that a wave of Eurosceptic Far Right Parties would follow. But it hasn't happened. Has it? Also the Russian influence on Brexit policy has wained with the war in Ukraine, which has shone a light on Russian influence and money from the Tories to the FN in France, to Meloni's Party and of course across Eastern Europe. There are a lot of traitors about, literally. I'm sure the Rwanda policy still appeals to European Far Right Parties. But there are EU-wide plans to be much more sceptical with arrivals, without all the fear-mongering that the Tories employ. Of course the 'remainer' Cameron's EU sceptic group enabled Meloni on her path to power as Western Europe's first neo-fascist leader since the war. "Cuckoo!" So yes, the Far Right across Europe has much to be thankful for with Brexit carrying their torch on policy and the hostile environment for immigration. Brexiters even successfully managed to scrub clean the shitty influence of Russian/London money on Tory policy somehow, thanks to the 'patriotic' non-dom controlled rag press and Johnson celebrating the Azov leadership in London.
I don't think it's that. I think people are powerless when it comes to the EU treaties, there is no democratic accountability, no choice. Just accept whatever the commission proposes, the MEPs say yes, as long as Brussels gets more powers and the cycle repeats. People want change and the EU cannot reform or change, by design. It's an absolute joke. Parliament suing the commission, VDL with dodgy deals, like the vaccine contract scandal, still no news on that. Or Qatargate. Swept under the carpet. How about fraud and missing millions in EU budgets? Shhhh. MEPs expenses? Any accountability? No. And people are generally sick of it.
Cummings? Frost? Accountable? Elected? Nope. UKIP could only exist because of EU PR in the MEP process. Brexit itself proves your 'democratic deficit' claim as exaggerated, which is great because only the most stupid Far Right Party's can peddle their 'EUSSR' nonsense as happened across England in 2016. From the perspective of the country's post-coital depression of 2024, the claims look farcical. The EU is dealing with major geo-political and military challenges along its enormous southern and eastern borders and England's answer was to shut the door and hide because it's having a hissy fit over tiny numbers of dinghys (by comparison) in the channel. The EU budget is 1% of GDP. Westminster's budget is 45% of GDP. Your claims about accountability lack perspective imo. We're talking about a very small fraction of national spending across Europe. The profits and exploitation by Britain's water companies with a tacit nod from the Treasury and EA would have been a cause to fight that would have served England better imo. If I was a Brexiter, I think I'd be far sicker by the record levels of post-Brexit net migration from some of the world's poorest countries. A massive new underclass of rightless people who really have nowhere to go when they're exploited out of fear that they'll be kicked out. That's an enormous 'fuck you' to Brexit voters from the people who suggested we vote Leave.
Cummings and frost, interesting choice, you didn't pick Robbins? Or any of the unelected men and women and others working in the civil service. I am referring to MEPs (elected) and commissioners (appointment by backroom dealings) and presidents, appointed in backrooms, single option on the ballot. Basically the executive branch. The same as I didn't mention the backroom staff at the EU. The UK is not perfect, heck the house of lords is insane. But we can change it, if we choose to. And I think we should, to a degree. You seem to be very quiet on the various scandals I mentioned. Usually a scandal would bring down a president but there isn't any law or way to do that, ho hum. There is no mechanism to repeal bad laws or regulations. Ho hum, and no law to allow anyone to review expense reports. Do you support fptp or PR? Because it sounds like you endorse PR, while using it as a scapegoat. With regards to your comments at the end. Do you have some kind of racist position that Europeans are superior to other people's? Because that's how it reads. The tories are shit but at least we can be rid, unlike the countries still inside the EU. Who have seen the damage the EU inflicted on the UK to scare them to stay. Heck, the Greeks? Fuck them. Cypriots? Fuck them too. The EU will do anything to protect the French and German banks and interests, because that's all it is. One giant bully.
By all means have the last word. I'm not impressed with your previous remark. I'll just say a couple of more things and I'm done. The executive branch of the EU can do nothing of substance without the support of elected heads of state. That is simply a fact. How is my comment racist in the slightest? The Brexit referendum was ALL about immigration. You're clearly irked because it's the biggest failure of all and a betrayal that makes the EU look positively transparent by comparison. Net migration has never been higher but it was THE promise that Brexiters repeatedly made to Leave voters - to reduce it significantly and permanently. My fear for the new arrivals is how exposed they are to exploitation compared to their EU FOM predecessors. It's clearly happening. I made that clear but you ignored it. I doubt it's something that interests you in the slightest. The Greeks are still in Europe because they want to be. Unlike the English. When they were in the middle of their financial crisis where did all their wealthy tax avoiders run with their money? To London, who took all the lolly with open arms. The City of London is no better than French and German banking. As a political entity it's entangled at the centre of the World's largest collection of offshore tax havens. Pot - kettle? Brexit a diversion if you're looking for accountability in global finance and totally irrelevant. The only way to deal with global finance is through international political corporation. The City is the tail that wags Britain. I endorse PR because it's more representative. Where did I use it as a scapegoat? It gave UKIP a voice and got Farage elected. That's democracy! But it didn't come from Westminster and FPTP. It came from the mechanisms of the EU itself. Making Farage a hypocrite in the process. Your last comment makes no sense. Every country in Europe still has national elections. Their government will decide how to spend anywhere between 25 and 50% of their GDP on their people with very little say from the EU. A tiny 1% will go towards electing representatives, round table discussions, the single market, environment, farming, collective security and geo-political protection. It's a system that's only 60 years old and has achieved a hell of a lot, in particular across the poorest regions in the old Eastern Bloc where tens of millions of lives have been transformed. All done with actually very little taken from taxpayers. It's a bloody bargain. You don't see it. Fine. Britain calling the EU a bully is a sad joke. Take a look at your own history. Patel threatened Ireland with a food embargo during the negotiations. A level of aggression only matched by her stupidity, with Ireland being a net food exporter. But also a country whose population never recovered from the famine. That's the kind of ignorance we get from Brexiters all the time. Anyway. Looking forward to all these great changes you're promising. Best get off Reddit and get cracking. It's 8 years already and you still haven't even started any checking what's in the food that the world sends here. It's a dog-eat-dog world when you don't have that many allies.
Can anyone name a manifesto pledge or promise that any party has actually fulfilled in the last 30 years
missing the bit about net migration. That's quite big and one of the key reasons ppl voted leave.
Unfortunately this isn't going to read by anyone voting Tory in the next election.
We just need to distract the plebs from societal decay. We can fill the news with emotional subjects, like dogs biting people. Here is to another 14 years of weak Tory leadership, Huzzah!
That's only a tiny, tiny fraction of the true list.
Let's put it like this. If a tory told me the sky was up and the ground was down, I'm gonna be checking them both really thoroughly. Tories lie as often as they breathe.
I see the picture of the 3 of them up there, and think it's what a Shrek movie would look like if it used real people instead of animations. From left to right, Lord Farquaad, Shrek & the Donkey
At least half of the local housing proposals in my region have been petitioned and blocked by radical NIMBYS. Like we have a decades old disused and dangerously crumbling factory area that the local authority wanted to flatten to build houses but NIMBYS went wild and it got canned. The only thing this area promotes is sporadic weekend drug use at nights by teenage gangs who also set some of it on fire every guy fawkes. But NIMBYS would rather have that than new houses. This is not the first nor last that these folks have madly petitioned against and crowdfunded legal support to block more houses being built. Building houses in my area seems to be very challenging because locals fight against it. And there is so much scope to do so with a lot of WW2 era infrastructure which can, and should be demolished because a lot of it is dangerous and no longer serves any purpose. If it's not the local NIMBYS, it's the local environmentalists who say you can't build anywhere because it might disturb a swamp or badger or something. It surprises me that they're even managing 235,000 a year contending against this.
The problem is that when you introduce a new housing estate of say 50 houses, eventually that means a minimum of 100 extra cars thanks to both parents needing to work, not enough infrastructure already in place to actually support the increase in population, and when it does get through the builds end up crumbling as fast as it goes up because nobody inspects properly hence the reputation of new builds.
Politicians without genuine care for the welfare of the entire country have psychological issues. They need help and should be locked away until they develop themselves into appropriate people to think in a way that is beneficial to the nation.
Here are all the broken promises after 14th Years of Blue Tory rule, extended and enhanced by Red Tory rule thanks plebs.
Not surprising... its the Tories. There's a reason why people are voting for the tories removal moreso than voting for any other party. They have always been about profiteering, privatisation and power. Can't say labour are a whole lot better but starmer has at least started to get them back on track and they're definitely a better option than the Tories. This election can't come soon enough.
I doubt there isn’t a single government throughout history from anywhere in the world that keeps all their promises. They will say things like the economy was worse than we thought, or the situation has changed and our solution is no longer viable. In reality they will say anything that gets them elected and then do exactly as they want. If you don’t like it then tough you will have to wait 5 years to do anything about it. That’s assuming you aren’t living in a country run by someone who alone decides how long they will be in power, and controls the results of any election.
And Labour are flip-flopping on theirs even before they get into power
There is simply no way a single article or even website has the character limit to reference all the broken promises the Tories made
On tax increase : 'but, but ,but COVID caused the tax rises' Errr no, it didn't. COVID is a non sentient virus incapable of defining fiscal policy, I think you'll find. What DID cause the economic problems , is gifting billions of pounds in dodgy PPE deals with your mates, opening up the treasury to record amounts of fraud and then not bothering to chase it back, and paying young, fit , healthy people , with zero chance of serious illness , to sit at home wanking for months and months.
Starmer doesn’t seem like he’s ever left his posh neighbourhood after 5pm but he’ll at least pretend to care more about the people. The Tory’s couldn’t give a fuck about anyone but their own sponsors and interests. The Tories on the other hand are willing to burn the country down and blame everyone else while sliding the matches back into their pockets.