Couple of percent yes (ignoring brexit). But I worry about the cumulative effect of general tax-side austerity. its a balancing act, if labour get in it’ll be interesting to see if a higher tax and spending model works for the UK. My guess is it won’t.

ransos – Member
They take their business elsewhere and the state has less money to spend, not more.
Have a look at the corporation tax rate in competitor countries, and tell us why their industries haven’t relocated en masse to the UK…

POSTED 45 MINUTES AGO # REPORT-POST

Global trend would appear to be downwards

[/url]

12.5% seems to work for Ireland? Agree you don’t want a race to the bottom, but surely you’re looking for as many favourable elements in a business’s PESTEL analysis, or whatever they use these days, as possible?

I don’t see it as threats or sabotage to be honest, just behavioural effects. I’m not talking about your Monaco-based tax exiles, I’m talking about people like me. I’m (just) a 40% taxpayer, I could take a job abroad when I leave the RAF, not planning to at present because I like it here. Take lots more of my earnings off me and the balance changes, the country loses my taxes, and there are many like me. I know the tax take needs to come up and I’m pretty sure the Tories are planning that too, question is how far can you turn the screw? I would consider voting Labour FYI but I don’t think this is the time to further disincentivise inward investment in the U.K. as we’re busy doing that anyway with Brexit.

I have no idea why you have come to your own assumption that Corbyn is somehow unaware that corporations and wealthy individuals will not sit idly while corporation tax rises & higher rate taxes are implemented.

But it’s not about the ideology, it’s about the practicalities. They take their business elsewhere and the state has less money to spend, not more. You can’t borrow forever. I’m sure you’ve got a clever doctrinal counter-argument but finding a balance between the 2 camps is the essence for me, and I suspect taking more than half of people’s income is the tipping point for many.

binners – Member
One of the senior guys from Ryanair was on five live this morning matter-of-factly stating that it wasn’t scaremongering to point out that in the event of no deal, then flights between mainland Europe and the UK would cease, and that they were very concerned this could happen

This is clearly silly. We’ll need (and get) a bilateral agreement with the EU, if we don’t just stay part of the Single European Sky, like Norway and Switzerland and some of the Balkans. However, it’s also silly to pretend this won’t come with a membership fee (SES) or disadvantage to UK carriers (bilaterals).

Boardin bob/Jambalaya:

Bit of a tangent, but your graphs agree with each other!

It’s more likely than catching it at a dinner party 😉

ulysse – Member
I’d imagine lethal force from the Army is a given..

Absolutely, we’re all mindless trigger-happy nutters 🙄

To answer zokes’ question on the legality of soldiers shooting somebody, peacetime rules of engagement only give service personnel the same inherent legal right of self defence as any member of the public, i.e. You may use lethal force if you reasonably believe that your life (or somebody else’s) is in danger and there is no other way to prevent the danger. There are also rules about issuance of warnings. The difference is that we’re allowed to carry firearms on duty, so the lethal force is considerably more so. The entitlement to use it is exactly the same as a member of the public. Regarding the “shoot to kill” element, this gets misunderstood. AIUI armed police are taught how to shoot to incapacitate if appropriate, this is quite a subtle and complex thing. Servicemen are, in general, just taught to aim for the middle! “Shoot to kill” becomes confused with extra-judicial killing; it isn’t.
Making the judgement in the case of a suspected suicide bomber is difficult; there are signs and there is training, but there’s a big potential for a mistake as with Menezes. If a squaddie were to shoot somebody and they turned out to be innocent, if it was found to be a reasonable and honest belief, the law protects them, as it should.

Anyway, time for this.

Nye bevan spoils it at the end with that sneery remark about Anglo-saxons. Self mythologising bobbins. I believe he was from South Wales anyway, so probably of Anglo-Saxon stock, whatever that means, which is nothing.

Tj great post, pretty much my thoughts. Can’t imagine there’s a completely fair solution.

It is, an entirely unsurprising one too. My flabber is still gasted that the Tories either didn’t realise what an electoral landmine that was, or were so arrogant that they didn’t care.

One other possibility is that they thought it needed doing and have gambled that their lead is sufficient to push through unpopular (but necessary in their opinion) reforms. That being the case, I think it’s quite commendable they’ve decided to be honest with the electorate rather than magicking it out in the next parliament, likewise the free school meals. The conventional wisdom is of course that the voters don’t want the truth….

@legend, I’ve seen stuff like that seriously proposed so I wasn’t sure!

airtragic – Member
1. There are 2.
2. They don’t have any!
Pedant, a drone from Amazon and some hand grenades then

Appreciate this is probably tongue in cheek, but I’m always amazed/amused by armchair generals who reckon they’ve got something the military planners on both sides have missed!
These drones; what’s their range and payload? How much damage will the grenades do? How quick can it be fixed? Assuming success, what next? What are your chances of success? Given that, do the rewards justify the risk and drawbacks?

Our posture down there is intelligence led and the idea is that we can change that quicker than the other team can change their capability.

“IDF Active personnel 9,127 invasions 0”

Large reserve force and a very proactive approach to ensuring the latter, plus a nuclear deterrent of course!

1 cruise missile into the only fast jet runway on the islands and you can land all the troops you like.

1. There are 2.
2. They don’t have any!

Whose w***athon was this again? 😉

However you spin it, withdrawal of a benefit is not murder or genocide. By that rationale, all governments pre-welfare state were genocidal. If I get sacked and top myself, my employer did not murder me. Colossal cock-up with grave consequences yes, but I don’t think hyperbole helps your argument.

I answered you. It wasn’t. The disabled should have been protected. Nothing wrong with the principle of assessing fitness to work but it’s a complex issue and the implementation has obviously been dreadful. Happy?

“Been here before…
The Beatles were taxed till the pips squeaked, and yet the surviving members are still multimillionaires.”

Were they “tax efficient “? Would they have paid more at a lower rate? Don’t know btw, speculating!

“…and yet somehow insisting we are spending less these last 7 years seems to have increased our national debt by just over 50%. uncomfortable truth here Has money just got more expensive these days?”

Simple, the deficit is shrinking, but it’s not yet zero, so the debt continues to increase but at a reducing rate.

Nothing wrong with taxing the rich a bit more, but as others have said it’s more about symbolism than actual tax take, and the risk as always is that if you overdo it then behavioural effects kick in and your tax take goes down, meaning less money for the needy.

Income stagnation is not unique to us either (speaking as a public sector worker!)

Yes, it would be nice if multinationals paid all of their taxes. If it was easy, wouldn’t everyone have done it by now? Likewise, if you can just run up as much debt as you want with no consequence, wouldn’t everyone be doing it?

VAT is indeed regressive, but haven’t the Conservatives committed not to raise it, whilst staying noticeably quiet on income tax and pensions commitments? And don’t lower earners pay rather less of that than they used to due to the threshold moving up? I’m all for holding the govt to account on its record, but credit where it’s due and all that!

“The point is that they were deliberately targeted, when they did not need to be, because people like you don’t appear to have any compassion and don’t seem bothered about other people’s suffering.”

I would substitute “deliberately targeted ” with “not protected “. I agree, however, that they should have been, especially given the relatively small sums involved.

The top one percent aren’t your global mega-capitalists/asset strippers/whatever, that’s the top 0.01%. 1% is £162k pa and upwards, the 1% are more likely successful professionals, senior consultants, engineers, financiers etc. And just the 1% won’t be enough….

“Casually justifying “grave and systematic violations” of disabled people’s rights on the basis of not wanting to pay any more taxes because…… well…. paying little Johnny’s school fees could jeopardize that third yachting trip this year, and we might have to make do with last year’s model of Range Rover.”

Been discussed elsewhere, but I suspect you can tax these people ^ at 100%, ignoring behavioural effects, and you still won’t fill the gap. And you can’t ignore behavioural effects!

Agree the axe shouldn’t have fallen on the disabled. But it had to fall somewhere. We spend more than we take. Once you ring fence education and health, as others have said, it falls all the harder in other areas. It was always going to be difficult, and it was always going to be hardest on those at the bottom of the ladder as they’ve got less to spare and receive more state spending. Any party in power has to face this dilemma; you can argue for more tax-side austerity as Corbyn does, you can tweak stuff here and there, but the reality is that there’s no magic bullet imo. Demonising and othering the people who make the decisions just polarises the argument.

I was making the point that politicians trying to tap into the populist wave of anti-establishment sentiment is interesting. I understand it’s quite a well-established phenomenon after a financial crash. I wasn’t trying to have a go at JC by suggesting he’s the same as Trump.

Nope, I said there were parallels!

Do tell.

Trump and JC are both populist and iconoclastic. Setting yourself against the media and the establishment. Both disliked by the politicians of their own party and both written off in the early stages. And I was responding specifically to the idea that his more eye-catching policies wouldn’t survive the cold shower of political reality if elected!

Are you saying Corbyn is an overly aggressive, sexist, warmongering bigot?

Nope, I said there were parallels!

The Trump parallels continue!

That’s just talking to your target audience. They’ve probably calculated that the poor are never going to vote for them anyway, not worth chasing. The same reason Jc doesn’t try and placate those earning over £70k!

Theresa May on the today programme yesterday was painful, the standard few minutes of dodging questions and saying nothing of substance. Dawn Butler on PM just now was excruciating, for the same reasons. 7 weeks of this!

tjagain – Member

The whole debt and deficit is a tory mirage
1) they are not reducing debt or deficit

That’s not right, the deficit has been going down since 2010.

After loops 1 and 2 split, ignore the unsigned trail on the right as you climb the hill (on loop 1). Carry on up that hill!

With the caveat that I’m very much on the remain side….

From a defence perspective, NATO pre-dates the EU and is enormously more potent and relevant militarily due to Uncle Sam! NATO, and nuclear weapons arguably, are the reason for the relative peace since WWII. EU for trade, NATO for security. We’re not going to go to war with our former EU partners in some kind of post-imperialist Brexie wet dream because they’re still our NATO allies, and the principle of collective defence is just as relevant today as it’s always been; no single European nation is much of a match for Russia imo.

Incidentally, I commented on the Daily Mail’s BTL bit (I couldn’t help myself) when others were expressing similar bellicose sentiments. I wondered whether they’d be joining us serving military in the event? Probably not, those who have to fight wars are usually less keen to call for them! I’m sure there are EU nations with Mail equivalents though, with similarly unhinged comments; the shouty nutters will hopefully be safely ignored by the grown-ups!

Ok, you got me – we’ll continue to send the whisky*, irn-bru, deep fried chocolate bars, shortbread & Broons annuals down south & you guys keep sending up the good old English tea & scones, vats of coronation chicken, bunting, morris dancers and the juicy Westminster scandals we all love reading about & we’ll all carry on with a stiff upper lip and forget that the EU will be doing the exact same thing to the UK post article 50 triggerment (we’ll make up our own language as well)…

It’s a toughie…

*the revenue from which has always been listed under UK exports, as opposed to featuring on the tartan tax return, hasn’t it?

Ah, the return of the whisky tax myth…

Grievance-mongering 101[/url]

WoS, what an unpleasant fellow he is.

I heard Alex Salmond on the radio the other day, suggesting that Scotland’s ANNUAL deficit could be outweighed with a bunch of THROUGH LIFE costs for Trident etc, making a bigger number. Subterfuge worthy of a Brexiteer!