I reckon that if you want to go looking for tax, the best place to look for it is in taxing corporate profits properly. Of course, that will mean some sort of harmonisation with the rest of the EU for a start. But if the EU can't fix that, what's the point of it? Apple has something like £100 billion salted away in Ireland. It gets richer to the tune of about £12 billion every 3 months. It doesn't distribute this cash to shareholders, or pay any tax on it. The multinational I worked for had several brands registered in different countries (despite being a UK company) to avoid tax. And then of course there are Starbucks and Amazon, but these are just high-profile companies that you hear of. As the world becomes increasingly corporatist, the corporations make more and more money, but they pay less and less tax. It's a bit of a joke. The people working for the corporations get poorer and poorer whilst the top managers (a handful of the workforce) get richer and richer. If you want to look for inequality, it's a good place to start. You could then tax the workforce less and still finance your economy. Oh, hold on. I know. All companies will just relocate to Singapore. Of course they will. But even then, you could tax the profits they actually realise in the UK.
There was one other thing I wanted to say: In general there is very much a "glass half empty" approach on all these political discussions: The politicians are all half-wits, all civil servants are self-serving tossers, everything is a pile of poo. What, I wonder, do people really expect the country and life to be - utopia? How much more brilliant do you think it could reasonably be? What sort of agenda would the utopia party have? It seems to me that the UK has all sorts of "problems" that politicians are unlikely to ever be able to solve. The climate is not great. The place is overcrowded. Most of the towns look rubbish, because they are the consequence of rapid building of cheap crap in the industrial revolution, and the necessity of building more cheap crap to create instant housing after the Second World War. Cue a lot of naff living environments. Consumers can complain they don't have enough money and are too taxed, but they spend less on food now than they ever did and eat out far more. They also seem to work harder - just to afford more Chinese goods they don't really need. If they are obese, it's because ultimately, they choose to be. Politics aren't ever really going to change things. If the roads are clogged, it's because people choose to travel by car, or voted for parties that weren't very interested in rail. The way things are is the aggregate of how people choose them to be. To be honest, I didn't like many of those choices, so I left. When I started to spend half my time back in London, I found that actually, the only person I met who was really uncomfortable with how things were was me. So I declined to return permanently. Many things had got better since I left, but some things were worse as far as I was concerned, and most hadn't really changed and almost certainly wouldn't.
All perfectly true Glidd but where does that leave us? Admit defeat, drop your head and shuffle along accepting everything as it is or sell up and leave? A somewhat bleak choice. When my 90 year old mother is no longer in this world I almost certainly will leave, but in the meantime I feel I have not only a right but a duty to question and hold to account those who make the laws we must live under and who spend the money which we are forced to hand to them under pain of imprisonment. And of course, a lot of people can't leave. They have neither the means to leave nor anywhere to go. They have a right to complain if they feel badly governed even if they have no ready solutions. You solve problems first by accepting they exist and then by talking about how to put them right. And as Utopia is an unobtainable ideal, you have to keep on doing it.
I think we first have to realise what sort of world / country we live in,, this is not a labour v conservative issue, it is a global haves and have nots,, until we realise this then nothing will change, even if we did I doubt that we could change anything,, the army will maintain the status quo
UKIP are not a fully developed party and have few policies. Yes, Douglas Carswell does talk a lot of sense.
Each successive generation has taken out more than it has put in thereby passing on an ever larger debt to the next generation.
Which is exactly why it won't happen. Let's just stick our heads in the sand and pretend we can tax, borrow and spend our way to Utopia.
Proportional representation is a total disaster, yet another reason why I left NZ after they introduced it there, you end up with no clear cut winner, no direction and minor parties having a disproportionate amount of influence over running the country
It is certainly easier to identify problems than find solutions but identifying the problem is a necessary first step. I have never liked the glass half empty / half full analogy, I prefer to think that the glass is at the 50% level IMHO. Hopefully we can all muddle through and live to a ripe, healthy, old age. It has worked so far. But then past performance is no guarantee of future performance, as they have been saying since the times of Ancient Greece.
all i am reading here is arguments for independence. funny that. i argue on another thread small is beautiful, but i think that is the gist i am getting here. crazy talk. i say let Ukip run riot down your way it will only help advance the cause.
I think the point I was trying to make is that in the UK, maybe the glass is 70% or 80% full. That's not to say it couldn't be fuller, but the UK likes its island mentality. It doesn't want to look elsewhere for ideas and ways of doing things, unless it's to the USA - and most of us know how bizarre and suboptimal life is like over there.
do you think history or location influences your political persuasion? not much immigration problems up our way so no need to vote ukip or tory. although i do have glen coe and all the history that goes with it next to me and lots of good history surrounding the 45 and james of the glen in me back garden. might be sending me pro inde you know what.
That is true but first-past the-post is also unrepresentative when what was once a two horse race becomes a crowded field. Either Labour or the Conservatives can form governments on barely 40 % of the vote which leaves 60% of the electorate unrepresented. And even then the outcome is likely to be decided by a tiny proportion of voters in key marginals for whom policy will be devised by focus groups. And so government is reduced to a marketing exercise with policy driven by market research not conviction. If voters do not elect a single party to government with a clear majority there will be coalition anyway; either that or paralysis. At least with PR the voters choose their rag-tag government rather than politicians appointing themselves to office from the loser's enclosure.
Fookin el = first 'new' Scottish Tax announced on TV = 10% purchase tax on all properties over £250,000! Anything over £130,000 that is - so a £12,000 tax bill on a £250K house (£12K) and £22K on a £350,000 house. Well done :Wideyed:
Can you capitalise this tax in the UK, or do you need it in cash instead of having it added to your mortgage?
I think he means will HMRC require you to pay your fee for owning private property with a cheque on the 31st on January or will you be able to add it to your existing mortgage debt.
