The Labour Government

Blue Maverick said:
You know there are a lot of people who critisce the Muslim community for various things but I’ve never seen an elderly one in care, all the care homes I visited were full of “white” people, they look after their elderly, they buy a bigger house or extend or buy two and knock through. They know once they’ve gone then they will move into that part and so on and so on. What you’ve done is what I if I have to do will do, I couldn’t put either of my parents in a hime and as long as I can do it I’ll bloody well have them. Now I know not everyone can do it, especially when it comes to dementia, but far too many are happy to turn their parents off into a home.
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We've essentially privatised beginning and end of life care in our society to 'free' people up to work.
 
Alan Harper's Tash said:
Yep and I’d reinstate the WFA until energy costs are back within our control.

It can’t be means tested as it’d cost more than paying all the elderly.

We should also create a huge R&D drug sector to develop drugs to use at cost price for the NHS and sell around the world to fund the NHS.

We need progressive ideas, not everybody posting different figures about things that back up their party of choice.

You see it everyday.

£22b black hole? Here’s a graph.
Bollocks. Here’s my pie chart.

Doesn’t get anyone anywhere.
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Would never work. Far too expensive and time consuming, not to mention undermining our own Pharma companies and all of the regulatory hurdles doing this would involve…

Believe it or not but the NHS actually do a decent job of procuring drugs at good prices..
 
Chippy_boy said:
That's the status quo today, which I am broadly in support of. Let's see what happens to it in October.

I might make, somewhat unrelated, another observation. Sorry this goes on a bit...

Governments always overestimate the amount of money any particular tax change will rake in. Why, because they don't take into account the behavioral changes people make in response to it.

Look at e.g. the Winder Fuel allowance. Labour say they can remove it and save £1.5bn (or is it £2bn, I forget). But then people realise that they can still get it if they claim pension credit, which they have never bothered claiming for previously. The bill for unclaimed pension credit is WAY more than £1.5bn. If only a fraction of pensioners start claiming it, then no money is saved.

Another example: Reducing tax relief on pension contributions to basic rate - another thing they are considering. At the moment your earn £100 and pay £100 into your pension and no tax is payable on that £100. Doesn't matter how much you earn (apart from very high earners who get no tax relief to speak of) that same rule applies. So if you pay 20% tax, you get to claim £20 back. If you are a 40% tax payer and you paid 40% tax, you get to claim £40 of the hundred back etc. Seems fair enough. We want people to save for their retirement so everyone gets to save into a pension without paying tax on their contributions.

So Labour are first of all lying by saying this is "unfair" that the better off get more back than the less well off. Plainly it is not unfair at all, it is merely a system whereby your pension contributions up to £60k per year are untaxed. The "rich" get their £45 back and the "poor" get their £20 back because that's how much was taken from their pay in the first place.

Now, Labour are considering reducing the tax relief to a flat 25% or 30%. They imagine this will bring in a couple of billion in tax savings from the better off, since the government will only have to give a proportion of the 40% or 45% tax back. What they are not considering is that people will just think fuck it, what's the point of putting money into my pension - which will be taxed at 25% when I take it out at retirement - if I am only going to get 25% tax relief putting the money in in the first place. So they will stop paying into their pensions and it will generate zero tax savings. Worse, Labour will have to give back to the lower paid group MORE money than they took off them in the first place. It's an idiotic idea.

Finally, and too much to type in detail, but tax receipts went down when the top rate of income tax was raised to 50% and went back up again when they were reduced back to 45%.
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Standby for 10% of consultants in the NHS retiring immediately. The limit was increased a bit a few years ago to make continuing to work being wirthwhile. If any sort of limit is imposed then they would be literally paying the NHS to work by their loss to their pension fund.
 
metalblue said:
Good idea on NHS. As you say it’s this sort of idea we should be looking at for the future. We look enviously at the way Norway used North Sea gas/oil as a wealth fund whereas we spunked ir away on the here and now. No one is going to mind pain now if we can see a bold plan for the future, well a few might but you can’t please all of the people all of the time.
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We need something to ignite our sense of pride that isn’t winning two world wars.

It’s a shame we scrapped the tidal marina idea. We could have created wave technology to sell round the world as well.

We need something that gets us out of the tailspinning stall that we are in.

How do you find a visionary leader with a social conscience? Lots of countries are looking for one.
 
DenisLawBackHeel74 said:
Would never work. Far too expensive and time consuming, not to mention undermining our own Pharma companies and all of the regulatory hurdles doing this would involve…

Believe it or not but the NHS actually do a decent job of procuring drugs at good prices..
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Could we not expand it to be much bigger?
 
DenisLawBackHeel74 said:
They probably couldn’t do much more for drugs procurement but they could implement the same philosophy for goods and services that they do for drugs….
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Fair enough. Anything to make it better and more cost efficient.

The NHS probably needs to be a cross party institution to stop it being a political football too, with its chair being an expert, not one in cabinet.
 
BlueAnorak said:
Standby for 10% of consultants in the NHS retiring immediately. The limit was increased a bit a few years ago to make continuing to work being wirthwhile. If any sort of limit is imposed then they would be literally paying the NHS to work by their loss to their pension fund.
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Yep.

This is one of the reasons I *think* they might leave pensions alone, bar a bit of minor tinkering.

If think major IHT and capital gains tax changes are nailed on though. Only "rich" people have a £1m home don't they, and they don't vote Labour anyway. They can just announce in the small print that they are changing the rules on surving spouses inheriting their deceased partner's allowance, which at a stroke would reduce the zero rate band from £1m to £500k and generate take an extra £200k from those with £1m homes. They would not even have to mention the figures in the budget speech, just position it as a minor change that hardly affects anyone.
 
I get the tories have left the country in a bad state and labour might have to make cuts or tax rises, but the message so far from labour has been so negative and gloomy.

Obviously there aren’t easy answers, but where’s the positive vision for what labour want to do?

It’s already getting a bit tiring hearing the same repackaged austerity messages we’ve heard before or constant comparisons to the last terrible government.

There have been a few moments where I do think they have shown up the tories, but I don’t think that’s difficult.
 
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