The Labour Government

[Chippy_boy]

I just heard that Starmer earned circa £404k last year and paid £99k in tax.

Plugging £400k into Martin Lewis' income tax calculator, you get this:



He's paid circa £70,000 less than any other highly paid employee. So presumably he's benefitted from various tax dodges about which he has at the same time been critical. Honestly I cannot think of a politician I loathe more than this man.

 

[gordondaviesmoustache]

I just heard that Starmer earned circa £404k last year and paid £99k in tax.

Plugging £400k into Martin Lewis' income tax calculator, you get this:

View attachment 132250

He's paid circa £70,000 less than any other highly paid employee. So presumably he's benefitted from various tax dodges about which he has at the same time been critical. Honestly I cannot think of a politician I loathe more than this man.

Heard where?

 

[Big Joe Corrigan]

I just heard that Starmer earned circa £404k last year and paid £99k in tax.

Plugging £400k into Martin Lewis' income tax calculator, you get this:

View attachment 132250

He's paid circa £70,000 less than any other highly paid employee. So presumably he's benefitted from various tax dodges about which he has at the same time been critical. Honestly I cannot think of a politician I loathe more than this man.

I can think of plenty.

 

[inbetween]

I tend to agree with you.

However, I think probably the majority of MPs on both sides are decent, fair-minded, hard working people who genuinely went into politics to try to make things better. My guess 500+ at least fall into that category.

The problem is that to get anywhere up the greasy pole, you have to throw away your principles and try to defend indefensible bollocks or else you will never get a look in for promotion ever again. There's hardly any free votes in the commons and MPs are expected to obey the whips or else.

Perhaps an good improvement to our democratic processes would be to get rid of the whips altogether and make everything a free vote. If that was the case, I am pretty sure even with Labour's humungous majority, the reprehensible WFA vote would never have passed.

I actually totally disagree with your assessment of MP's. I view many of them exactly the same as I view car salesmen, they're often sleezy gobby types who mostly see this as a cushty career or a title for their CV. That doesn't apply to all but I certainly don't subscribe to the 500+ figure. Otherwise good things would get done due to a majority of good but nothing really good has happened over the last 20 years.

My brother worked for a backbench Tory MP only a few years ago. Her only daily interest was around getting photo opportunities and PR to better herself and funnily enough she was booted out at the last election. She now will no doubt have already found her non-executive directorship to earn money as a lobbyist.

Party politics is the sole problem with everything. I think they should double MP salaries, reduce the stupid expense loopholes, forbid secondary work and maybe then they'd get a better character of person. Do the people of Clacton really believe that Nigel Farage is the person to best serve Clacton? The system of MP's is utterly pointless if within the party system they are not able to act in the interest of constituents first.

I'm actually far more in favour of a technocracy because god forbid we put people in charge of things who know what they're doing. Imagine there's a pandemic and you need somebody to lead the response. Would you pick an economics/politics graduate yesman or would you pick a health boss and his own team of health experts? Guess which option our political system produced for COVID? And we wonder why it always ends in tears.

 

[meltonblue]

I just heard that Starmer earned circa £404k last year and paid £99k in tax.

Plugging £400k into Martin Lewis' income tax calculator, you get this:

View attachment 132250

He's paid circa £70,000 less than any other highly paid employee. So presumably he's benefitted from various tax dodges about which he has at the same time been critical. Honestly I cannot think of a politician I loathe more than this man.

Going a bit far here, he didn’t earn a salary of 400k. The majority of his earnings was from the sale of a field that he’d have paid capital gains tax on.

 

[blue by birth]

What do you think the Tories biggest blunder was?

Probably losing the election

 

[hcblue95]

I just heard that Starmer earned circa £404k last year and paid £99k in tax.

Plugging £400k into Martin Lewis' income tax calculator, you get this:

View attachment 132250

He's paid circa £70,000 less than any other highly paid employee. So presumably he's benefitted from various tax dodges about which he has at the same time been critical. Honestly I cannot think of a politician I loathe more than this man.

Wait until you hear about your pals Boris Johnson and Rishi.

 

[inbetween]

Sooner we have driverless trains the better.

I also agree with this. Modernisation of the rail network is key and trains are by nature the perfect target for automation. They need to start putting passengers first and passengers do not care about who is driving the train.

The biggest benefit of driverless trains is they're safer, the driver works for free and he'll always turn up on time.

 

[metalblue]

This thread has more cryptofascists than my local!

One of the darkest parts of fascism, and perhaps least understood, is its disdain for freezing the pensioner cohort and a joy of calling out freeloaders. It’s why these cryptofascist operate in the shadows.

 

[gordondaviesmoustache]

It’s why these cryptofascist operate in the shadows.

The clue is in the word ‘crypto’.