Matt Allen from Brighton admits work is ‘not in psyche’ - "A DAD-OF-THREE on benefits admitted that work is “not in his psyche”. But Matt Allen, who lives in social housing with his wife and their three children, said he is not abusing the benefits system. Matt works a few hours each week as a yoga teacher and says he has “no intention” of finding full-time paid work... Matt, who battles an autoimmune disease, says it is more important that he and his wife are at home with their children rather than working. However he said he is not abusing the system because his family has a “minimalist impact on society”. In the documentary Stacey asks: “How do you do it all Matt, is it all benefits?” He responded: “Mostly, but we claim the very bottom line.”... Stacey questions Matt on why other parents work to provide for their children. When asked what he would say to them, Matt, who claims £190 a week of benefits, said: “Spend more time with your kids - it’s simple. I have no intention of working a 45 or 50 hour week - it’s just not in my psyche.”... Adele seemed relaxed about Ulysses’ lack of literacy skills at the age of eight. She said: “What’s it stopping him from doing other than meeting test requirements? “I don’t know any home educated children who go past the teenage skills and don’t pick up the literacy skills. “At the moment he’s eight years old and it’s absolutely fine for him to take his time picking up those skills - so it’s not urgent right now.” Adele also said the family do not enforce teeth brushing, saying: “We do put toothbrushes out in the bathroom but not fluoridated toothpaste and we do not enforce teeth brushing.”"
ANDREW NEIL: Rachel Reeves has spent like a drunken sailor. Now she's in a mad scramble for tax rises. This is what's coming... she risks tilting us into a death spiral - "Britain’s beleaguered Labour Government has begun a desperate scramble to determine which of our taxes should be jacked up – and by how much – in the autumn Budget. Even though we’re now in the midst of the summer ‘silly season’, when political news tends to take a back seat to more frothy activities, Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Chancellor Rachel Reeves are already in cahoots to soften up worried financial markets and hard-pressed voters for major tax rises. Friendly newspapers and sympathetic columnists are being briefed on how a further steep rise in taxes, which are already at historic record levels, is unavoidable. Barely a week goes by without some Labour grandee floating their particular pet scheme to get us to pay more tax. Failed former Labour leader Neil Kinnock has proposed a 2 per cent wealth tax on assets over £10million claiming, ludicrously, that it would raise more than £10billion (ludicrous because no wealth tax anywhere in the world has ever raised anything like that). Former Labour PM (and Chancellor) Gordon Brown has gone public with his plan for swingeing increases on gambling levies, raising more than £3billion a year to pay for abolishing the two-child benefit cap. He also wants Reeves to fiddle with the fiscal rules (as befits a past master of such sleights of hand when he ran the Treasury) to give her headroom to spend more. In May, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, whose grasp of tax matters isn’t even rudimentary, sent Reeves a ‘confidential’ memo (which of course was promptly leaked, to Rayner’s advantage with the Labour Left) proposing various tax-raising wheezes, from limiting pension tax relief to higher taxes on dividends to aligning capital gains tax more closely with the higher rates of income tax.,, Associates of Starmer and Reeves have been busy floating tax rises of their own. In the past week journalists have been briefed on everything from cutting pension tax relief to slapping a new ‘windfall tax’ on bank profits (but not on energy companies, since Labour has already sucked the life out of North Sea oil and gas)... A wealth tax, however, is a non-runner. It would take ages to set up and Reeves needs fresh cash now. As extensive foreign experience illustrates, it would also generate de minimis revenue. It could even cost the Exchequer by turning the current rush of rich taxpayers from our shores into a stampede. Labour is forced into a potpourri of tax rises because in its 2024 manifesto it ruled out raising income tax, VAT and National Insurance contributions (NICs) – the three biggest generators of tax revenues. The Treasury insists that pledge will be kept. Perhaps. But I wouldn’t hold your breath. Labour has already broken most of the other tax promises it made to win power. Indeed, it’s really reneged on not increasing NICs too because, though last October’s rise affected employers’ contributions rather than those of ‘working people’, in the end it’s the workers who pay the price in the form of lower wage growth and fewer jobs, as many (especially in the hospitality sector) are already finding out. Let’s not forget that Labour politicians insisted during last summer’s election campaign that they had no plans for a general increase in taxation. The tax rises they had in mind were small and limited to things Labour affects to hate – like private schools and non-doms – which would not affect the vast majority of voters. That promise was smashed to smithereens months later in Reeves’ October Budget, which increased taxes by £40billion. At the time, she was adamant this was a one-off rise forced on her by the so-called fiscal ‘black hole’ she had inherited from the Tories. Voters could be sure she would not be back to empty their pockets a second time. But the new black hole she now needs to plug is all too real – and entirely of her own making. The Left-leaning National Institute of Social and Economic Research said this week it could be as big as £50billion. That looks a bit toppy to me. But it’s likely bigger than the one she invented last summer. Reeves has presided over a stagnant economy and spent like a drunken sailor – a fatal combination when it comes to national finances. There is now a yawning gap between her spending plans and the revenues taxes are generating. Since the debt markets are no longer in a mood to indulge her profligacy, she can’t fill the gap with more borrowing. Hence the mad scramble for tax rises. Of course, there is another way. The bloated British state consumes more than £1trillion in public spending a year – and rising. It should not be beyond the wit of a prudent government to make significant savings, thereby avoiding the need for more borrowing or higher taxes. But Starmer and Reeves are being held hostage by their own backbenchers: ever since they forced the Government to abandon even the most modest of welfare cuts, they’ve made it clear they will not countenance public spending cuts of any kind. So brace yourselves for tax rises. Last autumn’s hefty tax increases have already taken their toll on economic activity. The British economy is now stuck with next-to-no growth, rising unemployment and persistent inflation. Somewhat absurdly, Reeves tried to take credit for the Bank of England’s cut in interest rates on Thursday (the Bank sets rates independent of government). In reality, she has rekindled inflationary pressures, thereby impeding the Bank’s ability to cut rates in the future. She has presided over a sharp rise in the national minimum wage and a huge increase in NICs. Both have contributed to reigniting inflation. Food prices in particular are surging. The Bank expects overall inflation to spike to 4 per cent by September – double the 2 per cent it is charged with delivering. It expects groceries to rise 5.5 per cent this year. The British Retail Consortium fears it will be 6 per cent. So much for Labour tackling the cost-of-living crisis... the scale of tax rises she is now contemplating for her second Budget risks tilting the economy into a death spiral. Scary times, indeed."
Who’s actually going to pay our pensions in 20–30 years if the UK keeps its birth rate low and also restricts immigration? : r/AskBrits - "I'm an English additional rate taxpayer, my European wife has 2 masters degrees from top unis here. We've been financially rinsed and treated like criminals just for me to live in my own country with my wife. The visa process is incredibly arduous. When we were younger and poorer we paid £900pcm to share a shitty room in a 4-bed HMO in East London, next door to an identical house occupied by a non-working Bangladeshi family who couldn't even speak English, and were living freely in social housing. Now we see the cost of literally everything going up, pensions becoming more out of reach for people, whilst our governments (blue and red) seem determined to import as many people like our old neighbours as possible. We're quite tired of paying higher and higher taxes, an NHS surcharge for a visa, and going into hospitals just to see hordes of people who we know full well didn't pay their way, people who in many cases can't even use the NHS without needing a translator. Anyway, that's why we'll be following many of our friends and moving abroad next year."
"Hello fellow disappointed skilled immigrants. My wife is a welding engineer with the highest possible globally accredited certificates with experience in nuclear and I am an AI researcher with a doctorate in agentic AI. You could say our skills are in demand at the moment and you could say we are good tax cows to be milked and would be in the nation's interest to have the fruits of our work here. Yet, we pay unjustified amounts for the visas, go through these lengthy and demeaning processes, just to be met with general hostility and an incapable of progression economy and watching policies after policies that are effectively Brits shooting themselves in the foot again and again. General consensus is oike this: Illegal immigrants breaking laws? Awww poor them. My mom coming over as an EU citizen to dogsit so we can go on a holiday? No, that's illegal, hurr durr! Yeah, thanks, no more. My current project terminates in the autumn then we are off the sinking ship."
Opinion: The desperate need for a return to economic growth - "In the 1980s, Dutch Disease supposedly caused problems for resource-based economies whose buoyant exchange rates priced their other industries out of world markets. In the 2020s, Canada and the U.K. are suffering what could be called “Anglo Disease,” where bloated, deficit-spending governments are a drag on national economic potential, stalling the engine of progress and generating stultifying stagnation. There is a prescription for Britain’s ills, however, and Canada’s, too, if we pay attention. It comes from Jon Moynihan, an Oxford- and MIT-educated corporate leader, now a member of the House of Lords, whose 2024 book Return to Growth: How to Fix the Economy may be the most urgent policy read in years. In it, Moynihan cuts through the political and statistical noise and provides a practical policy road map rooted in data, history and what in recent years has become uncommon sense. Moynihan identifies three “devils” dragging Britain into stagnation: ballooning government spending, punitive taxation and suffocating regulation. His counterpoint? The three “angels”: free markets, free trade and sound money... The argument is moral as much as economic: growth is a bulwark of democracy, social cohesion and prosperity. Britain’s problem is not a lack of capacity but a lack of will: an entrenched political class that mistakes management for leadership. Moynihan makes the critical but obvious point that “if an economy can grow large enough, then only a small percentage of GDP needs to be confiscated in taxes to pay for needed services.” That’s why economic growth — the creation of more pie, rather than over-sharing of a gradually shrinking pie — should be policy’s over-riding goal. Without growth, countries cannot afford the social services that allow them to be largely socially democratic and mostly peaceful and egalitarian. The problem now is that government continues to grow despite the economy not keeping pace. The outcome is inevitable: if a state continues to borrow to pay its bills, it will eventually go bankrupt. The U.K.’s story should make Canadians deeply uncomfortable. In nearly every meaningful way, we are on the same trajectory. A relentless focus on growth, competitiveness and institutional renewal is needed here, too. As the federal government proposes unparalleled new spending with no guarantee of commensurately strong economic growth these risks compound for Canada. Projections are that by 2050 Canada’s net debt-to-GDP ratio will be almost identical to the U.K.’s, at roughly 130 per cent . It does not take an economic genius to understand that, continuously larger deficits in an economy poised for recession make snowballing debt unsustainable. Stagnant economies breed populism, protectionism and social unrest, hollowing out the middle class and eroding trust in institutions. Britain and Canada face much the same problems. Increasingly, they are the world’s problems. Jon Moynihan’s book is a self-help template for any advanced economy sliding into complacency. If we ignore its lessons, we risk a future where growth collapses, democracy decays and lawlessness and conflict overwhelm us."
Clearly, we need to push degrowth and "tax the rich", because endless growth is cancer
Left wingers claim that Canada's debt is relatively low, so there's no harm continuing to pursue their disastrous policies. But in the UK, left wingers don't see the need for reform either, so
An exodus is already underway in Starmer’s Britain: get ready for four more years of it - "In our current employment market, even an Oxford degree is of limited value. An article this week about five Oxford graduates, struggling to find work after more than a year, provoked much debate and some mockery. Not for the first time, social media reminded us that we are what GK Chesterton called “veneered vandals”, savages under the thinnest of layers, and people lined up to criticise the supposed sense of entitlement of the graduates. In fact, the five Oxonians came across as ambitious and determined. They were making ends meet through temping, tutoring and working summer jobs while firing off hundreds of application letters. They were simply finding out, like so many people of their age, that three years of study and tens of thousands of pounds in student debt no longer get you onto the first rung of a career ladder... Before lockdown, the UK budget was on its way to surplus. Now, the Government is borrowing nearly £150 billion a year, two thirds of which must go to pay interest on past borrowing. No one has a plan to undo the supposedly emergency spending of 2020. The only debate is over whether taxes must rise to meet the new commitments, or whether we carry on borrowing. Did we imagine that we could pay people to stay home for the better part of two years without suffering an economic hit? As a matter of fact, I think a lot of us did. The same people who spent lockdown howling down attempts to loosen restrictions as “putting the economy before lives” are now angry and bewildered because prices, taxes and unemployment have risen. Britain has reached the end of a long run of structurally high employment. For more than 30 years, our jobs market was the envy of Europe. Yes, we could be hit by external events, notably the global financial crisis. But we bounced back quickly, because we understood that the best way to encourage employers to hire people was to make it easy to fire them... in a country with restrictive regulations, every employee is a potential liability, and companies hang back warily. In such countries, unemployment is structurally high, especially among young people. That has been southern Europe’s tragedy for decades. British governments used to understand this. Neither Tony Blair nor Gordon Brown tried to undo the labour reforms of the 1980s. Both knew that, if they wanted revenue for public services, they needed a buoyant economy. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, by contrast, seem to struggle with the concept of cause and effect. Never mind their tax-and-spend policies. They appear not to grasp that raising the costs of employing people leads to fewer people being employed... If tobacco taxes reduce smoking and carbon taxes reduce emissions, what did they suppose jobs taxes would do? Sure enough, the number of employees on payroll plunged by 109,000 the following month, and has declined further in every month since. Britain’s overall unemployment rate is now at its highest since lockdown. The really striking figure, though, is youth unemployment. Among 16- to 24-year-olds, the jobless rate has reached Mediterranean levels: over 14 per cent in recent months. Why? Again, because of our refusal to acknowledge that actions have consequences. Pushing up the minimum wage (which applies from age 16) and the national living wage (which applies from 21) makes MPs feel righteous. They have voted to raise minimum remuneration for 20-year-olds by 55 per cent since 2020. The trouble is that these repeated hikes end up punishing rather than helping young people, because they close off job opportunities and and push some onto welfare. Around 60,000 students a year go straight from university onto long-term sickness benefits. MPs with a basic knowledge of economics tend to keep quiet, because they are terrified of being asked how they would like to live on £10 an hour. It is an irrelevant question, but it turns politicians to jelly... Ignorant voters, self-righteous journalists and cowardly politicians make a potent combination. This year, the minimum wage rose by 18 per cent for 16- and 17-year-olds and by 16.3 per cent for 18-, 19- and 20-year olds. Result? Fewer jobs for young people. Openings in the hospitality sector are down by 22,000 since last year, and graduate postings have fallen by an almost unbelievable 33 per cent. To repeat, policies have consequences. I sometimes think that the readiness to acknowledge trade-offs is the real dividing-line in politics. And I don’t just mean among politicians. Among voters, too, there are those who look at the costs of policies, and those who go to the polling station humming “I’m just a soul whose intentions are good”. Hikes in the minimum wage are the least of it. The open-ended extension of equalities laws is an even greater deterrent. When retail workers can be compensated for being paid less than warehouse workers, supposedly on sex discrimination grounds, even though the retail workers were refusing to be redeployed to warehouses, employers can hardly be blamed for being reluctant to hire. And that is before we get to Angela Rayner’s package of employment laws, the most far-reaching since the mid-1970s... Here is a paradox. Labour – the clue is in the name – is meant to be the party of the worker. Yet every single Labour-majority government has left office with unemployment higher than when it began. Every. Single. One. This one, unlike some of its predecessors, has wasted no time. Already we can see where it is going: more and more workers’ rights, fewer and fewer workers. We are in a vicious circle. Higher unemployment means fewer people paying taxes into the system and more drawing benefits from it. Since Labour has already proven that it cannot cut spending – not even mildly to slow the rise in benefits claims – that can only mean even higher taxes, prompting more disinvestment, slower growth, higher unemployment and lower revenue. According to a survey by the British Council, 72 per cent of Brits under 30 are thinking of working abroad, and who can blame them? We are pulling off the extraordinary double of simultaneous emigration and immigration crises, exporting our entrepreneurs and replacing them with people who go onto benefits. And, God help us, we have another four years of it to come."
Britain’s workers are being bled dry to nourish a new elite class - "all this early inflation-busting pay rise achieved was to send out a signal that going on strike pays in Rachel Reeves’ Britain. The Government appears to have been on the back foot ever since negotiating with public sector workers over pay disputes and industrial action. Train drivers, junior doctors and teachers have all secured above-inflation pay rises. It will not have escaped readers’ notice that the strikes have continued despite these deals. Those familiar with Anglo-Saxon history might have even foreseen this predictable consequence of the Government’s negotiation tactics. What makes Labour’s stance even more ill-advised and short-sighted than that of Æthelred the Unready, is the fact that, while bending over backwards to accommodate the demands of public sector employees, they appear to be squeezing the life out of the private sector. With the impact of increases in national minimum wage and National Insurance contributions hitting businesses hard, bosses are at their most pessimistic since 2016. They feel worse than during the Covid lockdowns, fraught Brexit negotiations and the aftermath of Liz Truss’s mini-Budget, according to a survey published by the Institute of Directors last week. The majority – 85pc – of business leaders think that government policy so far will be unsuccessful in driving up desperately-needed economic growth. According to a House of Commons Library paper on public sector pay, in April 2024, median weekly earnings for full-time employees were £765 in the public sector compared to £714 in the private sector, “making earnings 7pc higher in the public sector”. This was the case before Labour took power; adding pensions to the mix makes the disparity even more stark. Last year alone, taxpayers were hit with a record £47bn bill to fund public sector pensions."
Even Italy is richer than Starmer’s socialist Britain - "Not only do Italians enjoy better food, warmer weather and la dolce vita, they’re now richer than us too. Adjusted for the cost of living, Italy’s GDP per capita has overtaken the Britain’s for the first time this century, according to the World Bank... For decades, the country has struggled with demographic decline and fiscal debt crises. In 2011 there was national humiliation when the then prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, was effectively removed from office by Brussels, which threatened to force Italy out of the eurozone. Today, however, Italy seems to have achieved an enviable stability. Under Giorgia Meloni’s tough-minded conservative leadership, Italy is now among the most desirable domiciles in Europe, not least for millionaires fleeing the Labour Government’s tax raids... What Giorgia Meloni has grasped – but Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have not – is that if you keep tax rates low, people have less incentive to avoid paying them. This is especially important in Italy, where much of the population used to keep their savings in cash, often literally under the bed, in order to escape the taxman. Thanks to a populist prime minister of humble origins who knows her compatriots well, that culture is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Ms Meloni has an instinctive sympathy for the small businesses, self-employed workers and farmers who are still the backbone of the Italian economy. She hopes to recreate the post-war economic miracle, known as il boom. That miracle was unleashed by the free-market policies of Luigi Einaudi, with annual growth rates of up to 10 per cent. While Italy’s economy is now much less dynamic, living standards are rising. Here in Britain they are stagnant, partly due to low-skilled mass immigration. Ms Meloni has managed to cut the number of illegal arrivals from North Africa, which fell from 157,000 in 2023 to just 66,000 last year. Admittedly her deal with Albania to deport asylum seekers to processing camps there has run into trouble with the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg. This is the EU court to which Starmer is keen to hand over jurisdiction under the trade deal he struck with Ursula von der Leyen at Lancaster House in May... Of course there is still plenty of poverty in Italy’s perennially depressed southern regions. But the poorest parts of the UK now suffer from a welfare dependency culture for which the Labour Party has just abdicated responsibility. There is no equivalent in Naples or Palermo for the British phenomenon, visible in cities like Birmingham, of entire communities claiming mental health benefits and giving up on work."
Tax the rich more to fill hole in public finances, Labour members tell Starmer : r/unitedkingdom - "Reddit and Labour backbenchers only have one policy idea: TAx the RiCH. Meanwhile Nvidia is nearly worth as much as annual UK GDP."
Tax the rich more to fill hole in public finances, Labour members tell Starmer : r/unitedkingdom - "Would suggest the point is twenty years ago UK GDP per capita was the same of an average US state. Hey not California but still mid ranking. Now it's significantly lower than even the poorest state being Mississippi. And all we can offer up is taxing those that create wealth even more... It's a doom loop."
Tax the rich more to fill hole in public finances, Labour members tell Starmer : r/unitedkingdom - "Or they arnt investing but investing in say the USA instead"
"well then there is no downside to taxing them then is there? what are they going to do, pull out the investments that they already aren't making?"
"Or remainder leave. Just because we start shooting ourselves in the foot doesn't mean you have to shoot yourself in the head also At some point the tax doom loop will end. Almost certainly with the IMF"
"The downside is that you reinforce the doom loop rather than getting out of it. We're a nation in decline and taxing to fund welfare ultimately isn't going to solve that The other downside is that they leave and then we'll have even less tax revenue to spread around (top 1% pay 29% of income tax)"
