To find Rachel Reeves an irritating pain in the neck

I’m not fan of the Tories and voted Labour, but your partisan mantra is utterly pathetic. How is she helping to clear the mess?

Was it by taxing business and stifling the economic growth so promised?

Was it by insisting that social care providers were also lumbered with the NI rise meaning they have a real terms cut (which is something even the Tories never did)?

Was it by taking away the winter fuel allowance from those on a basic state pension of less than £12k per year, or taken away lifelines from the disabled, when there were many ways to find similar sums if she had only taxed the wealthy more?

Was it by talking about growth but without actually having a plan to deliver it? For all the talk of planning reform and industrial strategy, we still don’t have anything of substance, let alone any action.

Rachel Reeves has been an utter disaster… arguably worse the every chancellor we had under the Tories, with the possible exception of Kwasi Kwertang. But at least the Tory chancellors had the honesty to call themselves Tories, and not masquerade as Labour.

No, the country voted Labour, but got another version of the Tories back. Seriously, what’s the difference?!

How does halving growth help?

Indeed, dear old Boris from Eton’s amateur dramatics society, who so wanted to play the part of being prime minister.

I presume we’re allowed to insult him?

Why? There are additional costs associated with disability and without the extra help some wouldn't be able to access employment.

Go check your facts. Lies. She is not trying to get more children removed from parents into care.

Also, more children are not abused in care than by their parents either. Good grief so many errors in a short post.

Have people forgotten Boris Johnson was a huge backer of Trump getting a second term as President - as was Truss. Heaven help us if they were in power now with such impaired judgement and skewed moral compasses.

Great to have a Chancellor who is actually trying to sort out the utter mess left by 14 years of Tory misrule and their 5 prime ministers. Did these incompetents think the problems would just disappear on their own?

Did away with the 10% tax rate
Miserly rise in the state pension

The idea that high PAYE tax payers aren’t paying a “fair” share in the UK is just batshit.

why should a person of wealth feel unwelcome in UK and punished financially ? Other countries want them & want investment

Why does UK roll out the carpet for penniless and chase the wealthy out?

Baffling

They should make do with their salary

And there are people eligible for disability benefits who work. You've been told this before.

Come on @Clavinova you know the rate was higher because ours was in a worse condition. It hasn’t recovered back to where it was while other economies have.

September 2023
The UK economy made a faster recovery from the Covid pandemic than previously estimated, according to revisions to official figures revealing a stronger performance than Germany and France.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/sep/29/uk-economy-makes-stronger-recovery-from-pandemic-than-first-thought-germany-france

The Office for National Statistics has made some pretty dramatic upward revisions for 2020 and 2021...
Put together, it means that at the end of 2021 - rather than being 1.2% smaller than it was going into the pandemic as previously reported - the UK economy was actually 0.6% bigger...
As Simon French, the chief economist and head of research at the investment bank Panmure Gordon was quick to note, the entire UK economic narrative, post-pandemic, has just been revised away. All those headlines about the UK economy not being back at pre-COVID levels, or bottom of the G7, are now obsolete.
https://news.sky.com/story/the-uk-actually-fared-much-better-after-covid-than-first-thought-heres-why-it-matters-12952220

Same. But I think Boris was just a bit more pro green compared to Rishi which I why I preferred Rishi as chancellor.

I like Rishi. I think he suffered from having to follow Boris and Liz Truss.

I admired him. Steady hand. Intelligently steered us through the banking crisis, and his restructuring of bank vs treasury has been good in my view.

He wasn’t perfect, but I think he is unusual in politics, in that he is a man of integrity.

Indigo is correct. I only have O Level Maths (and not a good grade) and I can see that taxing a smaller and smaller group of peopl just doesnt work.

Make Stamp Duty double what it is and no one moves,they will wait unitl next year or the year after. Time and time again its been proved that if you reduce say SD it will kick start the housing market or even give inventives to older people often in houses that can often be too much for them to downsize.

No, there are a group of people who for whatever reason, poor choices in men resulting in children that the men dont support, messing about in education, little work ethic, jumping on the band wagon of 'poor mental health' and they all want someone else to pay for their choices. As long as it isnt them that's fine. Ignore their cash in hand jobs, lets go after the multi millionairs. Wait - they have all left....

1 in 8 of our young people not in education or working. That is truly disgraceful.

Trying to get growth while further disincentivising anyone to invest would be a spectacularly stupid thing to do. When ever anyone suggests this it makes me think that they either really don’t understand how the economy actually works or they’re just desperate for someone else, anyone else, to pay for an easy solution to their problems and that’s blinded them to logic.

Benefits do need to be cut. That’s the one thing she is is not wrong about. She just isn’t cutting them deep enough. Everyone knows that the millions claiming disability benefits are not all genuinely disabled, unable to work. The system is a joke and people are milking it.

The middle class definitely need to be taxed more. In fact they are the only people who can support increasing taxes. Poor people have no money and rich people are mobile.

They don't need taxing on earned income though, because this just persuades people not to work. The only exception to this IMO should be the tax relief on pension contributions, which should be changed to 50% of what it is currently. This still gives a reasonable incentive to save while raising extra revenue. We also need to ensure pensions are ring fenced for inheritance tax - that is once money is put into a pension and receives tax relief it will become liable for inheritance tax.

All the other extra taxation should go on assets and unearned income.

I think the problem with this government is they really had a opportunity to change round the way things are done, but they have fluffed it. Why ? I think maybe three reasons, one is because the need for change is not pressing enough (we will get there, just not at the moment), the second is because the government is running scared of making significant changes due to what happened to Truss. The final one is the promises they made in order to get themselves elected, which have led to them being hamstrung. They are simply out of options to implement any significant change without breaking the promises they made.

Thus we are getting the same old old, another 5 years of Tory government.

Starmer has a choice, he can be the journeyman policitian who no one remembers or he can try to do something different and change the country. That comes with a lot of risk of course. And the longer he leaves it, the more risky it is to Labour regaining power at the next election, because changes often lead to things getting worse before they get better and we are already getting close to 1 year in power for Starmer.

But nowhere near as highly as workers wages. That's the problem and it needs addressing. Passive/unearned income needs to be taxed more heavily than workers wages.

I agree. Back in the noughties a newspaper did a huge graphic as to the ministers and shadow ministers and other influential political positions, and how they were linked, lots of links as to where they were educated, where they previously worked together, marriages and relationships, broader family and friends, etc., and the links between the two main parties were really surprising, when you have, say, a Labour minister living with a Tory researcher, or two opposing cabinet positions who'd been educated in the same place, worked in the same place, saw each other socially and did sports/hobbies together. It really is all two cheeks of the same arse except for a few exceptions. I think it's all a game to a lot of them, just in it for themselves and a bright prosperous future after the end of their political careers due to contacts made, promises of jobs for favours, etc.

@43percentburnt A country will never tax its way to wealth. The rich will leave and those that have no money will stay.

The group Patriotic Millionaires would refute this. The ultra high net worth bunch are fleecing us, they don’t pay a proportionately fair share of tax. It needs to change.

£1bn is 1000 x £1m. There isn’t a person alive who needs this much money. Or even half of it.