To think Labour is not the party of the working people.

Wha a shame this thread has gone the way it is.

The way to do it is incentivise, particularly SMEs

So how & who would you incentivise? SMEs are not going to turn around years of low productivity

Their policies are shit, unless you’re on Iv and have more than two kids!!!!

On Iv? What is that, please?

As a relatively young pensioner, who saved for retirement from self-employment and the proceeds of DH's SME, I'd be happy to forgo the free bus pass and the free meds. DH would have continued to buy his annual pre-payment multi-prescription pass for £110. Well-off pensioners might grumble a bit, but would eventually accept that if you own your own home and have a personal plus state pension, then some restrictions on entitlements need imposing: perhaps via an age limit (the over-85s?) or available only with certain medical diagnoses/disabilities.

Withdrawing, then restoring the WFA was an own goal, but the ceiling should have been limited to around the equivalent of NMW. I am sure that the triple lock will have to go, but an average of inflation and wage increases would need to be retained because whatever MN thinks, there are a great many elderly people, most of them women, who get by on the state pension and maybe a few quid monthly pension from a PT job.

I would limit the scope of the NHS to remove fertility treatments and some elective procedures, including non-emergency caesareans. If you are too posh to push, pay privately. If the NHS pathway for elective care is very long, I think there should be a tax credit for anyone paying privately for e.g. cataracts or orthopaedic surgeries.

All children's medical care, including basic dentistry, should be free, but not orthodontics.

I would retain the two child cap, because all the stuff about children in poverty is based on a relative and arbitrary definition of poverty.

I'd like to see large parts of the civil service on a hiring freeze, but HMRC expanded.

But all this is just skirting around the issue of disability. What disabilities are sufficient to qualify for the higher levels of social support? The medical advances since the 1950s have been remarkable and we all welcome the progress but the future for premature babies has improved so much. My cousin's 23 week DD is now 30; apart from minor learning difficulties, she has a normal life. But we have all read about the (possibly apocryphal) individual's

whose school transport budget is £90k pa.

Should anxiety qualify a young person for benefits? What training should be provided for those unsuited to a mainstream academic education? These are questions for us all.

And housing? Prohibitively expensive in most of the southern UK or even anywhere there's decent employment prospects. Rather less of a mountain to climb elsewhere, but nurses, teachers, office, construction, engineering, retail and hospitality jobs are all over. Doctors, accountants and lawyers likewise.

But the government and its regulation of the economy has to be moderated in light of the size of the enterprises being regulated. It's ridiculous to expect a small company with one part-time admin person to follow the same rule book as Sainsbury's.

No, it was not meant to be a dig at all.

I don't know, there's a level of targeted support in this that I think might be helpful for young people who've never really been in work, pre-employment training and so on... but the proof will be in the pudding I guess!

I see is that meant to be some sort of dig? I don’t even go on those Trump threads, I stick to Labour ones. It’s pretty obvious since you seem to follow my posts.

Ah, apologies, I think perhaps I was confusing you with RingoJuice.

I've voted yabu, because you were dumb enough to vote for labour and think this wouldn't be the case. It's what happens every time they get in. Preach from their ivory towers, whilst shafting the working class. The conservatives aren't any better, except they don't try to hide it the way that labour do.

That is a bit of a classic through is it? Government fucks up strategy for minimum wages and national insurance for young people. Rather than say you fucked up create a new and complicated scheme to administer which effectively reverses your previous policy.

What where did you get that impression? Re the US

What about this? Looks like a trial run taking place now, then will be rolled out across the whole country later in the year. Hopefully will help lots of young people:

www.gov.uk/government/publications/jobs-guarantee/jobs-guarantee-grant-guidance

Who is 'us'? I thought you lived in the US? Germany has an absolutely lunatic energy policy - apparently nuclear is too dangerous but digging up half of Saxony for the dirtiest coal imaginable (lignite) and buying gas from Putin is just dandy.

What about Peter Kyle?

I think it’s more for us less for them. Germany for example is very much hit by the Ukraine Russia war and now Iran. On energy they feel it quite quickly.

There you go, imagining things that no-one has ever said.

It's a factor, just as it is in the poor performance of the UK economy.

How do a few customs paperwork wreck entire economies?

You think what’s happening to the EU economically is due to Brexit?

Yes, Brexit was a disaster for the rest of the EU too. The UK was 18% of the whole EU economy prior to Brexit and losing that from a single market is obviously going to have profound effects. It would be the same as if California was no longer part of the US.

I don’t know why you’re yawning. Your comment was a little confusing which is why I asked you to clarify. You said “I get zero help from UC”. That infers you’d like some help from UC.

What would you like the government to do to help you? Were you better supported under the last government and there’s something you’d like brought back?

I find the blanket blaming of governments a bit tiresome at this point, there’s only so many levers they can pull in the face of wider economic impacts - Brexit, trade wars with America, global energy prices, globalised wealth (ie the very wealthy moving all their wealth off shore) etc.

People in the U.K. are so entitled, they demand high quality services, a social safety net, and low taxation. Labour are bending over backwards to not increase the tax burden and are then constantly attacked for the poor public services which result from that.

We are 23rd once you account for population. And even that is massively skewed due the large number of high earners in London and the Southeast. We also have incredibly low productivity once you get out of London and the SE due to lack of investment in modernisation, automation, and skills.

Ultimately, while we may have the 6th highest GNI in the world that is spread among a very large number of people.

How does a few small frictions in what is technically a free trade deal ruin an entire economy?

Most pensioners are also tax payers.