Labour policies unrealistic

Given that for practically every child in the uk who attends school or are home educated and every student in further education, the bulk of their homework/course work is done online as a necessity. Parents are kept updated online. Most office/tech jobs/jobs in general do not end at the close of the business day but carry on in to home life (teachers for example).

Equalising poorer families accessibility to this improves opportunities for the more vulnerable members of our society.

(Not even including those that must manage job searches and benefits online).

Labour's policies are considered standard in most Scandinavian countries

Many of his state aid policies would be illegal under EU competition rules so they would not be standard in most Scandinavian countries.

Most Scandinavian countries and Germany have far higher rates of income tax starting well below the £80000 threshold Labour mentions.

@OhWhatAPalaver just wait until the economy crashes and your family is starving to death. While it’s a shame that you’re dependant on the state you will only suffer if you vote to destroy the economy because you will be the ones that will be stuck when the shit hits the fan. Forget healthcare, you’ll be worried about food in the event of a Corbynite government. I don’t know how to warn you better than to advise you look to history to see what destruction far left economics causes. Don’t vote yourself into a death sentence.

@Tatty101 if you look at their workers rights policies it’s pretty fucking clear that there will be terribly job losses. The majority of employment is provided by SMEs, they’re not going to be able to withstand these kinds of reforms. The people who run them will seek to take their skills and capital where it’s appreciated and the rest will be out of a job. If it was just a bit of extra tax it wouldn’t be so bad. But labour has piled on policy after policy which are anti wealth. It’s inevitable that wealth will decline as a result.

@getmeacupoftea many of them will leave or just give up so that magical 10% won’t be forthcoming. We’ll shit down the business (a few people will loose their jobs) and look to move abroad within a year. It’s not worth it for us. Pretty much everyone we know who is a high earner or a business owner is considering their options. Business owners in particular have said they’ll just close down because their policies will obliterate any profit so there’s no point in taking the risk and working the long hours. Their policies haven’t been properly priced.

Here’s more from the IFS - the real problems with Labour’s plans:

There are risks with both the proposed spending increases and the proposed tax rises.

It will be extremely hard simply to deliver anything like this scale of increase in capital spending, at least in the near-term, certainly in an efficient and cost effective way. If the intention really is to scrap Universal Credit and replace it with an entirely new benefit system then, as the last decade has shown, this would come with the risk of huge administrative complexity and costs. A particularly expensive commitment is on the state pension age. Rather than allowing it to rise as longevity increases, Labour wants to keep it at age 66, a very expensive pledge in the face of demographic change. This would add a projected £24 billion a year to spending by the 2050s. The commitment to abolish university tuition fees remains an expensive giveaway to the highest earning graduates and has the potential to make it difficult to maintain a system without a cap on student numbers.

On the tax side the proposals in the Labour manifesto represent an enormous increase in the amounts they want to raise from corporation tax. If their proposals did raise the sums they suggest then we would be raising more in corporation tax, as a fraction of national income, than any other country in the G7, and more than almost anywhere else in the OECD. This would clearly come with substantial risks. The truth is of course that in the end corporation tax is paid by workers, customers or shareholders so would affect many in the population. In the end, it is unlikely that one could raise the sums suggested by Labour from the tax policies they set out. If you want to transform the scale and scope of the state then you need to be clear that the tax increases required to do that will need to be widely shared rather than pretending that everything can be paid for by companies and the rich.”

CendrillonSings

Isnt the key in that article that the increase in taxes will pay for that 10% increase in day-to-day spending?

Why is Government providing services paid for by tax a bad thing? Increasing taxes on the wealthy to ensure public services are better for all is surely a positive thing for all in society?

1. theyve provided a fully costed manifesto to illustrate how they're affording the policies and
2. who disagrees with more funding for schools, or the NHS or police if it's properly funded (which is explained in the manifesto)?

I work with the elderly and some of them live in dickensian conditions. No heating, no light in one house I went to. These are people who have paid taxes all their life. And where has their money gone ??? The Tories haven't sorted out anything. 9 years and people are still struggling. No opportunities to change their circumstances.

I do hope they’re not all going to be voting Conservative .

Meanwhile, here’s the IFS analysis of Labour’s new tax and spend spree:

www.ifs.org.uk/election/2019/article/labour-manifesto-an-initial-reaction-from-ifs-researchers

The Labour Party manifesto offers a very substantial increase in the role of the state, one that is even larger than the big increase offered in their last manifesto. They estimate that their measures would push up day-to-day spending by £80 billion in 2023–24, which would be an almost 10% increase on what is currently planned. They estimate that their tax raising measures would bring in a similar sum, which if delivered would push the tax burden well above levels sustained in the UK since the Second World War.

Labour left the Tories a gigantic deficit of well over 100 billion pounds a year, cried and screamed about every Tory attempt to reduce it (“austerity”), and now the increased debt is being held against the Tories? What a joke!

Would you have liked the deficit eliminated in just a couple of years? That would have meant 50 billion + worth of cuts per year, and that would have been real austerity!

FinallyHere I was thinking that too - apparently it couldn't possibly work, yet 70+ years later, here we are ... And it wasn't just the NHS, that Labour government made huge changes to the infrastructure and social systems of this country, all of which the Tories insisted would be expensive and unworkable.

For me voting Labour is a no brainer, no matter how far fetched their policies may seem. The tories have ruined our NHS, our schools, our police force, fire service, destroyed disability benefits, declared terminal cancer patients fit for work, contributed to the deaths of over 130,000 people in the name of "austerity" .... The list is endless. I personally couldn't afford private health care and if the tories get back in, they will welcome Trump and his cronies with open arms and sell the NHS to the highest bidder. Voting Labour is literally a choice between life or death for me and my family. It sounds extreme but it is the reality of private health care. Bankruptcy and homelessness at best, death at worst.

And yet national debt has increased substantially since 2010 according to the Office for National Statistics ...

Do you think the Tory policies over the last 9 years have been realistic? Theyve cut services to the bone and STILL caused national debt

Is anyone else reminded of the doom sayers when a national health service was first proposed ?

I totally agree with making sure people on benefits have broadband and can even understand nationalising Openreach. Having everyone get broadband for free through?? Really? That £30 per month will just be raised through taxes another way. Labour are talking full fibre broadband for free so hardly a ‘basic package’.

GC - the dent rose because there was a huge gap between income and expenditure due to the financial crisis. If that gap was allowed to continue, then debt would go up extremely fast. It is hard to blame the stories for rising debt when they inherit annual spending of 100, but tax revenue of just 60. Austerity just closed that gap between income and expenditure gradually over time, but that meant that total debt continued to rise. You may disagree with how they closed it, but it is totally misleading to blame them for the existence of a gap in the first place.

And no, I will not vote Conservative because of Brexit and I find Johnson repellent.

I remember a colleague of mine who'd been in her job 20 years wittering on about how unemployed people all had phones and laptops who refused to believe me when I explained the reality of looking for and applying for jobs these days. She was convinced you could still do it all by letter!

snuggybuggy exactly, anyone who has ever had the misfortune of job hunting on a job centre machine will understand why we need vastly more accessible broadband.

I very much doubt all broadband will be free anyway. It'll just be a basic package.

Making broadband more accessible would be a bit of an equaliser given that virtually all jobseeking and access to other services is almost all online.

eyewhisker there may not be anywhere else that offers free broadband as yet but as a comparison, Belgium has free public transport.
Plenty of publicly owned broadband globally though, particularly in the US of all unlikely places!

Eyewhisker - I don’t see how my post is misleading. I agree that reductions in spending were necessary, and am also uncomfortable about a spending spree. But the fact is that the Tories have added massively to the national debt. It is now £1.8 trillion (85% of GDP), up from £1 trillion (or 60% of GDP) when they came to power. And that is with austerity, and without the huge bailout that the banks received in 2008. So the Tories have hardly “come in and sorted out the mess” as a pp claimed.

Please tell me which other countries give free broadband.

Nationalising Openreach is not totally crazy, but the free broadband is a massive cost, which will just lead to more taxes elsewhere.