Uk totally messed up - is anything good?

Would have made no difference if every younger person voted in the last election. The Boomers demographically are way ahead and are far more right leaning than the Gen Z/millennial cohort (as a majority).

Similar with the Brexit result.

@FreeZor You said: Brexit was a symptom of a disengaged, poorly educated society who are incapable of having a functional democracy because democracy is predicated on the assumption that the electorate are capable of voting in a rational manner.

Are you proposing a dictatorship or something? What do you propose to replace democracy with?

Such a mess. 😔

My worry is that living standards will drop even more sharply for the generation who are still children now. Fundamental changes need to be made to have any chance of mitigating this. But I can understand why young people don't vote. No party is offering them policies that will genuinely address these issues, that are realistic and targeted at the right priorities.

Brexit is responsible for around £50bn per year of lost tax revenue currently. Interestingly, almost exactly the amount that the tax burden has risen in recent years...

It is the most stupid and pointless and idiotic, self-destructive thing any developed country has done for a long time because it had absolutely zero chance of being anything but a complete shit show. It's not even cutting off your nose to spite your face but shooting yourself in the foot and then the face as well for good measure.

But it's by no means the only cause of the UK's problems. It was rather the cherry on the cake: the final flourish so obviously insane that if the electorate couldn't even grasp that this bright red cherry on top of the "how to fuck up your country for generations" cake was indeed a cherry and it still did not draw their attention to this cake and make them wonder who was eating it, then the politicians would have the message loud and clear that they can do whatever they like and the electorate will do nothing about it. Brexit was a symptom of a disengaged, poorly educated society who are incapable of having a functional democracy because democracy is predicated on the assumption that the electorate are capable of voting in a rational manner.

Thanks @FreeZor Really interesting information there.

It's a bloody mess isn't it. I wish more older people would vote with the next generation in mind and that more young people would get out there and vote.
Less than half of under 24 year olds voted in the last general election and they have the most to lose if things continue as they are.

Also the now exhorbitant (and largely untaxed) rise in housing costs over the last few decades to now 8 x salaries on average is a direct transfer of wealth from younger cohorts to those now retired/ some of the Gen X generation who also benefitted immensely. This unearned wealth is another source of the funding behind very comfortable early retirements and is being paid for by the squeezed generation who've had no real-terms salary increases in 15 years, are paying the highest income taxes ever, paying huge childcare costs, paying student loans, paying for state pensions the like of which they'll never receive themselves, then also got hammered by the interest rate hikes on the huge mortgages they had to take out if they wanted a stable home for their children due to their parents having enthusiastically voted for policies that inflated the value of assets far above the value of earned income.

Brexit lies at the core of all the problems that we are currently facing.

Because many of those private pensions are either: 1) public final salary pensions in unfunded schemes therefore being paid out of current tax revenue; or 2) private ones which have cost companies/ organisations so much that this has depressed the amount of money available to spend on salaries for current staff of working age. This is a well-documented economic effect.

Obviously that isn't the case for those who have funded early retirement entirely out of private savings and investments in ISAs/ defined contribution schemes. But the majority taking early retirement are in receipt of DB scheme pensions per the above. Then on top of all of that state pensions are being paid out at ages and values that the working people currently funding them will never receive themselves and that many of those currently claiming them paid nowhere near enough tax during their lifetimes to fund. To the vast majority of the current generation of those in their 30s and 40s, the idea of receiving any sort of pension aged 60 or even before 70 will be a pipe dream.

From an economic perspective it's basically the same thing. The purpose of raising interest rates is to deliberately make everybody poorer and reduce spending power, reduce the money circulating in the economy.

In this particular case you are correct that targeted taxes would have been a far better idea, primarily on the Boomer cohort.

Instead, over recent years, it is income that has been hammered with tax, but only for a specific subset of taxpayers. The self-employed enjoy lower rates and lower earners benefit immensely from the tax free allowance which has doubled in real terms in the last 15 years and is higher than in pretty much any other country. Meanwhile we have higher earning employees on PAYE paying taxes as high as in Scandinavian countries, but receiving appalling services in return. So the rich whose income is mainly from wealth pay very low rates of tax and low to average earners pay nothing/ very little and our tax base has narrowed and become precariously dependent on around 15% of the population, with them paying at only £50k earnings sometimes marginal rates of 85% plus if they have children due to the tax cliff edge with child benefit withdrawal. At £100k earnings the marginal tax rate can go up to thousands of percent. I.e. work and earn more gross and you'll become significantly poorer^^ in net income. Obviously that is insanity if you are desperate for more tax revenue from these skilled and productive workers who you are relying on to fund everyone else. Nobody will work more for free so UK productivity remains dire and skills shortages abound as people cut their hours to avoid being penalised. And the rest of the population won't accept that if they want decent services then the only way these can be funded is by those who earn average incomes paying far more tax than they do now, like in all of the countries whose services they admire. There is no other way to fund it, it's mathematically impossible.

The interest rate hike was an unsuitable way to curb inflation for a number of reasons including that the cohort it hit the hardest were those mentioned above: those already hammered with fiscal drag and tax and childcare and high housing costs. These are the people with large mortgages. But they also tend to use almost all of their money on essentials so cannot really cut their spending much (the change the interest rate rise is designed to encourage).

Meanwhile the cohort who already had the highest disposable income of any group on average (pensioners, who are better off that working age people now on average) actually benefitted from the interest rate hike because they have the majority of the country's wealth (again obviously talking averages here before somebody pipes up that they are a pensioner and poor and didn't benefit personally. 🙄 There's always at least one who doesn't grasp that analysis of demographic and economic issues must use averages and generalisations and takes discussion of such things as a personal insult because they think the entire world revolves around them 😵‍💫). So the people who had the ability to spend on non-essentials were given more disposable income by the higher rates. Also these days with most mortgages on fixed rates the impact of an interest rate increase is far slower, and it affects a far smaller number of people due to the rise in private renting and number of retirees who own outright.

So yes, you are correct, a well-targeted tax would have been better. The BoE had no choice but to raise rates though because of their mandate and it being the only lever they have. It is fiscal policy from Government that should have been different. But they would never have contemplated the alternatives like reducing pensioner welfare/ taxing pensioner assets/ making pensioners pay NI/ equalising capital gains tax and income tax because the pensioners vote for them. They just continue to hammer those of working age even though the economic damage it is doing is crystal clear and is storing up even more problems for the future.

No investment and no growth in the last 15 years.

I agree with pp that it started with George Osbourne and his austerity but I think you can go further back to privatisation. That was the turning point in ‘modern’ politics, selling housing/water/transport for profit.

Thoroughly depressing and yet the media is obsessed by King Charles (yes I wish him well).

We love our Tories too much in the UK.

Labour's turn for a bit now though and they haven't got many answers.

Lots of people do realise. It’s very difficult to admit they were fooled though.

Tony Blair wasn't wrong when he said Education, Education, Education was he? But maybe not in the way that he meant it. Are we (the general population) supposed to be less educated now? Sources of information seem to be so dumbed down. Politics has been reduced to stupid three word slogans and shock tactics instead of anything being debated or explained properly. Brexit being a prime example. Almost nobody was informed enough to vote on such a cataclysmic change.
Rishi Sunak was prompted to agree with Piers Morgan that Keir Starmer is a 'terrorist sympathiser' during that interview yesterday. Is that where we are now?

The Tories would never do this because raising taxes would take more from the rich than it would from the less well off. They do everything they can to protect the better off.

Inflation on the other hand ensures that those with money still can get a nice rise on there savings, house prices can continue to rise and the stuff that they sell will still make them money.

It sounds like the South is beginning to feel what it's been like to live in the North for a very long time...

@FreeZor I agree with much of what you say, but can't understand why you say 30 - 40 year olds fund early retirement for anyone. State pension can't be taken early. Those of us who retire early with private pensions pay tax on the money we receive at the same rate as employees.

I and many other older people have spent a lifetime voting for a better life for others. We are not all the same I promise you.

so dear working mums and dads, keep working please. Free lunch does not exist anywhere in the world.

and again, observe, we cannot move forward without working mums and dads.

Now, forgive me, someone from an ex commnist country here. We had our version of free nhs, free all, free education, free uni, free uni accomodation with all bills for free included, cheap food, great holidays, tons of rubbish everywhere

now, imagine, this is what I see now, here. Makes me actually very happy and comfortable because life here is as easy, as it was back then in my country. As long mum and dad work of course. Now, are we on the way to 1984 ? Perhaps and may be .....I am not a conspiracy theorist but don't you understand that the government is basically dictating everything here one way or the other - just throwing my points into this wonderful mix

😂😂😂😂

Arent they great?😂

We have the most capable and trustworthy politicians I've seen in my lifetime.

We are also a world leader in sarcasm.

We now seem to believe that its role is to protect the rich.

I cannot understand the mentality of those who vote out of self interest in order to keep money for themselves and pay less tax.

Surely no amount of money elevates you to a place where you don't experience the pot holed roads, the state of A & E if you have an accident, crime caused by poverty, the sewage in the sea when you go to your second home in Cornwall etc etc. As you go about your life the effects of this whittling away of quality of life must be evident.

Do the selfish rich really not care what goes on outside their electric gates? They should shouldn't they?

There has been a series of unfortunate events beyond our control (Covid, Russian war etc) however, had the country been properly managed after the financial crisis things would be nowhere near as dire as they are now. At that point in time the Government could borrow at negative interest rates over a very long period. A huge investment in infrastructure, skills, energy and food security and developing key growth sectors in technology, medicine etc should have been implemented at that point rather than austerity. This would have led to growth and rising living standards instead of a decade of stagnation so that we went into this period of turbulence since 2019 in a very weak position. Then we have a Government so utterly incapable of understanding basic economics that they thought a solution to our economic problems would be to trash our international trading relationship despite us having a huge balance of payments deficit already. It was blatantly obvious that Brexit would permanently damage the economy and make everyone poorer. While there have always been economic peaks and troughs it is unprecedented to have 15 years of zero real-terms salary growth. And with further geopolitical instability to come, natural resources dwindling and eight of the ten largest cities on Earth being in coastal areas that will be underwater in a few decades due to climate change, we've seen nothing yet in terms of mass migration. Not a situation in which it's a good idea to be reliant on importa for basics like food and energy...

The generation now in their 30s and 40s have been royally screwed with the highest childcare costs of any developed country, huge housing costs, student debt, no salary growth throughout their careers, inflation, Brexit, a terrible education system for their children, and now massive hikes in interest rates while they fund early retirement for those whose generation bled the state dry, sold off everything of value, let infrastructure crumble and created this mess, but repeatedly chant how they "have earned" the pensions and benefits that they paid nowhere near sufficient tax to fund.

Part of the problem is an extremely badly educated electorate who seem unable to understand basic economics or that the social contract includes responsibilities as well as rights. People do not demand change and are happy to tolerate this ongoing mismanagement, even actively vote for it. Refuse to look at data and assert that opinions based on fantasy are of equal value to those based on data and facts. There is truth in the saying that a country gets the Government it deserves. While this would always have been a relatively difficult period due to external events, the majority of the UK's problems were entirely foreseeable and avoidable.

I agree with @TheNoonBell that most of the west is in a state of managed decline and sadly this will only get worse with living standards continuing to fall sharply over the coming decades. Gross mismanagement in the UK has hastened the process: counterproductive domestic economic policies, absurd foreign/ trade policies, an economically damaging tax and benefits system that politicians know is damaging but refuse to change, no investment in the key areas required to improve things, plus a refusal to reform areas like healthcare and eye-watering unfunded pension liabilities that are not even included in the national accounts that are quite obviously unsustainable. It is a mathematical certainty that these things will HAVE to be changed because the country literally cannot pay them, but they'll wait until collapse until they do so, causing far more damage. And a chancellor so inept that he has arranged around 1/4 of recent Government borrowing on an index-linked basis so the one benefit of the recent high inflation (reducing the real-terms value of our debt) was not available! You really couldn't make it up. Everything designed around "optics" rather than what will actually work.

Head in the sand, ostrich syndrome and no evidence-based policy making whatsoever. A refusal to do what needs to be done even when it is staring them in the face and an electorate just as irresponsible as the politicians whose answer to everything is "somebody else should pay for it".

Can someone clever perhaps explain something to me?

Why, when the government wants to reduce inflation, do they increase interest rates rather than raising taxes?

To my (potentially dim and certainly uninformed mind) increasing tax could take the same amount of money from people's pockets, thus reducing inflation, but would put money into the public purse to pay for the services we so desperately need. Increased public services would provide employment, more people would be earning and paying more tax. Is that not better?

Am I wrong or should I be Chancellor of the Exchequer?

All of this. People don’t want to see that the Tory party has literally pilfered the country to make the rich richer. They’ve been very successful.

And people keep saying “Labour will be worse!”

We seem to have no agreement about what a government should do anymore. It used to be accepted that the role of government was to make life better for as many people as possible, particularly those who cannot help themselves. We now seem to believe that its role is to protect the rich.

Both are reasonable roles I guess - it depends what your values are. But we have accepted the latter, even though it makes most of our lives worse. It baffles me.