If you tend to vote conservative can I ask a few questions - let’s keep it light and respectful!

[Holidayhavanas]

Full disclosure I tend to vote Labour, but I’m really interested to know if you tend to vote for the tories, what is your reasoning behind. the real shortage of qualified public sector workers for example teachers, social workers, police. A health service and education system on it’s knees. Police forces like Manchester and Met in special forces. I think that it’s symptomatic of years of underfunding. I work in the public sector and feel on a daily basis that the country is absolutely screwed. I assume most tory supporters would say it’s down to austerity but I feel it’s ideological cutting back on public funding. I’mgenuinely open to hear other views as I find it so depressing and just hope that it’s something I am missing. Let’s try and keep this respectful 😊

For this thread to work as intended, stating a deputy party leader is dreadful or folk were terrified of x will just get peoples backs up and lead to the kind of retorts and discourse we are trying to avoid.

Just my thoughts... others my disagree.

MN is a (tiny) reflection but a reflection nonetheless of the population generally. There has been lots written about people becoming much more engrained and therefore polarised in their views in recent years.

I think those other posts referred to and several threads on here demonstrate that every day. It’s ‘you’re with me or are [insert insult]’ and people cannot get their head around someone’s opinion or experience being different to theirs.

On IHT I’m fine with system as it is. I would not increase it nor decrease

If people feel strongly then donating wealth is a good idea

But I’m ok as it stands

For IHT to stay the same it has to then reflect house price increases or the TH is effectively being cut.

I don’t know much about inheritance tax but assumed it may have been brought in by a Labour Government, but no it was established in 1986 by conservatives. My view is that the party is really only there for their mates at Eton i.e the elite and old boys network here. Non doms and big businesses getting through tax loopholes whilst the rest of us work hard all our lives paying taxes and even get taxed when we are dead, just seems unfair. I would support IHT if there was a fairer tax system for the super rich.

How long has non dom allowance been in place and have Labour tried to overturn it? Out of interest

Or have they changed tax for big business?

It’s better to view U.K. as trying to be competitive globally with tax rates and which countries can attract high earning businesses especially - as they employ and invest

You could make it so onerous you don’t get many high end paying tax burden but it won’t help those lower down at all - as the tax burden will increase for them instead.m

Obviously you do need some tax from high end but top earners do take majority of tax burden in U.K. and corporation tax is fairly attractive but some places are much lower to attract business

Whilst we can debate the fairness of IHT in terms of wealth equality, that money stays largely ‘in the system’. People who benefit from it are spending/saving/not using the public purse so much. Endogenous economics.

Multi-nationals paying no tax, taking profits and paying shareholders outside the UK is a triple whammy. This is where the real value and wealth lies and I’m convinced is the only way to generate sufficient taxation income medium term.

Death duties were first introduced in 1796 @Holidayhavanas. Hence, I imagine, the saying that the only certainties are death and taxes. Non Dom status was introduced at around the same time. Income tax was introduced as a temporary measure to fund the Napoleonic Wars. That’s how archaic our tax system is.

Inheritance tax in 1986 was just basically a name change as it replaced Capital Transfer Tax, which itself replaced Estate Duty in 1974, Estate Duty having been put in place in 1894 . Prior to 1894 there were other similar taxes, such as Probate Duty (1694), Legacy Duty (1780) Succession Duty (1853), Corporation Duty (1885), all of which were replaced by Estate Duty in 1894. So different names, but basically the same kind of tax.

So, no, there was effectively the same tax for centuries before the Tories did a pretty minor change of changing the name (and a few other technicalities) in 1986!

I agree, but you need international agreement to stop the international aspects of evasion/avoidance. There are working parties trying to achieve cross-border agreements, but it's very slow progress.

Tax haven countries are, obviously, not keen on stamping down on opaque structures, low taxes, anonymity, etc., as for many of them, the tax avoidance industry is their main economy.

It's a tricky balance. You want companies to locate in the U.K., which punitive corporate tax will discourage. The LSE has recently relaxed its listing rules, which has tempted some companies to IPO in London, rather than Amsterdam etc.

Then again, companies such as Amazon and Starbucks managing to pay very little U.K. tax given their substantial profit generated in the U.K. seems wrong.

Things aren't clear cut with Amazon. It's only their "commission" which gets offshored. Most of the goods sold are from smaller firms, usually UK based, who are just using Amazon as a selling platform (like Ebay or Etsy), so when you buy something from Amazon, you're mostly buying from small UK companies (even if direct from Amazon factories as most sellers use their fulfilment services where the sellers send their goods to be stores in Amazon warehouses until they're sold, so they can be despatched quickly/directly). Amazon are also employing huge numbers of people in warehouses and delivery drivers, plus a huge back office admin/support staff, so there's lots of tax and NIC being paid by their staff. Plus of course, most things sold on Amazon are VATable so there'll be VAT being paid to UK Treasury. So, lots of different people, people different kinds of tax, mostly to UK Treasury, throughout their UK sales/warehouse/distribution network. I'm sure that "some" of the Amazon charges/commissions end up in tax havens subject to lower tax rates, but I think the amount is very small in proportion to all the taxes that are paid in the UK on their sales/operations.

You're right. One of my good friends is a transfer pricing specialist so I don't want to be too disloyal and kill her revenue stream!

*This is the tone and type of post I mean too which has created an echo chamber when it comes to politics threads

I’ve been on mn a while and imo it started during pandemic when abuse was aimed at people who felt differently. Then politics threads where it is a poor discussion if not majority view*

I'd say it actually started much earlier. The Brexit threads were very polarised and vitriolic, then the 'Tory voters are stupid or scum' very much showed itself on threads during the last general election.

It was another reason that I would not have considered voting for Labour, as I wouldn't want to align myself with a party whose supporters felt comfortable spewing abuse at people that disagreed with them.

@fakename13778

It was another reason that I would not have considered voting for Labour, as I wouldn't want to align myself with a party whose supporters felt comfortable spewing abuse at people that disagreed with them.

The abuse was a massive "shoot yourself in the foot" moment, as elections are won and lost in the middle ground (Blair's "Mondeo Man"). Labour NEED floating voters to win an election. So, they NEED voters who've previously voted Tory, either regularly or occasionally. By insulting people who occasionally vote Tory, they're not going to get those floating votes!

Yes!

this is where I am as a voter who swings and previously voted Blair but then as middle ground swung away from Corbyn’s Labour

I find the attacks really off putting - it doesn’t do Labour / left any favours

Another way to look at this though is that we’ve chosen to allow the population to increase faster than the increase in housing stock. England is a relatively densely populated country, and it’s not clear that choosing to increase that population density and then to build the housing, schools, roads, factories, hospitals etc to deal with that is the best plan.

Gordon Brown in particular also chose to conflate investment and spending; claiming that X million had been “invested in” one area or another when what was actually happened was that more had been spent, and yes, as you say, to use the spend as the important measure rather than the outcomes.

When Brown was Chancellor the NHS was very much focused on outcomes.

www.kingsfund.org.uk/publications/high-performing-nhs

I don’t think that any of those are far right. Removing the whip is a very strange one in particular to make that claim for.

Sanctions on benefit claimants are not right-wing at all. If someone is on a benefit that has conditions attached (such as searching for work, or not having savings over a certain level) then of course they should be paused or withdrawn while those conditions are not met.

Reduced taxes for bankers? I’ve not seen that, what tax breaks / reductions have we been given? I’m pretty sure that we pay the same in taxes as workers in any other area who are on the same wages.

When Brown was Chancellor the NHS was very much focused on outcomes.

Part of it is how one advertises wins. If the marketing is 'look how much we've invested' rather than 'look at these outcomes', then the general perception is going to be that you've spent a lot of money with no return regardless of the actual good you have done. 'We've invested millions in...' doesn't wash well when the person on the ground doesn't feel the difference.

The Conservatives are much better at this than Labour, in my opinion. They focus less on cash spent and more on what they've got right (small wins those might be). The media does the job of focussing on cash spent.

No, that’s not a tenable view. The commitments that he signed up for on PFI contracts were massively expensive and not at all focussed on outcomes. They were entirely an accounting trick to pretend that state debts were not correctly included in the national debt statistics.

Apologies for my facetious comment to BlossomToes yesterday.

However, @StRaphael, @MsFrenchie and @MarshaBradyo are all correct IMO about the real complexities of taxing multi-national and global businesses. For every legislator trying to draft tax law, there's a small army of lawyers and accountants working out ways to frustrate or defeat their intentions.

It’d be helpful if those angry at the amount of tax paid by companies such as Apple and Amazon could explain which taxes they think are being unfairly avoided, and what they should be getting taxed on.

The Guardian has a real,habit of conflating turnover with profit, and comparing tax paid with the former rather than the latter, which is obviously ludicrous.

Are those who think taxes are being unfairly avoided guilty of making the same mistake?