Are things in the UK as bad as it sounds in the news?

[Lolobella]

I left the UK in 2017 and now live in Europe. I obviously still follow the UK news closely and visit, although I have no family left there.

In the last few months the UK news have become increasingly grim and concerning. I can't tell if it is just the news painting the country in a worse light than necessary, or if things are genuinely as bad as the news make it sound.

Obviously this is a tough historical moment for many countries, but the doom and gloom in UK news is just on another level and makes if sound like the country is in free fall. Poverty, strikes, crazy energy prices, failing NHS and public services.. Is it really so bad?!

I imagine they haven’t got a full handle on what tax changes will mean wrt behaviour.

But I’d be interested to see more. There was a good piece the other day on the treasury using a static model. Guy was good at talking about tax changing behaviour and that it’s not always considered.

How would Labour test perception and behaviour change with all parties?

But my point is what is the alternative to more tax?

Pay for nurses held at 4% - which means nurses continue to leave the NHS.

Pay them say 10% but to afford that we have to raise the money either borrowing or tax, extra growth wont happen in the next 2 or 3 years with a wide ranging recession on the cards.

There's wealth in assets. Just about the only wealth that's worth taking note of now that we've printed all that money. Not just property - although most other countries have some kind of property tax - but objects also. Christie's for eg is doing fucking fine. That's where people have been putting their money. Tax that.

Ideal way is people earning more so they pay higher tax. More people working instead of being economically inactive due to sickness or childcare responsibilities (quite difficult to fix that). investment in infrastructure and housebuilding which generate gdp by definition (business activity which is taxed).

Rich should be taxed too but it is much harder to tax them as they have assets rather than income..we could tax their assets but they would register it under the name of an offshore company..

I do agree that higher wages would solve a lot of the problems. And get rid of the need for all these ridiculous wage top ups via benefits. Maybe that means losing a few businesses. But what use is it having town after town where the entire economy is forty fucking coffee/cake shops staffed by employees who claim universal credit kept afloat by customers spending their universal/pension credit money?

That takes change though not just hammering SMEs via suddenly increasing minimum wage. It just closes businesses.

Oth on a small level take the supermarket thread where some posters are upset scan and go is replacing staff. Also see posts re earning better at Aldi. Lifting wages through technology is not always welcomed. And that’s before unions oppose change. But that’s the start of higher productivity.

I’m for it whilst we have a labour shortage though.

Need higher productivity to go with wage increase..if not it will just increase inflation. It's really not easy to fix which is why the Tories need to go.

How would Labour deal with the issue?

All that work credit stuff expanded under last Labour, what would they do differently this time?

Missing the point, raising wages across the board in order to increase tax take will take a decade plus, increase MW ?
what happens to wages just above this? soon every low paid worker is on MW or their wages have to increase, which as Marsha points out, hammers SME's.

So how do we pay NHS staff my 10% pay rise? or do keep to 4% and let the NHS run down further?

We need a solution now, not in 5 10 or 15 years.

Its to tax more, one would be to tax dividend income and get rid of the ISA wrapper.

Higher wages can drive higher productivity by circulating more cash and encouraging investment in infrastructure and training. Certainly we can't continue as we have been.

There are a lot of SMEs that are just recycling benefit money though. They're no use to anyone.

The answer to the tax question may well be in that list of countries below doing better than us

I see tax havens, low tax in that list but high natural resource for higher tax

Maybe there’s a country that taxes but is ok. I was going to say Germany but that has lower corporate tax

The U.K. has to stay attractive. The answer after that is something other than making it unattractive

Might be wrong but i thought both Germany and France have higher CT rates, 30% and 28% respectively atm.

A failed NHS doesn't make the UK attractive, public service provision is something a FI would look at for their employees.

Maybe it was a quick google that threw up

Corporation tax is levied at a uniform rate of 15% and is then subject to a surcharge of 5.5% (solidarity surcharge). This results in a total tax rate of 15.825%.

I didn’t look further as too much google

On healthcare most have private, it’s standard in my sector, but for FI friends they also had births, we didn’t. They are looked after pretty well from what I can see

Here you go.
taxfoundation.org/corporate-tax-rates-europe-2022/

UK is going up to 25% isn't it.

Yes many higher end will have PHI for employees but not all by any means, let alone private schooling.

Tax like exchange rates are not the be all for companies moving, as both can change very quickly.

We need a solution to the NHS/Strikes effecting us, that requires money
Its doing huge damage to our image abroad, just as the Yellow vests did for France, no one likes instability.

Don't wish to bang on but no one is answering how we raise billions to settle the NHS strike.

They won't win this one, nurses will very easily make good the lost income by going on bank and the mood is defiant.

Re strikes I don’t know what the outcome will be. I listen to each side when on the radio and it’s hard to tell where it will end up.

It may well drag on until inflation falls and then an inflation matching pay rise is easier.

But who knows

It's not just pay though, with the strikes. With the rail strike for eg it's also about financial mismanagement of the ROC contracts. Similar with royal mail.

For me its the NHS strikes that need sorting and the Govt should be careful, it will reflect very badly on them.

RCN said they will suspend if they will talk money, Govt refuses, comes across as uncaring, Barclay got what for by a mum today on a childrens ward.

No one but a fool picks a fight with nurses, Sunak wont win this one.

RM and rail are tricky as demand has fallen post pandemic for rail and due to letters / parcel issue for RM

In most private companies a drop in demand means redundancies

They also want to go down the TTIP route only with canada added as well. We REALLY don't want to do this

Yes thats true but rail and post are to all intents and purposes public services.

How do you run a rail network or have universal delivery if you get rid of staff?

So a train 1/2 full needs the same number of staff to run as one full or you compromise safety, same with post, if RM need to deliver to Scotland or Cornwall at the same price and timescale as in central London, takes staff.

Also if our taxes weren't used to prop up all these privatised companies which would cost us less and could be brought back under gov (our) control, that would help. As would getting rid of KPMG, Capita and all these other not fit for purpose 'consultancies' that are bankrupting us. There are alsomagic money treeswhen it suits them

Yes we subsidised rail to a fair amount during pandemic, not sure if still doing so

But they need to lift ticket prices, take more taxpayer money or reform. Rail is ££ already so probably latter

People seriously think Starmer is going to tax the rich too much? We are talking about the same Starmer, right? The one who campaigned to be Labour leader based on a bunch of pledges promising to continue the policy direction of Corbynism, then promptly threw them all in the bin (including the one about raising taxes on the rich), expelled most of the left of his own party and abstained on raising corporation tax?

What has he actually said to this effect? The only thing I've seen is the windfall tax idea on energy wholesalers to fund lower prices, which is exactly what SHOULD be happening and can't possibly be faulted as "driving away investment" since those mega-profits had nothing to do with investment in the first place, they're just an outcome of freak uncontrollable international events.

A pp said Starmer was to the right of Blair/Brown. Actually I'm not sure this is strictly true as Starmer has no ideological attachment to anything. It would probably be more accurate to say he's even more of a pragmatist than Blair - and few would have thought that possible. It probably means much the same thing in the end though, because he won't do anything to rock the establishment's boat, upset or challenge voters' perceptions. (Just look at the whole Brexit thing - he was the absolute driving force under Corbyn trying to steer the LP to an unequivocal Remain position. Now he's got such heartfelt respect for all those red wall Leavers that even talk of single market or customs union is out of the question. 😆)

The only thing that could drag the UK back from its agonising slow suicide is genuine structural reform based on addressing the realities of where wealth lies, how it's distributed and what it's relationship is to labour, to property and to class. Some practical manifestations of that might be a Land Value Tax, an updating of council tax bands, taxing capital gains at least equally to income or preferably higher, abolishing non dom status and massively simplifying the tax code to close loopholes for the rich. But the political will has to be there to face reality, both among the political class and the electorate as a whole, before those kinds of conversations can even be had. At the moment we're nowhere near that happening and people are still arguing about whether 1% this way or that on income tax will Save The NHS or Eliminate All Investment, as if it were 50 years ago and capitalism was still working.

None of that's going to change under Starmer, whose entire modus operandi consists of telling people what they want to hear. The most we can hope for is that the suicide happens a bit more slowly. I'm not even sure that's a good thing.