Thread 38 Starmer: Tax your Hamster

[DuncinToffee]

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https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/_chat/5440759-thread-37-starmer-pinko-commie-slimeball?page=1

Political and general discussion with bonus recipes

Taxes optional but greatly appreciated

And, I suspect, a lot of gaslighting about the medias role.

Now I am not the brightest of bunnies, but I don't recall reading anywhere official that there was going to be an income tax rise. That seems to have been a media hallucination (which makes me wonder how much "AI" was involved).

However pushing an agenda to incite market movement by the gullible is great way to grift. That's all I can say.

😂

It’ll be hard to get up tomorrow and not tiptoe downstairs to see if Rachel Reeves has eaten the mince pie and drunk the sherry.

It is very odd!

🤣

And smashed your piggy bank to pieces.

Also - or is this another sign of my descent into madness - didn't budgets used to be in March ? Was there a memo I missed ?

No it’s not just you @SerendipityJane. DH (ex Civil Service) was saying this (and bemoaning the vanishing of ‘purdah’ as well as was Ken Clarke on The News Agents).
Google tells me that Gordon Brown that moved it to the Spring and Philip Hammond moved it back to Autumn.
Though in my memory it was always March.

It definitely ilused to be in March when I trained as a Chartered Accountant in the early 80s. One year it was on my birthday and at the budget day session for clients they sang happy birthday to me and had a birthday cake.

😆depends whether you've been naughty or nice!

Of course!

I can remember in the 70s and 80s budget day was a Tuesday in March with queues of cars at petrol stations trying to beat the 6pm tax hike.

Well today is the day I gave up on the Labour Party. Screw Lammy’s proposals for the effective end of jury trials.

You know I said this government couldn’t do something more repressive than lockdown. I was wrong. Sod them. This kind of society is illiberal and cruel. Fund it, don’t destroy criminal justice.

But I thought Labour was the only government ever to raise taxes?

I am not for this either. Although I want to see the detailed plans.

It’s not the disclosed plans, it’s the shitty internal memo leaked where he seeks his colleagues agreement in Whitehall to cut it in effect for nearly all crime. What a weasel. And if his cabinet colleagues approve it then they are overturning something that is a system of freedom from tyranny. Disgusted. I seem to recall Lammy wrote a whole report about how vital jury trials were to fairness for ethnic minorities. Well it’s not just ethnic minorities- it’s all of us.

Are you saying that countries which don't have jury trials are illiberal and cruel? Because that doesn't sound like you.

However, I do agree that a massive change like this should not be done as a cost cutting measure. I'm very much not wedded to jury trials though.

I worked in criminal justice. Jury trial is gold standard. Why should we have less? This is our system, we invented it!!!

I've sat on a jury twice. It put me right off them.

The first trial was fraud, amongst other things. It was very complex. None of the jury understood any of it. Fortunately, the guy caved and pleaded guilty. Otherwise he would have been found guilty on the grounds that he was a 'shifty looking bugger.' I quote.

Scandinavian countries dont have trial by jury, right?

Me too & stocking up on booze & cigarettes/tobacco
unlike today which here on MN has been a swamp with some of sickening stuff being posted combined with Armageddon tomorrow where everything will collapse & civil war will break out.
As for Farage he has an extremely thin veneer of being the affable pint down the pub bloke, scratch the surface he is poisonous if any of the fucking so called journalists prodded him that affability rapidly disappears that cunting grifter is full of racist bile & if the fuckwits in Clacton hadn’t elected him he would be an annoying sideshow certainly wouldn’t be the mouthpiece he is now & his followers would not be as nearly as bold, every fucking day one of reforms councillors are spewing shite added & abetted by the rabble that endorses them I am so utterly pissed off & if he is not in the pocket of Russian/Trump influence I’m fucking Margaret Thatcher reincarnated, rant over.

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/jury-trials-scrappes-court-lammy-b2872268.html

I think there's a wide range of options. But I'm from the Netherlands, which is hardly a bastion of cruelty in terms of its legal system. It doesn't have jury trials. They aren't the gold standard - other forms of justice, if well implemented are not necessarily worse. Jury trial, if implemented badly, is not necessarily better.

Sorry, but that last sentence made me laugh

Well since we have been giving this a fair trial since the Magna Carta, it’s a very important aspect of individual liberty in the UK. Juries are a lot more liberal that judges.

Lammy literally built a career complaining about the unfairness of the criminal justice system. Now he proposes to radically limit one aspect that actually goes a long way to promoting it. What a grifter

How do you think the backlog gets cleared in any other way?

I agree that juries used to be more liberal but I don't believe that is based on recent evidence. And I agree that racial bias is a problem which lies within the law as an institution. But it has also been found in jury trials. As have other prejudices.

I'm sorry, but the 'we've always done it that way' argument just doesn't hold any water for me. There were lots of things done at the time of Magna Carta that we don't do anymore.