To think Rishi is right - the government cannot be everything to everyone?

[Cuppasoupmonster]

Don’t get me wrong, the Tory government hasn’t tried to be anything let alone everything.

But I think he was right when he said there’s too much reliance on the state to provide for each and every issue the public face.

We could free up a lot of funds by taxing big corporations properly, cracking down on non doms etc. But even then, I’m not convinced the socialist utopia of generous benefits, a five star NHS, cheap and available high quality public housing, instant mental health support etc that is often discussed on here could ever be financially viable.

AIBU?

You'd need all countries to cooperate to achieve that. No exceptions. You'd have to persuade Switzerland to become more transparent, coerce various Caribbean islands (not to mention Monaco, Liechtenstein etc.) into giving up the perks of having more millionaires paying peanuts than actual houses.

Good luck.

I don’t think you’d have to have all countries actually.

I don’t think it’s beyond the wit of man to come up with a better answer than what we have. There’s just no will from those who could do it.

Nobody’s asking it to be all things to all people, or solve all problems.

We’re just asking them to not create new ones, and to run the country and public services competently.

I hear the Amazon name lots of times. If there is so much disapproval why not refuse to buy from them? Any taxes that are added to Amazon will be paid by us in the end anyway. 1% of the richest pay nearly 30% of overall income tax.

So we’ve moved into fantasy economics now.

Has everyone picked a country yet. Wonder what Ireland has to say about that.

"I’m not convinced the socialist utopia of generous benefits, a five star NHS, cheap and available high quality public housing, instant mental health support etc that is often discussed on here could ever be financially viable."

I see that the phrase "socialist utopia" sneaked in when describing the basics that should be available to everyone. Socialised benefits are those that are better and more affordably provided by governments than by profit-making organisations, be that education, healthcare, infrastructure etc. or are benefits that can be incentivised by government action to be provided for the population as a whole and not just to provide profit and incomes for a few corporations. For example, this could be through user-owned co-operatives rather than through government-controlled organisations or private companies.

Financial viability? Some European countries already have many of the "generous benefits" in the OP. Where I live there is five-star health provision (paid for through employer and employee contributions, just as in the UK, but ringfenced for healthcare and not administered by the government or used as a political football). There is high quality housing - either private, public or co-operative - with strict enforcement of building regulations and housing laws to avoid slums and stop rip-off landlords, but also to balance the supply of housing with the demand. Utilities are largely public-owned or co-operatively owned, so the "profits" generated go back to the customers rather than being creamed off by investors (which in the case of the UK are very often overseas investors, so money pours out of the UK economy). Education, whether academic or practical, is not the preserve of the rich or the well-connected.

It can be done, but decades of mismanagement by all of the British political parties and a refusal to acknowledge that the UK's problems are not the fault of "the EU, foreigners, experts, doomsters, scientists and cyclists" and all of the other scapegoats that are trotted out but have been caused by a rotten political system populated with rotten politicians (all of the parties have them) that makes it easy to manipulate the population and misuse Parliament.

The government is a shower of shites.

They are supposed to work for us, not the other way round.

It is absolutely their responsibility to make sure the people they are serving don't freeze, starve, suffer etc. Most people I know including myself are working full time and there's still not enough money to have both heat and food in the same day.

Its a fucking disgrace. Was it not Sunak caught on film boasting about taking money away from deprived areas and feeding it into wealthy areas?

Their handling of covid was a shambles, their crappy clap for carers was laughable, and they completely shat all over nurses with their pathetic payrise whilst giving themselves a lovely raise.

Don't even get me started on minimum wage and how much the UK is becoming more and more impoverished because of their fucking incompetence and lack of morals.

We have "warm banks" now for fuck sake, how is that OK with them? I'll tell you why, it's because their pockets are being nicely lined and sitting in a freezing cold house with a jumper on is something that will never effect them.

They will never have to skip a meal to feed their children.
They will never have to turn every light in the house off and light candles instead.
They Will never have to be terrified to turn the heating on.
They will never have to put supermarket own brand food back on the shelf because they can't even afford that.

They are self-serving, corrupt arseholes who don't give a shit about any of us.

It's absolutely in their power to fix a lot of things wrong in this country, its literally their fucking jobs. They just choose not to because, again, they don't give a flying fuck, as long as they are rolling in it.

So no, I'm afraid I don't agree with you OP. I get what you're saying about people taking responsibility for themselves, but most of us are already doing that and we still can't make ends meet.

Tax haven countries aren’t going to voluntary give up their tax haven status.

He's basically saying that we don't have enough money to pay for our vitals.

Yet his wife gets £11.5M in dividends every year for working for a company that operates in Russia.

I don't think it is possible for the government to be all things to everyone and I don't even think it should focus solely on the vulnerable because otherwise the money will eventually run out when everyone else leaves. However, the Tories have been too focused on ring fencing elderly people and have neglected the rest of the population for 12 years. They've created an environment - by stoking asset bubbles and targeting tax on working age people - where even people who work hard to gain a profession like nurses and teachers struggle to house themselves or make ends meet.

The average salary for a teacher in my county is £35k, which is about £2,300 net. Around half of that is required just to rent a two bedroom flat here. It is far, far more lucrative to be a teacher in other countries now and if I was in that profession I would leave the country. I think we're on the edge now and we need to cut working age taxes significantly, paid for and more by hefty spending cuts and tax rises on the retired population. Otherwise people are going to start leaving the UK in droves.

So where are we headed? Are we to have lives like those in the third world countries? A few have extreme wealth and many are destitute, resorting to begging or looking through bins?
Of course we expect better from our government. We have enough wealth to make sure everyone is housed adequately, has food and clothing, can keep warm and has access to a health service.

But my OP wasn’t ‘we shouldn’t expect anything from the government’, or ‘I think the government are doing enough’ (although you would never know that from the replies!).

It was, even if the government implement a socialist tax system, I’m not sure the capital would be raised for everything that seems to be expected on here.

@Cuppasoupmonster You are getting the responses you are because you set up a strawman.

In what way? I’m winning the vote 🤷🏼‍♀️

No but they should get the absolute basics right.

Yes when are people going to wake up that it can be done!

It does seem there are people who think absolutely everything should be paid for without question.

On a smaller scale we had someone moaning on the local fb group they "now have to pay £60" a year for their gardening waste bin! I mean... really. When it was pointed out that £5 per month for what is essentially a luxury service it's a bargain. They came back with it not being a luxury service. Well mate, if you want to load up bags, load up your car and drive it to the tip to drop off as gardening waste yourself then yes it's a bloody luxury service. Filling up a bin, taking it the curb to be collected it's much easier yeah?

I honestly think some people want the council to wipe their arse for them because "they pay their council tax." 🙄

Is this what winning looks like?

Yay.

No, he is not right. The countries with the highest levels of contentment in the past have been the Scandinavian social democratic govt’s. Also a state that provides good services and a safety net actually promotes financial prosperity too. I want no part of a low tax, small state society, but it is the road that the UK has embarked on

@Havanananana

agree. I live in one of those places too, and looking back at the UK from outside… It’s so cut-throat, individualistic, ‘I’m all right jack’, survival of the fittest. I honestly believe that the period when the NHS and social welfare programs were established was a blip, and the true nature of the UK is far harsher. Read William Dalrymple on The Anarchy, the rise of the east India trading company: that gives an idea of the cultural values of the U.K.

Childcare is a good example. Good quality, state funded, childcare should be an absolute basic. It enables women to work, and encourages low income families to work as it’s worth it. And means-testing to provide supper for low-income families without giving unnecessary handouts to those that don’t need then? Why is that so hard to implement ? Where I am it’s as simple as looking at a household tax return, and using that to derive a coefficient, which is then applied to everything from school meals to childcare costs to grants for school supplies to how much you pay to go on a school trip. My friend's on a very low income : she pays €0,22 per school meal. I pay the full whack: €4,00. It’s all done privately, no one knows how much others pay, no FSM stigma.

But tbh don’t think that the culture or values of the U.K. would ever support a ‘socialist Utopia’. I read a book about the financial crisis in Iceland, and one of the reasons why so many people got themselves into debt wasn’t ‘keeping up with the Jones’ or self indulgence, it was because there is a shared belief that people should be equal, should have similar standards of living, that there shouldn’t be a big gap between rich and poor. When the author talked to teenagers there, and told them about homeless people in Reykjavik, they genuinely didn’t believe her : because that just couldn’t happen in a place where everyone is equal.

I think there's a lot of waste in public services and if they were properly organised and managed they could meet more need. It's shocking that public bodies employ consultants for example and then don't hold them to account when they fail to deliver. Smaller hospitals which are cleaner and better run are closed and replaced with huge hospitals which can't retain staff and are expensive to run. Social care is under funded then hospitals are full of adults who don't need medical treatment but there's no safe alternative for them.

I think that each of us has a little communist inside trying to get out.
Perhaps that is where we are are ultimately reaching out for?

Well OP, perhaps @antelopevalley thought you'd set up a strawman because the total number of people who were publicly asking the government to do everything before they came out with what superficially looks sensible was...zero. Just a response thought up before by a SPAD or consultant to tee up the poor majority for regressive tax rises. You might think that if a majority agree with you then that means it's not a straw man. It perhaps just means the government marketing has worked. Hope you're getting an overtime rate in your day job.

If you want to have a think, perhaps look for where the government said, 'let's everyone agree to impoverish the majority by c33% in incomes and not grow the economy, just direct an aggregate £2.5 trillion to the richest 1%' then direct all government policies to that goal rather than increasing productivity and growth in per capita GDP. I wonder how many would have voted for that truth?

Why are you jumping to extremes? I'm not advocating communism by stating that neoliberalism has failed.

But that’s not what a strawman argument is. The strawman is that posters are arguing against something I haven’t even said. Because, as usual on here, nuance is impossible and indicative of secretly wanting to take the ‘wrong’ side. It’s very frustrating, it’s the arguing tactic of overly emotional teenagers.