Is there money to do what Labour wants to do?

[AutismHelp1980]

The majority of us are feeling optimistic today and we should!

However my concern is, is there the money to do what Labour needs to do? I keep thinking back to Gordon Brown selling off our gold!

What a load of nonsense. Every Tory government since the war has borrowed more than Labour. Public debt has soared under the Tories. Gordon Brown actually had public sector surpluses and reduced the total of debt. The note left in the treasury was a common humerous thing done by outgoing labour and Tory governments.

Well a quick Google will show that that’s not true at all. Debt was much higher in 2009/10 then it was in 1997.

They are few and far between these days though. I always ask for a cash price, but haven't been able to get one for at least ten years.

Yes, because there was a world wide banking crisis, prior to that labour had run a public sector surplus, something the Tories haven't managed. Overall, labour has always borrowed less than the Tories.

Tory v labour borrowing.

www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2021/06/24/the-tories-have-always-borrowed-more-than-labour-and-always-repaid-less-they-are-the-party-of-big-deficit-spending/

Is it lower than 2010 now?

@HappiestSleeping that's good, & possibly because if the business's bank knew they were accepting cash they might start getting worried about tax evasion & debank them (it's illegal for banks to handle the proceeds of crime).

In the last ten years I've had several instances of being offered cheaper prices for cash payment. I also had one engineer from a well known boiler servicing company tell me that he & all his engineer friends work formally 4 days a week, and "independently for beer money" on the 5th day. Restaurants paying eg plumbers via meals rather than cash. The black economy is sadly very prevalent.

I don't doubt it goes on, but oddly, I think covid helped with all that. Same for people who paid themselves in dividends as they didn't get any furlough money as it wasn't 'through the books'. Can't have it all ways.

Also, the banks charge businesses for depositing cash these days, so electronic is better.

Come up north, plenty do it.

Who do you recommend?

@SkippysEar the truth of that note is here:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/09/liam-byrne-apology-letter-there-is-no-money-labour-general-election

It's not quite as the Conservatives would have you believe.

Listening to the Rest is Politics this morning, apparently Labour have never actually promised to increase overall spending and will in fact cut it. I think people expect them to spend high because they are Labour but they have been quite cautious in what they have committed to. They have also made the pledges not to increase taxes on working people or VAT, corporation tax etc so have tied their hands somewhat because these are by far the biggest revenue raisers.

Labour actually played quite a clever game in the campaign where they put a lot of focus on gimmicky or niche policies like VAT on school fees, ticket touts etc. I think they intentionally avoided too much talk about the big stuff like how they would fix the NHS or achieve economic growth.

The tax policies they do have are highly unpredictable in terms of the revenue they might raise - non-doms can mostly leave the country if they want to; if you increase capital gains tax people will probably hold onto their assets; VAT on school fees might raise a bit of revenue but it's very hard to predict how the education market will respond.

I do think increasing resource to HMRC is a good idea - HMRC have had their budgets cut and they simply can't enforce all the anti-avoidance law available to them. They are also hugely disadvantaged by paying a fraction of what the private sector pays to their staff for the same skillset. I've known HMRC to lose multi-million pound cases by not filing documents in time.

I think the scale of large corporations avoiding tax is overestimated and very few such corporations are actually evading tax. It's not easy to get facebook et al. to pay their "fair share" of tax in the UK partly because other countries have a different idea of what their "fair share" is and you can't (usually) tax the same profits twice in different jurisdictions. We actually do have law to try to achieve this already though - our tax system is very advanced in this respect in international terms.

The ideal is obviously to fund spending through growth in the economy but that takes time and is easier said than done. And you're not likely to attract many businesses here with 40% capital gains tax rates.

If you listen to the Leading episode with Gus O’Donnell from last week, he talks about how we pay Civil Servants too little and are losing talented people to the private sector. An example he gave was someone working in a high level procurement role in the CS is probably paid about £50k, but in a private sector role with a similar budget responsibility would easily be on 5 times that amount. He suggested CS should get lower pensions (27% employer contribution seems pretty standard in a lot of roles!) and be paid better to attract the talent.

There are a lot of farmers worried about possible changes to IHT rules - currently farmland is exempt from IHT to allow farms to be handed down through families rather than needing to be sold to pay IHT bills. I know that a lot of very wealthy people buy farms to try and avoid IHT on their own estates, which does need to be tackled, but any changes in that area would have to be very carefully managed or we will lose family farms in this country within a generation and be in a situation where the farmland is owned by mega corporations who don’t give a toss about the environment or local area.

It’s worth pointing out that the term “farmers” in the UK includes many exceptionally wealthy landowners who enjoy tax breaks and take advantage of tax loopholes that other rurally based but less wealthy people cannot. By reducing these tax breaks and changing the incentives in a fair way it could lead to a more efficient use of land and greater modernisation of British farming and the countryside overall.

Reeves could be more flexible with her pledge to follow similar (and self imposed) fiscal rules to the Conservative government which aims for debt as a proportion of GDP to be the on track to fall in five years time. The government need to boost borrowing to invest in our broken public services and infrastructure. The government has failed to invest in the people, public services & national infrastructure that are vital for a thriving economy. This FT article says:

“bond investors said the market could be forgiving if a new government decided to boost borrowing and amend its debt rules, provided funds were channelled towards measures to stimulate the economy. “If Labour borrows to invest, markets will not worry about it,” said Tom Roderick, portfolio manager at hedge fund firm Trium Capital. “What markets are more worried about is borrowing to cut taxes, or increase social security payments, which doesn’t sound that likely.”

Also FT writes:

“ former BoE chief economist Andy Haldane, who said that “existing fiscal rules risk starving the economy of the very investment needed to boost medium-term growth”. Remember these fiscal rules are self imposed. I read fiscal rules have been changed 9 times since 1997.

https://www.ft.com/content/4f868dd0-259d-45e9-bd86-2af4b60aab43

Nothing. We have enough. I want as many people as possible to have enough. I don't mind contributing to that and giving the government a chance to make things better than they are now.

Ha

.labour wasted millions on creating huge accademies which did little to improve education how many of these improved pupils achievements smaller schools and much smaller classes might have helped Maybe labour mayors cutting down on their use of taxis and trying a bus would help as well and paying MPs according to how many hours they actually work Our Labour. MP never turns up in parliament don't they hàve any rules