To think there is no more money?

[Rainbowsponge]

And Labour have admitted this.

So many threads saying X or Y needs to be ‘properly funded’ (even though most of the time our spending is actually in line with comparable countries), but no acknowledgment of the fact there’s no money to spend.

And when you bring it up, posters completely ignore you or accuse you of being Jacob Rees Mogg

Wouldn’t the quality of debate be improved if we stopped burying our heads in the sand?

At least Tories are out ha!

They knew all of this and said we’re up to the job. Now did you believe them?

🤦‍♀️

Nail on the head. We need a reality check in the UK.

Absolutely. But when you look back to when the UK WAS a righ country (won't derail into how we got there via the plunders of empire) - what millionaires spent their money on was libraries & hospitals & museums & railways & education & being benefactors for the public good.

These days, they're not even taxed well & their money is spent on hiding away from the hoi-polloi, private jets, superyachts, overseas property & luxury goods.

Not suggesting a new labour government can change the morals of the super rich, but they can amend the tax system at least so they're putting more back into the system that enabled them to "succeed".

France’s debt/GDP ratio has performed like the UK’s over that period. Nothing to with covid or energy shocks, oh no. I blame the Tories.

The Rwanda ‘estimate’ is Yvette Cooper’s.

lol

@Rummly respectfully, it's very obvious that you're not happy with the outcome of the recent general election & you'd happily have had another term for the self-interested individuals who kept allowing children in the 6th largest economy in the world to go hungry & under-educated at the expense of lots of their mates having 2nd properties & 3rd foreign holidays and beyond.

Do you have an answer to the OP's question though? Or are you just here to poke at those you disagree with, without adding any real substance to the conversation?

There was me thinking they spent it on land, jewellery, luxury food and parties 😬

Why haven’t Labour unveiled steep tax rises for the super rich then? Surely that would be the first thing they would do?

Sorry i didn't realise we were talking about France, must have mis read the title of the thread.
But look at the standard of public services roads health etc in France compared to the UK and how they reduced electricity price rises to 4 to 8% compared to our 150% increases....

Germany, despite exactly the same impacts, has debt to gdp of around 63%

The Tories tripled national debt, yet at the same time crashed public services.... quite a trick.

The Tory Governments own estimate was £400m... Cooper added in the costs of the additional civil servants hired, housing costs for those "rounded up" and flight bookings, is she wrong to include these costs?

Lets go back to the Tories own figures.... do you think that £400m was money well spent?

Productivity does need to increase but that will come through investment in infrastructure, house building etc. Good economics , not this failed idea of trickle down.

There seems to be a bizarre concept of the lazy workers not working hard enough and therefore need to be punished into working harder.

Who knows. Maybe Labour will go on about ‘tough and painful choices’ or pp are right and the money is there and can be spent

You’re quite right. My preferred outcome would have been a smaller Labour majority. The Tories were (are) tired and fractious and needed replacing. It seems obvious, though, that we’re now in for at least two and probably three terms of Labour. Which I find a bit disturbing.

Being unhappy with a General Election outcome isn’t a bad thing though, is it? I mean, presumably you were unhappy in 2019?

I’ve already answered the OP’s question, in the same way that others have: we do not have the money to meet the extra spending demands that all governments are pressured to meet. If the (recovering) economy allows some of that then good, but we can’t spend recklessly like Blair and Brown did (leaving aside PFI…) when the economy inherited from Ken Clarke was good.

We cannot raise even a tiny fraction of the money that Labour needs by punitive taxes on the super-rich, which won’t work anyway.

There may well need to be massive, urgent expenditure on defence within the next five years. If that happens I think the Tories will share the blame - for not spending enough on the military beforehand - and I certainly won’t be criticising Labour afterwards for emergency spending and debt.

The general criticisms you make of the Tories about children and education will apply to all governments. Child poverty in Britain is also on a par with France and Germany.

As for the ‘substance’ of the conversation, where do all of the criticisms of the last four governments fit into that? If it’s ok to blame Tories, why isn’t it ok to cast doubt on Labour, or is that not allowed?

It's been three weeks. They need to go over the state of everything and assess the current situation (or at least give the impression they are) before announcing any changes.

No one should just hiking up taxes for the wealthy without properly thinking through the consequences of these.

But it does look like, as said at the time, Hunts ill thought out NI cuts were not affordable and could only be funded through additional borrowing or cuts.
Labour will now have to work out how to fund these, v irresponsible of the Tories to do this, just to try and win an election :(

Reeves will doubtless look at pension relief, CGT and IHT (and i hope council tax on the higher bands) but most importantly on how we spend the money already raised.

Labour would have known from OBR state of situation so they are pitch rolling for tax rises the IFS were right re conspiracy of silence on this

Quite likely, both parties kept quiet about this.... but at the end of the day, these are as a result of Tory policies, that Labour have to deal with, its not something they created.

Hunts NI cuts are about the same size as the fiscal hole.

As pp's have said, if we want European levels of public services, we will need to pay for them.

People might be expecting better services from money Labour have rather than tax rises.

Which was pledged by them at the GE

If Labour increase taxes on "ordinary working people", they won't have a second or third term of office.

They need to think VERY carefully about how they fill the black hole. If they hit the floating voter, i.e. Blair's "Mondeo Man", they'll see their majority disappear at the next GE.

Increasing tax on "ordinary working people" will be Starmer's "Nick Clegg's Student Loans" moment and he'll never recover.

Labour aren't increasing taxes on working people.

They've repeatedly said this, so i'm not sure why pp's keep going on about something that isn't going to happen.

Maybe a better question is why the "party of fiscal responsibility" cut NI causing this deficit?

So why announce before doing that that there’s no funding increases as there’s no cash?

They have to say something. And what everyone knows is that the state of the country's finances is dire.

They're managing expectations. We aren't increasing funding on things right now because there's no money.

That doesn't mean that in a few months they won't find a way to get more money. Or that they won't change allocations of things. Or put rule around how allocations can be utilised. Or any number of other things.

We need big change. That can't and won't happen instantly. And any decent change should happen after those implementing it take their time finding and assessing the options.

Look at Truss. She announced huge, sweeping changes and everything collapsed. Do you want the same to happen again?

Pretty sure if there was a way to ‘get more money’ they would’ve put it in their manifesto when costing?!

Do you think that a) they put every single plan they have in their manifesto, and b) they know the exact things the other side has done before they get their hands on it?

That's not how politics works. Not a single party is 100% transparent on anything.

And you've just ignored the fact I gave other options and suggested they may be looking at numerous things.

I work in improvement. I wouldn't take over any project and immediately change things, regardless of what I thought I knew about it. I would do all my own investigations and research and then make decisions. And I would tell my stakeholders the options and recommendations once I knew exactly what they were.

I think the concept of being a "net contributor" has been misunderstood.
The amount of money it costs to provide public services to one person and their children is pretty high.
The income tax on £40k doesn't even cover a year of education for a child, but I suppose eventually £40kpa is enough to even out, less than this isn't.

I will never have been a net contributor, I'm medically complex and have cost the NHS probably hundreds of thousands over my life.

This all just reads like wishful thinking (I hope it isn’t)