AIBU to think it doesn't matter whether the government is Labour or Tory?

[Chowtime]

As I approach the grand old age of 60 I've been looking back on my life and I realise that whatever government being in power hasn't really effected me at all.

I've never been poor enough to need any benefits, and I've never been rich enough to not worry about money. I'm in the middle and so must millions of others be.

I can honestly say it hasn't made any difference to me.

I think thats interesting.

I can honestly say it hasn't made any difference to me

Gosh - where have you been hiding?

Do you find it easy to get a GP appointment; are you/your family not on any NHS waiting lists? How have your recent rail journeys been? - smooth/reasonably priced/no delays? Are there no unemployed young people at a loose end cluttering up your town centre and drinking away their sorrows in ways that make them a nuisance to the public?

Do you have no thought for those who are suffering under the policies of the previous years? Is your life ruled by "I'm alright Jack"?

Oh this had me banging my head against a wall earlier. Does he think no one (not least his leadership opponents) would notice he started the process himself? Laughable.

I'm saying that migration isn't caused by Labour or Tory governments. It's a global problem - caused by issues within the country they're migrating from, like Ukraine and Syria.

That isn't something a UK government can control.

I don't understand - the gov response to things (migration or anything else) is within their control.

Unfortunately there are loads of people like that. I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that there's little point even attempting to debate with them. It's depressing.

@SunriseMonsters what an excellent post. Read it, everyone! ☝

Did you see this OP?

How do you explain this image if which government we have makes no difference OP?

Thank you. Excuse the typos!! Rushing around as usual.

I just find it so frustrating that people don't realise that things can be different. A short trip to most other European countries demonstrates this very clearly: returning here afterwards is almost like going back in time for two decades. I suppose that shouldn't be surprising given there's been no real-terms increase in pay in the UK for the best part of two decades now precisely because of these policy choices, and our PPP per capita has (predictably) falling off a cliff as a result and will continue to do so if the issues I mentioned aren't addressed.

I had hoped that with RR having an economic background she might instigate some change and take action on these very obvious matters staring her in the face, yet so far there seems to be no sign of that at all. I fear she may be captured by the same party ideology that has wrecked the country to this point (whether it's been the Labour one or Conservative one, both have just compounded the damage over time).

We need politicians who make evidence-based decisions and address these key issues if we want rising living standards and security for the future for our children.

The one that is a short-term blindingly obvious win that the Government can fix overnight and reap economic rewards from within months is fixing the tax system as that's entirely within their control whereas changes to economic policy take time to feed through into the rewards being reaped. Still essential nonetheless, but for an immediate boost, any Chancellor with a brain would remove the tax system cliff edges at the budget! Yet from what's rumoured in the press she intends to entrench these further and compound the problem. I despair really. Then no doubt they'll scratch their heads and wonder why we have an evem larger trade deficit, skilled people retiring/ emigrating/ cutting hours. It's the Labour version of the Conservative Brexit "shoot yourself in the face as well as the foot, just for good measure".

If she had any sense her budget would drastically reduce the UK taper rate and raise the work allowance so people can earn more before the taper starts; and make child benefit, the personal allowance and 30hrs childcare funding universal again. And for God's sake don't mess around with pensions and discourage pension saving even further because that will not only raise future tax bills for us and our children but also decimate the already far too low levels of investment in companies that is essential for any prospect of growth. These measures would remove barriers to work and productivity and economic participation at every level and would more than pay for themselves.

But sadly - as with the Conservatives - I suspect this Government won't do what they need to do to improve life for their citizens because it's all about political point scoring (in whichever extreme direction the current Government is inclined) rather than pragmatic, evidence-based policy that will actually work.

Sorry, UC taper rate. Not UK!

I agree with a lot of what you say @SunriseMonsters but I disagree that this government won't do anything to improve our lives here.
I also don't believe that CB needs to be universal, but I do agree that there should not be such a cliff edge in terms of losing benefits like CB, when earnings go above a certain point. The problem is they are constrained by lack of money to do everything that they would like to do.
The graph posted above showed NHS waiting lists improving over the labour government last time, I would expect this will happen agin this time around. I know from my own experiences that education and schools massively benefited from the Blair/Brown years, hopefully that will also happen again.
I am taking a wait and see approach that does not involve believing every rumour on twitter and here, they need a little bit more than 90 days to show that they can and will make a difference.

It makes a massive difference. The NHS and social care has been abysmal under the tories

Roll back 15 years and services to the general public including the most vulnerable in society were far superior.

Obviously you can believe what you wish, however:

1. evidence from many countries shows that "benefits" such as childcare funding, child benefit etc being universal is beneficial. a) this saves costs (oftens means testing costs more than it saves); b) it creates buy-in to the system, so higher earners support the continuation of these things (even though they still pay way more in tax than they get back so are paying for this benefit for themselves and for others simultaneously). The fastest way to eradicate the state pension entirely, for example, would be to means-test it. All that would happen is that those who are funding it would lose vestes interest and support for it (even though they pay in many times what they get back if it is universal) and therefore the threshold would be frozen/ not uprated properly/ criteria gradually tightened until it's inflated away or virtually non-existent.

This is why universal benefits/ services work. The higher paid pay for themselves and others but everybody receives them that way they have wide political support and are not eroded, and those who pay high taxes feel they at least get something for their money so support it. If they are simply treated as cash cows - forced to fund everyone else but mot even able to access the services they pay for - then that is the fastest way to destroy any welfare state at all. Bevan was in agreement on this.

Well OP, like you I'm 60 and I wonder how you can not have noticed how different life was different in the 90s and early 2000s compared to now.

Longest period of sustained low inflation since the 60s.
Low mortgage rates.
Introduced the National Minimum Wage and raised it to £5.52.
Over 14,000 more police in England and Wales.
Cut overall crime by 32 per cent.
Record levels of literacy and numeracy in schools.
Young people achieving some of the best ever results at 14, 16, and 18.
Funding for every pupil in England has doubled.
Employment is at its highest level ever.
Written off up to 100 per cent of debt owed by poorest countries.
85,000 more nurses.
32,000 more doctors.
Brought back matrons to hospital wards.
Devolved power to the Scottish Parliament.
Devolved power to the Welsh Assembly.
Dads now get paternity leave of 2 weeks for the first time.
NHS Direct offering free convenient patient advice.
Gift aid was worth £828 million to charities last year.
Restored city-wide government to London.
Record number of students in higher education.
Child benefit up 26 per cent since 1997.
Delivered 2,200 Sure Start Children’s Centres.
Introduced the Equality and Human Rights Commission.
£200 winter fuel payment to pensioners & up to £300 for over-80s.
On course to exceed our Kyoto target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Restored devolved government to Northern Ireland.
Over 36,000 more teachers in England and 274,000 more support staff and teaching assistants.
All full time workers now have a right to 24 days paid holiday.
A million pensioners lifted out of poverty.
600,000 children lifted out of relative poverty.
Introduced child tax credit giving more money to parents.
Scrapped Section 28 and introduced Civil Partnerships.
Brought over 1 million social homes up to standard.
Inpatient waiting lists down by over half a million since 1997.
Banned fox hunting.
Cleanest rivers, beaches, drinking water and air since before the industrial revolution.
Free TV licences for over-75s.
Banned fur farming and the testing of cosmetics on animals.
Free breast cancer screening for all women aged between 50-70.
Free off peak local bus travel for over-60s.
New Deal – helped over 1.8 million people into work.
Over 3 million child trust funds have been started.
Free eye test for over 60s.
More than doubled the number of apprenticeships.
Free entry to national museums and galleries.
Overseas aid budget more than doubled.
Heart disease deaths down by 150,000 and cancer deaths down by 50,000.
Cut long-term youth unemployment by 75 per cent.
Free nursery places for every three and four-year-olds.
Free fruit for most four to six-year-olds at school.

14 years of Tory government and the world is a whole different place.

This Labour government have settled the train and doctor disputes and immediately stopped the latest riots. I agree they've made a cock up of the expenses thing but if they carry on as they have started otherwise and do a 10th of what Labour did last time it will be better than the shambles the country is in now.

Plus the economic distortions and perverse incentives that you introduce by trying to withdraw these things at certain income levels, which as I said harm productivity and economic participation. There's robust evidence on this. No matter what level you do it at, you create a distortion and disincentive to work.

Progressive tax is fine but with regular, linear levels, not distorted by withdrawals of other aspects of state provision. You distort economic activity and people make different choices. At £100k income the tax cliff edge including childcare withdrawal results in a marginal tax rate of over 100% for many i.e. if they work more hours/ accept a promotion they will have less money. You don't have to be a genius to understand why discouraging such people who pay a lot of the tax we need from working/ earning more is a bad idea...

Independently and highly respected economists have all concluded that these cliff edges are discouraging productivity gains and economic activity at every level of earnings (UC then child benefit then the withdrawal of the personal allowances and tax free childcare etc). Hunt commissioned i dependent economic research on low UK productivity and was told this is one of the primary drivers. Yet didn't fix it. Ignored it. Reeves has been told the same. Will she fix it? I'd hope so but I doubt it, because she can't be seen to be doing anything that might benefit people on decent salaries even if it makes everyone else better off as well!

It's just lazy, that they can't be bothered to explain this to people and will do what will score political points over what will raise living standards and growth, which they claim to want.

As I said, any Chancellor with a brain would address this immediately and the economy would improve in a matter of months.

Even the Guardian reported on these economic studies on this matter. It's not a party political issue but neither party seems to be able to resist attempting to turn everything into one. Very sad for the UK and all that live here that some huge improvements to living standards for all and simple solutions to raise more tax revenue for public services by removing barriers to productivity are not implemented because our politicians are obsessed with their various agendas and not at all interested in what has been shown to actually work^^ and result in improvements for everyone.

www.theguardian.com/business/2023/feb/13/full-time-part-time-work-no-longer-pays-uk-economy

Really? I'm 62 and have seen the country swing from prosperity to austerity.

Do you only think about yourself?

But OP, that IS to do with Government policy. Who sets regulations and funding? Who is supposed to forecast population increases and plan appropriately in terms of e.g. building more schools, hospitals, improving antiquated Victorian pipework, replacing the towerblocks that were whacked up after the war and were only ever supposed to have a useable lifespan of 20 years, funding councils, attracting educated people to the skills we need to foster to create a more productive society etc?

I can't tell them apart tbh. But I'm also in the middle - not too poor, not too rich.

You are right OP, Labour and Tory are two sides of the same coin.

If you genuinely can't tell them apart then that shows a staggering amount of ignorance.

There are many posts in this thread alone that would help you understand

I think you notice it more if you're poor or rich. In general, Labour are better for poorer people and people in full on poverty. The Tories are better for making rich people richer. People who are comfortably in the middle trundle on mostly the same. Which means in elections you're voting more for your conscience than for any massive stark difference to your own material life.

I don't believe there is resounding support for universal benefits, and I don't know about evidence of this from other countries.
Many other countries have very different tax models compared to us, different ways of funding state activity, so it is impossible to fully compare and contrast. I think I'd prefer to see proper funding of education, NHS, public services, low unemployment, fair wages for everyone rather than a couple earning £300K between them getting CB for 4 kids. I am happy to pay more tax to fund public service properly, but there do need to be sensible limits to benefits that are not required because of high earnings.

@SunriseMonsters you speak the most sense on here, although since I was in my 30s (now in my 50s) I have assumed I won't get a state pension because it will be means tested as it has been apparent since the banking crisis that we are virtually bankrupt as a country. And govts go for the easy targets and policies rather than eg starting a better health system from scratch. Most people are pretty uninformed hence the people on here who think we will go back to the Blair years when there was a golden economy left by the Tories (versus a totally broken economy now) or that adding 10 million low skilled people who are a massive net cost in the last 20 years is not going to have a devastating effect on public services.

I think I'd prefer to see proper funding of education, NHS, public services, low unemployment, fair wages for everyone rather than a couple earning £300K between them getting CB for 4 kids

Not giving child benefit to people earning £300k will save you very little money. In reality very few would claim it, anyway. But if you say they can't you have to implement an expensive system to check whether they have, administer them repaying it, correct errors in repayment, chase debtors, pay people who have mistakenly had it withdrawn, customer service staff and systems to deal with all of this, etc. This will cost far more than you save since not many people earn that much and child benefit is a relatively small payment plus few of them would claim it anyway. Such means testing wouldn't even cover its own cost let alone fund the NHS, education etc (you imply it is a choice between the two but this is false).

If, however, you set the threshold substantially lower to exclude people on much lower earnings in an attempt to at least make your means testing raise enough revenue to pay for the means testing process then you create a peverse incentive that discourages economic activity because wherever you set the threshold (if it's at a level where it captures sufficient numbers of people to make it worth doing) you will have a cliff edge that discourages work. So then people change their behaviour to avoid it, and once again you are back to your means testing not even covering its own costs.

Aside from the points I raised about public buy in to services (which a PP appears to have misunderstood: making the services universal creates and maintains support for them, not the other way around), means testing causing economic harm. This is well-recognised and visible in the economic data. Hence my suggestion that to boost productivity and growth it would be sensible to vastly reduce/ remove these distortions because there is solid evidence that it would provide a huge economic boost and incentivise more productivity at all levels (by reducing the universal credit taper rate significantly, and scrappjng withdrawal of CB and the personal allowance and childcare funding entirely).

Labour, Tory both the same.
Both pawns in the bosses' game.

Saw this painted on a wall years ago. The older I get, the more I agree with it (I'm slightly older than you, OP).