Conservatives and Labour - is there really any difference for middle class working families

[Sweetcup]

Please convince me otherwise as I'm feeling utterly depressed.

I really can't see what is on offer to middle class families from either party - it appears to be exactly the same. High taxes, no guarantee of decent state education or access to medical care, horrible driving on roads, criminals out of prison early picked up in luxury cars. Our salaries are worth less than they were 7 years ago.

In principle I don't mind paying high taxes but it really doesn't seem to be a guarantee of anything. Our local state secondary is dreadful as a few (non-working) families seem able to disrupt the education of the rest. As a tax payer I don't feel either the Conservatives or Labour have ever spoken to me directly about what my money is doing and what they are guaranteeing for it.

We cut right back (no Netflix, eating our, no takeout) to put money into our pensions and now I just feel like that means we will have done it to pay for other people's state funded retirements.

Not a good day:

Sir Keir Starmer has suffered the biggest fall in approval rating after winning an election of any prime minister in the modern era, a poll has shown.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/10/28/starmer-suffers-biggest-fall-in-popularity-for-new-pm/

Sir Keir Starmer mistakenly announced that Rachel Reeves would unveil five new freeports at Wednesday’s budget, in what officials have reportedly dubbed a “total cock-up”.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/keir-starmer-freeports-budget-2024-rachel-reeves-b2636884.html

Au contraire, Clav, it’s a wonderful day for you and your fellow Tories, you must be delighted. Not that Starmer’s popularity ratings are here nor there at this point in a parliament, we’ll worry about that four years’ hence.

OP when you say "working families" do you mean working adults?

This is one of those phrases that politicians use which is highly irritating. Kids don't work - it's adults that work, get paid, and pay tax, even ones without families

@TempestTost

Showing the big wigs outside the UK they are willing to get tough on pensioners.

Ie sacrificing kittens like a mafia to show other big players they are ruthless?

Well as a middle class person I'm hoping for improvements to the NHS and schools under this government. Even if I have to pay more tax.

Am so sick of the fake furore and fearmongering in the right wing press.

You could barely write this stuff I wonder if the "in the thick of it" writers are inspired?

We will tread lightly on your lives

For now, in a few months we will be surging through it like a tsunami.

I can understand, though don't agree with, the argument that very high earners are paying too much tax. But I struggle to understand the idea that middle class people are paying too much tax. Only around the top 15% of earners are paying more than 20% income tax. Yet around 36% of people in the UK consider themselves middle class. So most middle class people are basic rate taxpayers. As the Institute for Fiscal Studies shows, we basic rate taxpayers are paying the lowest personal tax rate (tax plus national insurance) since 1975: https://ifs.org.uk/articles/how-tax-burden-high-when-most-us-are-taxed-so-low.

@Genevieva where do you get your figures? 20% of adolescents claiming? Best I can find is that 11% of adolescents are considered disabled and the percentage of adolescents for whom dla is claimed is 7%. Which makes sense if you think about it, not all disabled children are eligible.

I don’t begrudge anyone accepting what the government at any particular time says they can offer them. For me, this isn’t about left verses right (I read a range of papers for that reason) or right verses wrong. It’s simply about affordability. Yes I did know that welfare included state pensions (not civil service, nhs or tps pensions). And our state pension is among the most miserly in Europe. I also know other OECD countries are in a similar structural hole. it doesn’t make the situation any more sustainable.

We are not the US. The pound is not the world’s reserve currency and our economy is not capable of rebuffing the consequences of financially illiterate government policy. We absolutely could experience our ratings plummet, hyper-inflation and junk currency status if we don’t get a handle on our debt. Not tomorrow, but it is possible. Just look at what Truss’s hint at unfunded tax cuts did. Taxes will not be sufficient to cover the projected increases in welfare spending, so the same could happen if spending is not controlled.

With an aging population, it’s simply not feasible to have such a large percentage of the working age population dependent on other taxpayers for their survival. People are already on their knees with high taxes and high housing, energy, transport and childcare costs. Taxing people more will likely reduce productivity and increase emigration, resulting in a shrinking economy and a loss of high tax payers who are important in a knowledge economy as well as for tax revenue. We already have the highest emigration of top rate tax payers in the western world and we are haemorrhaging jobs and investment to America, Europe and the Muddle East.

If we want a tax base large enough to support people in need then we have to be competitive. We have to encourage investment and make sure that successful people see a future here. We can get away with much higher taxes than the Middle East, but we really can’t get away with increasing taxes so far above our neighbours without facing negative consequences.

We used to have a lower rate. Tax thresholds hit at higher points relative to the cost of living, so many jobs that now pay basic or higher rate, would once hate payed lower rate tax. We also have national insurance - c. 8% employee contributions and 13.8% employer on top of salary and a 1% apprenticeship levy. Then there is council tax and the high taxes we have on energy. And finally, many people are repaying student loans. Together, these make the tax paid by ordinary people higher than at any point in our history.

Ultimately I guess if you want these people to extend credit to you, you have to show you will take the kinds of actions they see as necessary.

This seems like a completely made up figure. There were reports recently that there had been an increase in the numbers of teenagers claiming DLA but nothing about 20%. Total misinformation.

Many thanks for your reply. I do take your point about student loan repayments. And sorry I'd forgotten about Gordon Brown's lower 10% starting rate of income tax that existed between 1999 and 2008. But that only applied to incomes between £5,225 and £7,455, so was aimed at helping very low earners. Even allowing for inflation, how would jobs that today pay basic rate, let alone higher rate, only be paying starting rate? I get that higher rate kicks in at relatively lower levels than previously, but it's still only around the top 15% that earn over £50K: most middle class people earn less than that, so pay what are historically very low levels of income tax. As for national insurance, the IFS figures already take that into account: the current 8% rate is the lowest since 1981, which was at a time when basic rate income tax was 30% compared to 20% today. Finally, the largest energy tax is fuel duty, which was frozen for a decade after 2011, then cut in 2022. Surely for around the bottom 85% of earners, so including large sections of the middle class, the problem is less high taxes than low wages?

To add to my own, point the government has plenty of opportunities to tax my money before it reaches by savings. I strongly believe that once that money gets to my savings it's mine and under no circumstance should the government lay any claim to it. If I need a care home later in life I don't see why the governmnent should take that money from me - it's mine.

Yes - I think wage suppression relative to the cost of living (especially housing) has been a big problem for a long time. A lot of oldies like to say something akin to ‘well when I was young we didn’t spend all this money on…’ insert modern convenience of your choice. They forget that they didn’t spend on those things because they didn’t exist the world has moved on.

It’s really difficult to take one point in time to do a comparator. And just because it was done in the past doesn’t mean it worked. Dennis Healy increased the top rate of tax to 98%. The success of his policies is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that in 1976 he had to apply to the IMF for a loan and subject the U.K. economy to IMF supervision. Plus, work is much more mobile now, so we have to be more competitive on tax to keep jobs and investment here.

Money has approximately halved in value since 1999, so a lot of part-time and even some low wage jobs would have been largely or wholly within the 10% income tax bracket. Obviously today most of this is tax free, but there used to be a belief that even the lower paid fulltime jobs should contribute a little to the system. And apparently there are more and higher stealth taxes.

What is the location of this working class utopia where you think that the things you list don't exist. Why do you think lack of access to a gp appointment or good school only applies to the middle class. Also, the fact you appear to assert that only the middle class are tax payers is despicable.

I think it is ridiculous to expect a rapid change - this is budget one for a new government.

Unrealistic expectations won't help you.

We have the whole parliament to see what happens.

you don’t have to be disabled to claim dla it’s based on care needs so alot of claims won’t be for a diagnosed disabled child, this is partly due to the waiting lists for things like asd being so long, 4 years in places. That said i didn’t think it was as high as 20%, figures I’ve seen quoted before was one in ten children have dla claimed for them which is still a very high figure. Disability of any kind is a huge spectrum from children thst just need a little extra help to children thst need 24 hour 1-1 care day and night, for dla the lowest rate you have to show care needs of one hour in excess of what a typical child of that age would require. High rate care is awarded if a child has night needs as well.

I mentioned upthread about 1.2m claim DLA and there are about 12.8m children under 16.

So is that 9.3%?. My maths isn't perfect.

I find it quite upsetting when the press tries to make people believe disabled children are the cause of our financial woes. The welfare Bill includes state pensions which is over half the bill, universal credit which is the next biggest element and then housing benefit is bigger than dla. In fact just the ordinary child benefit bill (which I know includes some disabled children too) is almost double the bill of dla.

I also find the idea that there is a right amount of disability a bit strange. When you think it covers everything from visual impairment, cerebal palsy, down syndrome, development delays, accident, long term effects from diseases like meningitis etc. It only takes a nasty virus to sweep through and we could have 80% disabled.

I know the debate is really at what point of disability do we as a society want to provide financial help.

Not all adults have moved to PIP from DLA so the actual number of children who get DLA will be lower.

The government isn't taking the money from you. You would be paying for the care home from the money you have saved. If you didn't have any money, the government would pay for the care home. 84% of care homes are privately owned, so paying your own care home bill would be giving money to the private owners of the care homes and not the government.

If we want all care home places to be funded by the government, we would all need to pay a lot more tax and national insurance and, apparently, nobody wants to do that.

This is such an unbelievably patronising response, and to be honest reads as 'don't bother your little head about your life in the here and now, be more abstract and cerebral in your thinking'.

I agree.

If we want all care home places to be funded by the government, we would all need to pay a lot more tax and national insurance and, apparently, nobody wants to do that.

It’s an appalling idea for other reasons. I want choice if I need residential care, not being condemned to whatever the state deems appropriate. The only way I can have that choice is to pay for it. Happy to do so.