To be fed up of the political manipulation on mumsnet

[ZenNudist]

It's incessant and it's wearing. It's been going on for years and I'm fed up of the massive amount of tory party generated and lobbying content blocking up mumsnet.

I appreciate mumsnet is seen as a key voter demographic but a lot of the threads being posted are so transparently fiction.

The billion VAT on school fees threads must have been a mix of real people and tory HQ.

Fake outrage started immediately and now well into saying that with less than 4 Months of government and before enacting their first budget the Labour Party are apparently making a mess of everything and reversing the great gains made during tory rule. What great gains? I don't know. I saw one post trying to take tory credit for reducing inflation like that was Rishi's doing, laughable.

I also have seen a few fake scenarios for adverse impact of the budget on inheritance and small business taxation. Speaking as someone who will be adversely affects by increasing employer NI and the reduction in business property relief I still support these changes. My friends who are small business owners feel the same way.

Labour promised not to put up the main rates of income tax and employee NI. They were clear that measures would need to be taken to increase the tax take. They still are trying to drive growth because at the end if the day increasing the tax base is the best way of increasing revenue to the exchequer.

I know a lot of mumsnetters say they can't spot trolls or AI threads. I also think a lot of people will not spot the blatant manipulation by lobbyists and tory campaigners.

Tory party now playing a long game.

The Tory party is funded by the rich for the benefit of the rich. The rest of the middle, the poor, the marginalised have almost no voice and no one funding a political machine to work in our favour.

It's gross, isn't it. I am fairly centrist but I just cannot fathom those who centre their entire political stance on a belief that everyone can just "work harder" to improve their circumstances.

I'm not sure I'm seeing that.

What I am seeing is a failure to connect issues of productivity and wealth.

But this is not having a go at individuals more, recently around this budget, about the fact that it is businesses/ productivity that have been hit and a concern for the fact that this might impact employment and growth.

This was a hard budget for the LP as clearly spending needs to increase, the fact that I think hitting employers might be a problem for the economy if staff need to be laid off/ businesses need to close etc isn't blaming those who can't work. Although generally speaking a fit and healthy nation is good from both an economy and public spend / health perspective - I'm not sure anyone can possibly argue against the logic of that?

I'm not sure why buying more scanners means that we'll have a "ft and healthy workforce".

Obviously short waiting lists will help, but the key to a fit and healthy population is education.

What do you mean by 'buying more scanners?'

That's what a large part of the NHS money is being used for - more diagnostic machines. Not sure if they've factored in the staff to use them.

Gotcha.

Inheritance tax has increased - pensions, farms, business assets now included. So the “sobbing” about this was not groundless.

Talking about multi millionaire farmers shows total ignorance about the industry - asset rich perhaps but cash poor. There aren’t that many new farmers coming through and the vast majority of farms (in my experience) have been in the family for multiple generations. It’s not good for the country if farms have to be sold to pay inheritance tax. It’s a very short sighted, not thought through policy.

Same with VAT on school fees. It won’t bring in a penny, it will cost money but it’s good politics so that’s why they’re doing it. The Corbyn proposal was much more sensible - the state taking over all private schools and ending private education in the UK.

I’m willing to give Labour time to see if they make things better (they can hardly do a worst job than the last lot) but multiple policies are very short sighted in my opinion.

What is ridiculous is that the Labour leaning posters cannot accept even a little bit of criticism of their beloved party.

They cannot deal with anyone who dares to have a different opinion and resort to calling them bots.

And then they run to Mummy to complain.

Only after Brexit, and quite rightly. Cameron wasn't undermined at every turn.

The press only turned on the Tories after the Covid parties etc.

Labour have had a few weeks and they are turning.

It's worth noting that the agricultural relief for IHT was only introduced in 1992 anyway. The world didn't fall in before that. I suspect also that it will be a bit like ULEZ - it was going to kill everyone's businesses even though it only affected 10% of cars. Likewise, the IHT exemption loss will only affect a few people and can be planned for.

The one thing that does seem ridiculous and not thought through is the fact that businesses and charities doing healthcare work are not exempt from the NI rises such as hospices and GPs. But they can address that when they table the legislation.

I think a lot of them will be replacing old kit. There’s one MRI at my local hospital, it’s so old it’s virtually held together with sellotape and paper clips.

The NHS is reluctant to give MRIs anyway . At my hospital and the one dd works at, the lack of kit is not the issue, it's the philosophy that you don't need one if your issue is one that they feel will improve with time.

@sharpclawedkitten To be fair, Labour's position now is quite different to Cameron's in 2015. I think on the Tory side, a lot of Conservative voters liked Cameron when he was Prime Minister. He wasn't everyone's cup of tea and the Brexit headbangers and extreme social conservatives weren't quite so keen but there was, on the whole, enthusiasm from Conservative voters that he was Prime Minister.

As a Labour voter, I don't feel the same way about Starmer and Reeves at all and I don't think many left of centre people do. Labour's big problem is that, despite the budget, they're not different enough to the Tories even though we know the Tories did a piss poor job. Most people who voted for them in July did so to get rid of the Tories, not because they wanted Starmer.

I said before the election that it would be a big problem if Labour won a massive majority because the Starmerites would claim a victory not only over the Corbynistas but also the rest of us who are somewhere in the middle of the two camps. I also thought they would govern arrogantly and take their enormous majority for granted, blissfully unaware of how electoral mathematics mask how fragile their popularity actually is. On the flip side, ordinary people seeing a government with a mega majority always were going to expect big results quickly when in reality the mess left by the Conservatives is going to take decades to resolve.

So what we have now is an arrogant government that is not all that far away from the Tories politically and that only enjoys the support of a niche bunch of centrists (the kind who like to look "right on" and liberal but in reality still want to protect their wealth and who have made peace with Brexit) and otherwise exists on borrowed votes mostly from people who want the vast gulf in wealth inequality to be dealt with as a priority.

TLDR: Cameron might have had friends in the right wing press to defend him. The left wing press, what little there is of it, has no interest in doing the same for Starmer.

Not just tory, I put a post up, basically saying Labour had lied over a national highly publicised incident. Post taken down.

Aye, we're doomed. DOOMED I TELL YA!
🤣🤣🤣

This is very true. I particularly like it when governments affect to say they can control inflation or “brought it down”. They must think us fools

There's no denying the markets today is due to the budget though. So even Reeves PR pre budget hasn't stopped that.

How odd.

I see the opposite with a vocal group of hardcore Labour posters who will not brook any criticism of the Government.

To be frank if they wanted decent growth then the best way by far is to immediately negotiate a Norway type deal with the EU- the idea it would flood the country with people from the EU simply isn't the case. It would certainly help any business that just isn't UK centric and has imports/exports.the reason they aren't doing it ? Well according to my son who knows lots in and around parliament and civil service - far too many middle level tax payers with options would bugger off as the country has been left in such a mess and at the moment they also need to be able to easily put subsidies into various things without competition rules. So basically we can't go for growth in such a way simply because the country 'is' pretty shit I'm so many areas. Britain has so many advantages in quite a few ways and would be a natural choice for investment with the EU market - but no, let's appeal to a bunch of headbangers, few of whom understand industry and business unless it's shuffling numbers on a screen or appeal to utter xenophobes who didn't quite get that the previous government would be making up the resulting workforce shortages from 'elsewhere' bringing in whole families rather than mainly single young people and hence clogging resources. Even my 85 year old father in law who voted for it- says it is an absolute pile of crap , and has spaffed 300 billion

I've always thought that generally MN is more Labour leaning.

@Savingthehedgehogs Your understanding of immigration is woeful, sorry. Are you seriously proposing we solve two public sector crises driven not least by labour shortages by telling people to go away?

Like a lot of western democracies, the UK's population is getting old. We don't have a labour force that is big enough to cope with the aging demographic. The reason you can't get a doctor's appointment or an elderly relative can't get social care isn't because a fit, healthy 20-something has turned up in England illegally to wash cars or paint your nails. It's not even because people have come in legally to study degrees (that's the majority of immigration) or to pick fruit.

There are two reasons why you can't get a doctor's appointment or your elderly relative can't get social care. The main reason is that there are a lot more elderly people than there were 20 years ago and this generation of elderly people are more unhealthy than the generation before them.

The second reason is that working people are getting a smaller and smaller cut of the profits made by their employers. More and more of the wealth being produced is going into fewer hands and it is being received in ways that are harder to tax. So real terms per capita tax revenues are falling and our public services cannot afford to train or retain as many people as they used to. Even GP practices are being forced to close because they aren't given the resources from government to make it worthwhile staying open. Same with dentists.

I always thought MN was mainly left leaning especially over the last few years. There was thread after thread slating the conservatives and I did wonder at the time, what will those whingers be like if Labour get in. What will they do with their day once living in their utopia with no gripes? And also, how will they handle criticism from those who disagree? Don't forget Labour have not experienced being in charge in these days of fast moving social media. How would these people cope?

Well they are in. The government are being judged. There is a new army of whingers of a different party who will scrutinise and call out or knock decisions and the left must learn to deal with it. Just shouting out bot is a way to silence people.

In real life I know people who voted Labour who openly admitted they wanted to punish the conservatives. They are now whinging. Beggars belief!

@HotPipe It doesn't really beggar belief. The Conservatives were abysmal in power. Cameron and Osborne tend to get off more lightly than what followed but a lot of what we are dealing with now started with their decision to underfund services; it just took a while for the rot to set in. Brexit was just a ruddy great turd laid on top.

Given how awful the last government was (and unless you are wealthy and were therefore shielded from it, things really did go rapidly downhill) a lot of people would like someone very different in power. Preferably one that isn't scared of people who are ruining this country like buy to let landlords, privatised water companies and labour intensive low paid businesses like Uber and Deliveroo.

Instead, what people have got is the same kind of pro-Brexit, don't say boo to the rich, bomb the foreigners and screw the poor kind of nonsense that we have had to put up with under the last administration. So it is disappointing.

@ShinyShona I agree partly but not in other ways- I have quite a few friends who are very modest earners indeed ( think under £40k household) and constantly go on about many of the 'lazy arses' they know and they certainly don't want them helping out more cash wise or benefit wise . Not all low earners are particularly liberal on helping the poor- even though they themselves aren't well off.

The gvt have put quite a lot of measures in that affect fiscally and asset wise 'well off' - be it vat on school fees, abolishing non doms, IHT thresholds , capital gains tax , etc - there's a limit to what you can do without getting an exodus of some people who actually are paying a lot of tax that the country needs- and I don't mean people like Charlie Mullins- I mean the 70k software guy or £110k biochemist.

I don't agree the gvt are Pro Brexit- the vast majority were hugely against Brexit but as I've posted below there are issues if they seek some kind of EU deal immeduately , either full or partial. There is concern I know about a brain ( and tax) drain - and also the fact that at the moment they can put certain subsidies etc in place that are more difficult within the EU due to competition rules. As you say Brexit is a great steaming turd but the country has been key to get in such a mess that there are very specific reasons that an instant rejoin in some form may cause some different issues. It's a very difficult balance-

@ShinyShona on your post though about immigration etc - 100% bang on- maybe those that voted for Brexit should have believed those of us saying it will lead to much larger immigration of whole families from outside the EU ( and I don't mean white British speaking places like New Zealand) - therefore more pressure on medical, housing and education- rather than mainly single younger people here for a few years or doctors from Germany etc - it wasn't project fear- it was project reality!! Now some don't have an issue with this- but a great many who voted Brexit certainly did.

That's how the Tory party felt about disabled people