'Taxes are the price we pay for a civilised society'

[Bargepole45]

Having just paid an enormous tax bill, I frankly am fed up with hearing this. There are lots of civilised countries that have a far lower tax burden than the UK. It's just a form of blackmail designed to make contributors believe that there is no other way other than to pay sky high taxes to subsidise people's crap life choices.

Have too many kids and can't afford them? No problem, the state steps in. Have a terrible lifestyle and don't look after your health at all? No problem, the NHS will treat you. Spent all your money with wild abandon and have nothing left to pay for your care when you get old? Don't fret, the state will fund the same care home as someone that has saved all their life.

Don't people understand that these 'safety nets' just facilitate reckless behaviour? We can have a civilised society where people aren't cushioned from all of their bad decision making. I say this as someone from a background where I didn't have much money and I am so fed up with people pretending that poor people don't know that an apple is healthier than a chocolate bar or that it's a good idea to actually attend school. It's insulting and disempowering to keep making excuses for people that simply aren't incentivised to make different, better choices.

No @Avantiagain - those of us who have deliberately worked extremely hard this last year and put in extra hours and are above the 100k threshold, are being charged on account for next tax year, assuming we are going to do the same and continue with that. Hence why a lot of people have a higher tax bill than expected.
I doubt anyone thought about the fact there will be an election close to the on accounts being due in the summer too in a few years.

Yet immigrants manage to travel thousands of miles to take up the "low paid" jobs in the South East and other major cities, but someone in the NE can't travel a few hundred miles?

@Araminta1003

IMO it’s a funding issue. Our non-driving teenagers don’t hop on a train or tube to work, they sit on a bus for 2hrs to travel 15miles.

I manage an education recruitment business, in one of our NE LA’s you’d have to travel to the next one to find a secondary school that is Good. That has an impact on education, that has an impact on employability.

The various manual jobs we had available have disappeared, and absolutely no replacements found.

Redcar, for example, was a steel making town. The steelworks shut, all the jobs went with it, and then the high street followed because nobody had any money to spend.

Mining communities in County Durham, with no mines. The same situation.

It’s not a case of doing better for yourself when there’s such limited opportunity to do so, and you’re systematically held back.

I’ve answered this. Employment should be available in all areas, not just London and the SE.

How are you going to force employers to move into the run down areas??

what @Araminta1003 says above.

Who do you expect to come and sort NE out? businesses, esp larger ones, will NEVER come to an area where majority of population are generational unemployed.

And please don't say your 20yo nephew doesn't go to SE for job out of concern for local youngsters.

Yes he'd probably start at NMW, would need to live in a shared accommodation so not necessarily UC. But even with UC he'd be building skills and if he's so good and driven as you say, he could progress here. It's hard, of course, but completely doable, as proven but hundreds of thousands of people who did this.

But no, he'd rather stay in a comfort of his home town, spend another couple of years on the dole, move from unemployed to unemployable category and everything it leads to in a longer term. I honestly think that stopping all benefits at this stage of his life and kicking him to move would do him a lot of good longer term.

And no, he wouldn't kick local youngsters out of job, but we'd need to import less of low skilled cheap labor from abroad.

@SleeplessInWherever - I hear what you are saying, but equally businesses including online ones typically want to go somewhere where there is a large pool of young talent willing to work at a cheaper price than elsewhere. There are businesses coming back from eg China because cost of living there is so expensive it is now more expensive to hire a Chinese graduate than a British or Spanish or Romanian one. So there are opportunities if education is good and people are driven and talented. It does also rely on some people going home who made it big and trying to create opportunity there. But they won’t if the attitude is negative and the political vibe is off. The NE needs to also stop with the resentment. Durham is obviously an amazing university, for example. Why are the alumnis not doing more or will they maybe in the future? SE is too expensive anyway now and the AI/tech boom is real so I would not lose heart.

That would require fine tuning. Are you in agreement with the implementation, seeing as the extremely vulnerable would be excluded?

These discussions are always a bit weird, because you typically have some people saying, I think the taxes are too high/benefits being wrongly balanced, and then a bunch of people accusing them of wanting to have no taxes and no benefits.

It's always a question of balance.

There can be perverse incentives, there can be created dependencies, and there can be loss of productivity. The last of those is a problem in the UK for sure.

But it's a difficult discussion because getting down to the nitty gritty of tax policy is not easy for most people. But that's what you woul dneed to do.

One think I'd note for those who keep pushing the Nordic approach of high axes is that benefits are typically harder to get than in the UK, and maybe even more than that, there is a strong culture of needing to contribute for the common good.

@Araminta1003

Coincidentally, I am a Durham alumni. I went there for my PGCE and subsequent MEd.

Most of my cohort either wasn’t from the area to begin with, of if they were - like me, they’ve now left. Many of those I studied with are in the UAE, Europe, or just in other areas of the UK. I relocated from Teesside to Cheshire, a good friend relocated from Teesside to Surrey.

I didn’t however relocate for low skilled work, I relocated in a profession I already had, into an area I was confident I could afford.

There has to be a level of confidence that you can make it work, and I think it understandable some young people don’t have it.

but it won't.
I was involved with decisions about business expansion - one of the key criteria businesses are looking for is availability of local labor with relevant skills. It's as important as tax regime and political environment.

Do you know why there are so many shared services businesses in e.g. Romania or Poland? Because of abundance of young, highly educated workforce, speaking several languages, with excellent work ethic and entrepreneurial attitude. They aren't even necessarily that much cheaper, just very efficient and easy to work with.
Can your NE town beat this? no? then forget about such businesses.

You talk about bus commute - do you know that it's completely normal for London (and significant parts of SE) to spend 1.5h+ commuting each way every day? my DC commute to school daily over 1h since they started secondary.

You can wait all your life for the jobs which should be there, or try to move to build a better life. Like millions of other people do.

I think she means people can move to the south east where the jobs are, because immigrants manage to.

but i live in the wealthy bit of the south east and there arent many entry level jobs locally either. Theres more options but not enough for everyone.

They are insecure in terms of low hours. Things like deliveroo, evri and cleaning and care work, but not all full time.

I have no idea how immigrants achieve it. I suspect some are living in terrible conditions and some are doing a professional job too, or are on student visas, or escaping abject poverty or violence so it feels better than that. im also suspicious there is a bit of undocumented workers being exploited and im not sure we should aim for thst as a society.

plus not all immigrants are doing low paid work entry level work - many are coming for skills shortages higher up and are very much better qualified With much experience.

Private sector =/= big profits.

I think the point that you’re widely missing, is that if you’d like an educated workforce with the right skills, you first have to give them that education.

Rather than moving people round the country until the North becomes a wasteland, the government could always invest in those areas and the people in them, so they can get the skill sets they need.

Maintaining the current trajectory would lead to empty NE towns, even more overcrowded S/SE towns, and whole areas of the country left barren.

There is not a situation where that makes sense.

No, they do not exist.

There are not enough jobs for people who are actively looking.

A high number of benefits claimants seem to regard it as a right and would only consider relinquishing them if they were offered a comfy work life balance, 6 figure job within a 1 mile radius of their (Council) home.

Aside from London, other towns do have jobs. Manchester? Commutable from many Northern towns.

Meanwhile back in the real world of workers enduring low pay, long hours, lengthy expensive commutes......

The system needs to stop favouring benefits claimants at the literal expense of everyone else.

It is SHOCKING that the general level of educational attainment and expectation is so poor in much of the North. Before everyone steps up to extol their local comprehensive, compare the regional GCSE and A level results.

It beggars belief that the whole population of large Northern towns and cities (and rural/coastal areas) are intellectually inferior... so what is failing the children? And yes, I know that the per capita spend on education is much higher, especially in London's more deprived boroughs but the results have improved immensely in the last 15 years.

Spoken like someone's sole experience of benefit claimants is reading about them in the Daily Mail.

Do you think it's cultural attitude?

Where I live I have noticed a really big differernce in education between rural and urban areas. Some is down to the rural areas having smaller schools and fewer choices, but that shouldn't make a huge differernce.

I was talking to my hairdresser recently about the fact that most classes in my kids school do not have exams, even the university prep ones. He said he was shocked - all the similar classes in his niece's urban high school have them.

The schools largely have the option to choose, our rural school allows the teachers to do so, and most choose no exams. IN the big city school, the head doesn't allow that. But the main thing imo is that the city school has a huge proportion of university educated professional parents who expect good university degrees for their kid. Most of the rural kids here go right to work or into trade school, and the parents didn't go to university.

It's hard to run a highly academic school without the parents being invested in that.

I agree with you that way much more should be done about education.

But to do this there needs to be budget, and to have budget for education there need to be cuts somewhere and I think welfare is a prime target.

But it's also a personal responsibility to sort own life out and there is just no stimulus to do it when YP can stay on benefits indefinitely.

I have been out of work (not claimed benefits) and relocated. Yes I have first hand experience of how difficult it can be.

Did you relocate for a NMW zero hour contract role?

Thought not.

In answer to the thread title, I think we have a clear winner! 🎉🎉🎉

I'm in the rural SW which is not a beacon of academic excellence, but a bit above the NW/NE from memory of last year's exam result tables. Locally, the figures are further confused by the existence of a grammar school area close by.

But to a degree, there's an acceptance that rural schools have to accept everyone from a wide catchment. The two closest schools are 8 and 12 form entry and serve vast tracts of Dartmoor and Bodmin Moor. But pretty much everyone attends them, from the vet's and GP's children, through to those who scrape a living from seasonal agricultural or tourism jobs. It does affect what the schools teach: I remember one strong discussion over the curricula and content chosen for GCSE DT and IT courses. The default choice was the most "accessible", without any option for the more academically aspirational.

Definitely could be attitude, or at least expectation.

I have 26 cousins, and was the first out of any of them to go to university. I think I was only the 5th to go to college.

The expectation locally was that you went to school, either got qualifications or didn’t, and then went to work in local industry. Until that industry either closed or started using robots, and then there were no jobs for the unqualified people.

My mother wholeheartedly believes that I live near London, because Cheshire is South as far as she’s concerned.

Where I’m from the norm is people are born there, go to school there, work there and then die there. Except now they don’t work there.