We need a political party that will…

[Skippp]

I work in finance and this country is on the brink of collapse. It’s spending too much, it’s not growing the economy and needs someone to come in and make good decisions quickly if we are to survive. It’s in a really serious state now and action must be taken. I’vote Labour, and did so hoping Keir would be brave enough to take the hard decisions needed but he’s been a pathetic wet blanket. We need a government who:

1. get rid of the triple lock. It’s laughably unaffordable.
2. reassess the whole benefits system and get rid of disability payments for anything but the most severe conditions, increasing the amounts to those who have these conditions.
3. restrict benefit payments to those born outwith the UK to those that have been in full time work for a large proportion of their adult lives here.
4. Reduce the minimum wage to help companies hire again.
5. Reduce housing benefit. People will have to move to somewhere cheaper or landlords will have to drop prices to what people can afford.
6. Go to an insurance backed healthcare system like they enjoy in Europe.
7. Ditch 95% of planning regulation and get Britain building again.
8. ditch net zero. No one is going to run a successful business in a country with the highest energy costs on the planet.
9. Reopen Scotland oil and gas production (inc refineries) and explore for more areas.
10. Simplify income taxes. Roll income tax into NICs. Give everyone child care hours, child benefit, personal allowance and increase tax rates to pay for this. Stop artificially restricting people from earning more.
11. Simplify VAT. Drop the threshold to £20k to ensure no one has a ceiling on earnings.
12. Simplify IHT. 5% on everything. No nil rates or exemptions.
13. rejoin the single market and customs union.
14. Explain policies better! Tell people how unaffordable the triple lock etc is. Tell them what the single market and customs union non is and why you’re rejoining. Tell people what the ‘bond markets’ are and why they’re important. Tell people why paying for rich people’s child care is much better for the economy than forcing high earners to drop their hours.
15. Probably ought to start deporting economic migrants with no right to stay quickler to throw some red meat to reform voters.

We need a party to take on ALL of these policies and move AT PACE on them. Who’s the party that will do this? I thought it was Labour but BOY was I wrong on that!

What are people adding to the list?

I’d refuse to pay.

Why you'd rather a medical bill at the end

Don't pick on me for posts other people have made, I have been completely consistent.

When I started my first non-trainee job I rented a room in someone else's house. What I see these days is posts about people not being able to leave home because they can't afford the rent on a flat.

Does anyone in a professional role even rely on or use the NHS anymore? I can't. Costs me too much in lost earnings while I rot in queues behind non contributors whose unearned income isn't affected whatsoever. Health insurance is a necessity imo, the NHS was created to keep workers working but it's currently doing anything but. I'm so tempted to sell up, pack in work, go & fund a nice life abroad on my capital then come back skint with my hand out. I feel like I'm being taken for an absolute mug at the moment.

As I approach pension age, I have to agree.
However if you have fully paid up your NI then you should get something back, even if it’s £100 a month.

Yes, less concentrate all the money in London that generates the most of it and ditch the rest of the country… as Boris intended before deciding it was a better idea to ditch the EU…

We are still paying for years of the Conservative corruption and believing their tripe about it being fault of the immigrants and not decades of bad decisions. You may say whatever about the conservatives being over but no, they just came out of the closet with more open fascist views and renamed themselves Reform.

The first post reminded me so much of Trump’s first campaign… and here we are, with someone in power that cares so much about his people, his team and the world as an Elon Musk… you shouldn’t manage government as business because business demands for the less productive to be fired so what would you do with our massive and costly growing majority of retired people? Dump them in the sea or let them freeze to death in winter to save you some money?

And that we pay to switch off wind when it's too windy.

We don't store energy. Because it's very hard to got any spare mountains?

The biggest way to save loads of money and actually help people is invest more in social care. Do you have any idea how many people are in hospital beds who have been medically discharged but can't leave.

i wonder if there would be popular support for a guest worker system in lieu of the current migration system? No access to benefits or public healthcare, no route to citizenship, no dependents over the age of 60, have to leave if you lose your job and don’t find another within 3 months, have to leave once you reach 60.

Of course there would have to be a sweetener (as there is in all countries that operate such as system) such as reduced tax.

This

Can someone please explain to me why the government allows massive companies that make millions/billions in profits to pay workers wages that are so rubbish that the government ( ie the tax payers) have to top them up with universal credit? This really doesn’t make any logical sense in my mind.

But you pay NI to fund the pensions of today. It’s nothing to do with paying in. The idea that pensioners with millions should receive a state benefit is insanity. Imagine if a young, working age person, had an income that exceeded the majority of the country, but they got a protected state benefit?!

And how much to collect this 50p ?

This is excellent. It’s more of what we need. If you feel ill enough to be bothered to get yourself there you should be seen.

"Remove" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this post

My work is very flexible and I am very open to them about my health issues so they have never said no to a hospital appointment. Obviously I do lose a significant amount of money as I never get paid for it so after I've used my holiday everything else is unpaid also my appointments are spread out around the country so thats also a big expense. And another reason why disability benefit shouldn't be cut like the op wants

Well there are 160 thousand hospital beds in the uk 3 meals a day. These beds are usually all full so im pretty sure it would make money

Grid scale, small scale and domestic energy storage is massively increasing. Yesterday I stored 6kWh of the electricity my panels produced (couldn’t store more ans my battery was already over half full) and sold 14 kWh back to the grid. Domestic energy storage is already a significant part of overall storage but there doesn’t seem to be any official numbers on how much there is because when you connect a small or domestic system to the grid the DNO only want to know your maximum production capacity and don’t ask about your storage capacity.

There are plenty of British Citizens who contribute absolutely nothing..

But “the retired” were “the working” for several decades of their lives. Do you think you’re not going to get old?

Yup. This should be addressed too.

Look at Theresa May. She gallantly tried to propose a solution and it was desperately unpopular. Telling anyone what they want for free they can’t have us extremely unpopular. The media feed into the frenzy too. ‘The government are trying to rip you off by asking you to pay for stuff you get for free’ etc. see the farcical reaction to taking away the winter fuel allowance. My parents still get it. They have no mortgage, minor utilities bills (heat pump, solar panels, battery storage). Their costs are food and council tax and lots of fun holidays. They think it’s foolish that they get it but it comes automatically so it goes on Christmas presents etc.

Wages shouldn’t be cut… Just that we can’t afford to continue to increase minimum wage above inflation! NLW is 2/3s of median wage… You can’t go on increasing it beyond that proportion without creating major problems - who will work as a supervisor if paid pennies more per hour…

We should be focussed on “increasing the size of the pie”, not “splitting a shrinking pie into larger portions!” which clearly doesn't add up.

Fairness.
Already you can never/hardly ever pay into the system and receive pension credit to get you to with about £5 of a state pension.

No one these days is thinking the state pension will be around when they retire!

The state pension is a set amount. The triple lock is a mechanism introduced years back when pensioner poverty was high that was designed to increase the state pension more rapidly than it had been to reduce that poverty. It’s done its job. Pensions have caught up. It now needs to be set back to a double lock to ensure that pensions keep up in real terms, without getting exponentially bigger at a rate that is unfair to all of those funding it. Can you see that?

You do know pensioners pay tax? Any with millions will easily be repaying their state pension and more.