Westminster: Brexit is the hard right's weapon of mass distraction

[BigChocFrenzy]

The fervour and divisions over Brexit have suspended normal party politics.

The staggering incompetence & unsuitability of Corbyn as a leader, together with the resulting impotence of Labour has removed the normal checks & balances in UK politics.
There is a vaccum where the Official Opposition should be, so Theresa May is under pressure only from her right.

I fear Thereas May and the Tory rightwing are taking advantage of Brexit to complete the destruction of the post-WW2 social contract and the welfare state.

Meanwhile, the constraints of civilised discourse have been loosened and those with racist or social Darwinist views now feel free to spout their poison openly.

Putin is pouring petrol on all the fires and Arron Banks is lurking < sinister emoticons required >

Zoe Williams:
"Behind a smokescreen of bogus patriotism, ideologically driven cuts to the NHS and all our public services are unpicking the bonds of nationhood"

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/05/brexit-theresa-may-falklands-war-nhs-cuts

"We should be marching against the crisis in adult social care, the closure of care homes, the systematic exploitation of carers, the £4.6bn cut from social care budgets this decade.
We should be .... asking:

“What exactly is the plan, if we’ve decided we can no longer afford to care for the elderly and the disabled?
What do we do with them instead?”

"We should be marching against cuts in education funding"

"Every morning we wake up to someone on the radio explaining, despairingly, that you can’t fix the hospital bed crisis until social care is fixed, and you can’t fix that until council tax brings in more, and it can’t bring in more because wages are too low."

"But when everything breaks at the same time, that is not a coincidence: it is a plan.

As surely as Margaret Thatcher had an economic plan on employment, rights, industry and wages,
this century’s Conservatives have a plan on public services, which is to smash them beyond all recognition."

As for the troll question, I think the golden rule is to respond to the individual post, or ignore, depending on the quality of the argument presented in that post, ideally without reference to other posters "on the same side". Not all leavers are trolls, and I'm sure not all trolls are leavers.

The really mad ones like last night's are light relief really.

In idle moments I like to imagine a young PhD student in early 22nd Century Oslo or Beijing unearthing the mumsnet archives as they research the social history of the period leading up to the calamitous events of 2018-2025, and to picture their reactions to everything they find here...

(Does anyone else do this?)

kaija I like to think that someone will be looking back studying and say 'not everyone lost their heads, some nevertheless persisted in sense'

I like to think so hashi

Very interesting link about customs.

I've been wondering if the government is on the case of hiring new customs personnel and updating existing infrastructure to cope with the scenarios of leaving the CU or sudden death WTO rules.

All I've heard is that they are struggling to upgrade the IT system. A new system is due to go live in December 2018 - assuming it's on time.

Desmond Hiscock - DG of the UK Association for International Trade is quoted as saying his members had "a very real fear HM Revenue & Customs have neither the infrastructure nor the trained personnel to cope".

Arair the new system was designed to process up to 100m customs declarations per year, but 350m are expected...

Its an interesting point to bear in mind for the early election, isn't it.

TM could serve notice now and find that Brexit causes the UK to be totally in the shit for the whole of 2019 (as per the Peter North blog!) with nothing moving in or out, tailbacks through Kent etc... The polls could plummet very quickly.

Labour may even have sorted themselves out by then.

I have no issue with Semi or Leave voters posting here (obvious trolls aside), but I don't see that the thread being predominantly Remain in outlook is a problem.

You missed my point slightly Ninon!

It is precisely because it is Remain centric that I keep up with it - ie the opposite of it 'being a problem'.

A handy guide

From the OBR report:

Given the uncertainty regarding how the Government will respond to the choices and trade-offs with which it will be confronted in the negotiations, there is no meaningful basis for predicting the precise end point of the negotiations as a basis for our forecast. There is also considerable uncertainty about the economic and fiscal implications of different outcomes, even if they were predictable. So we have retained the same assumptions that underpinned our November forecast, which are consistent with a range of possible outcomes. Specifically, as regards the economy forecast, we assume that:

the UK leaves the EU in April 2019 – two years after the date by which the Prime Minister has stated that Article 50 will be invoked;
the negotiation of new trading arrangements with the EU and others slows the pace of import and export growth for the next 10 years - We have calibrated this slowdown on the basis of a range of external studies of different trade regimes; and
the UK adopts a tighter migration regime than that currently in place
, but not sufficiently tight to reduce net inward migration to the desired ‘tens of thousands’

Interesting opinion piece in the FT by Janan Ganesh on the self-employed NI increases and the "snap election":

"The media coverage in the coming days may also reflect the wide practice of self-employment among journalists. What ever this Budget was, it was not the prelude to a snap election."

TM would seem to me to be taking a far bigger risk to wait for the next election until 2020 than to get 2 extra years in now.

Interesting to note grumbles starting about the NIC on self employment being raised ... will the people affected realise it's purely down to Brexit ? (Unless someone has some compelling evidence that this measure would have been in George Osbornes 2017 budget, had the 23rd June gone the other way ????)

If TM has any sense, she will have taken note of elections that have not gone as planned ....

The issue there is that the self employed are still your middle class people. The ones who earn enough money will have set up a company with dividends and will be giving themselves the minimum wage (if that) so that they never pay any class 4 NIC.

In effect, she has just increase taxes on middle incomes again, probably because 1- she cant do that to the rest of the workers and 2- there is this idea that all self employed people are loaded so it doesn't matter.

And YY, not one word about how much Brexit is costing the country in there. Just something about having to keep some money aside...
Because all the civil servants and advisers needed wont cost a thing. And that's just a very small start.

"The issue there is that the self employed are still your middle class people. "

Not true. Childminders are self-employed. Many delivery drivers are self-employed. Plumbers are self-employed.

A lot of people are self-employed because it's cheaper for employers. They can avoid all the benefits, tax and NI, and some will fine the contractors for being ill or late.

The Daily Mail is very cross about the budget - its headline at the top of the home page describes it as "brazen" and says the move "flouts the Tory manifesto". I'm sure they won't stay angry for long but interesting...

And I agree with Tanith - the gig economy has made self-employment a very useful tool with which to remove any vestige of workers' rights, especially among the low-waged. Virtually every vacancy I see stipulates that the successful candidate will be "self-employed" when it is blatantly obvious that they will be anything but.

Well, the Tories committed to staying in the Single Market in their manifesto so I don't see why the Mail are getting their knickers in a twist

Or are they just cherry picking those bits of the manifesto that they want to be adhered to?

www.independent.co.uk/voices/international-womens-day-gina-miller-european-parliament-representation-a7619096.html

XNo that's not what I mean. It's not an issue with what sort of job your are doing.
Self employed people are starting to pay clas4 NIC very early on, around the £10k mark a year. Not a lot of money at all, even if you are a childminder or a plumber.
I can't remember what is the exact threshold but there is a point where it is more interesting to stop being self employed and create a company (I think it's around the £12k mark). You then pay yourself the minimum and get the rest of the income as a dividend.
It's easy to do as long as you actually have an accountant that knows what they are doing (or have one in the first ace!).
The issue here is that it's the smaller (income wise and regardless of the reason, it could be because they want to work part time) self employed people who will be hit because they don't have the right advice.
I hope I'm making sense!!

"I think this is her Gordon Brown moment, he bottled it in autumn 2009?, when he could have won a landslide."

Just going back to this a bit - I'm not sure it was that clear-cut.

GB became PM on 27/06/07. If he'd called a GE immediately, he'd probably have won a landslide 4 weeks later (the minimum notice period, I think, in normal circumstances. I thinks it's sometimes longer - 5 to 6 weeks?). But, the crash started late July/early August 2007.

"The UK stock market goes through a period of volatility. Banks begin to stop lending to each other due to market fears over exposure to potential losses on high-risk US mortgages. The credit crunch begins in earnest.
– September 13, 2007: News breaks that Northern Rock has sought emergency funding from the Bank of England in its capacity as "lender of last resort". It prompts the first run on a bank for more than a century."

If he'd called one after even just a month in office, he may well have lost.

But it is totally right that the system is wrong.
I'm sure there is something about the fact that some 'employers' have been fined for using self employed people are who are actually basically employed by them (as they are their only 'customers' etc etc).

This gives some interesting info on self employment issues. The BBC are saying the new tax rules just announced count on earnings >£16,000. I think the recent court cases v Pimlico Plumbers and Uber also need to be considered.

flipchartfairytales.wordpress.com/2017/02/15/tax-and-the-self-employed/

www.theguardian.com/business/2017/feb/10/pimlico-loses-appeal-against-plumbers-worker-status-in-gig-economy-case

www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/28/uber-uk-tribunal-self-employed-status

Love this woman!
www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/snp-mhairi-black-video-conservative-minister-caroline-nokes-tory-hen-commons-scottish-footage-a7618706.html

Ah, so when the Tories said they believed in the gig economy they meant they believed in taxing the shit out of the gig economy workers but not the companies obviously

Red - I think you start paying NIC as a s/e person at about £7500-8000 mark so pretty low. You don't pay tax until £11,000. While I am sure that the Treasury will try to spin the new NI raise as cracking down on greedy company directors (they also lowered the tax allowance on dividends), as I said above, loads of very poorly-paid jobs are now counted as self-employed so the low-waged are being clobbered for extra tax without having any security of employment/holiday pay/sickness pay etc etc.

If the government really wanted to collect extra NI contributions and tax, they would, of course, crack down on employers insisting that their employees are "self-employed".

I like Mhairi Black a lot - she's a raw MP who hasn't had the years of finessing into a glib, slick double speaker like most MPs.
She's still straight talking and to the point, which is a welcome rarity.