Labour hate people like me

[Meadowtrees]

I feel sick at the thought of how much our lives are going to change.

This is not a thread to bash or criticise people nervous about Labour. It’s a place for those of us who are feeling very anxious to have a bit of space - it’s not something we are ‘allowed’ to say in public without being called ‘scum’ ‘selfish tories’ or similar. I’m not particularly linked to any party and not sure how to vote, I may spoil my ballot.

Labour have made it very clear that they intend to make us poorer and our lives harder.
I’m a woman - Labour intend to remove women’s rights
I’m rural - Labour aren’t interested in rural areas
I work in a private school - enough said
I have teens - I expect Labour to put vat on uni fees
We both work full time and have slogged our guts out to now be in a position where we have a comfortable (but not high) income - I expect to be taxed more heavily.
We have elderly parents - I expect the cost of care and inheritance tax to increase.

Maybe it’s selfish but we’re screwed and I don’t expect that what we lose will be put to efficient or good use. It feels like we will be punished for having worked hard and being ambitious.

Labour are very much centrist. In fact KS has massively pissed off the left because he’s pretty much a red Tory as far as fiscal policy is concerned. Hardly alarming. Were you alarmed with Brexit or being taken out of the ECHR, both policies of a future and current Conservative government ? Now that is alarming.

According to our local Labour candidate a few years ago its not me and from that point onwards I vowed it never would be.

The Tory bot insults are par for the course OP - pretty unimaginative and bizarre that these people cannot comprehend that people may think differently from them.

How is she necessarily right wing?

@ActivePeony l can't hear it on my phone-I'll listen again later. I do wonder why neither Speaker nor Clarkson stuck to their guns, though.

It was a brilliant time (initially).

Presumably she’s intelligent and realises that these last few days before the GE will be full of all kinds of false messages on SM trying to influence votes.
Some of the headlines in the Telegraph are like ‘end of times’. Knowing that the current lot in government have been far from honourable (past record etc) I’m sure she takes them with a pinch of salt. Fwiw the Sunday Times is backing Labour, trust them more than the Sun.

It is difficult to feel that someone is legitimately anxious - to the extent that they think a political party hates them - about a slight change in their living standards when for the last ten years lots of people have really been suffering under the Tories.

To say that you don't care about things improving for them, you are only interested in yourself and your family, when you are clearly thriving, expect to inherit, and any reduction in circumstances would still be luxurious by the standards of people living hand to mouth or sick and destitute is pretty immoral so it's difficult to sympathise. I would rather someone was a bot than actually feel like that, but the fact that people kept voting for these maniacs suggests otherwise.

I am not sympathetic to your plight at all. If it's happens, suck it up. In truth, you won't be much worse off.

Combination of a generation that’s never lived under a Labour government as adults and social media.

On inheritance tax why shouldnt your parents’ estate pay it? Why should you get a huge amount of unearned cash for free and further inequality?
I dont buy the fact that its because your parents worked hard.
If your parents lived in the North or rented or went into care - the amount they can leave their children is likely to be much less compared to someone who benefitted from London property price increases for 50 years and died without incurring care costs.
We’ll never address the full inequality but better public services funded by inheritance tax goes some way to addressing the balance.

@Churchview
We must be the same age.
I remember a lot of this.

And what have recent Governments done to sort inheritance tax or care costs. Waffled before elections and sweet fa when they've had chance.

Really because I was 19 when Blair's Labour won in 1997?

Yep. Me and my sister paid eye watering amounts of iht. And quite right too.
And what's more won't be putting anything tricksy in place to mitigate it for our children.

You’re not that generation then. Nobody younger than late 30s can remember adult life under anything but a Tory government.

I doubt you are the 'squeezed middle' and I think that's the problem. I think labour will improve things for people at the middle and lower end of the wealth spectrum.

The problem is that people who are really pretty well off don't realise how lucky they are and think they are the middle. If you earn £66k as a couple you're in the top 10% of the country. So 90% of people are worse off. A lot are MUCH worse off.

I think the media fuels this belief.

A government committed to economic growth, as labour have made clear they are, should improve things for everyone. Though hopefully more for those at the bottom of the pile.

When you posted that bitchy tiny violin, had you read the part where I put my ds has left school?

So no violin for VAT on his ex school fees. And no violin for any of his experiences - they’re all behind us.

Or was the violin for the teachers I described who’d gone off with stress

Or was the violin an attempt to gloss over my points about what’s really going on in private schools, from someone who’s got real experience of what’s going on inside them right now - instead of halfwits who think the kids are wiping their are with 20 pound notes and bathing in champagne?

Charity - vat on school fees is levelling down, not up. Which seems to be labours main aim.

Edna - I was and still am despairing about Brexit. I do, however, remember that the Tory PM campaigned in favour of staying in, while Corbyn was ‘neutral’. Corbyn could have made the difference!! The tories did call the referendum, but they weren’t all in favour of brexit, and it’s incorrect to think that.

I think today's Labour Party is just as centrist as Blair was.

@EmeraldRoulette I think it was Reflections with Peter Hennessy (BBC Sounds).

I think the best solution I heard for this was a small 'death tax' of about 2% on the whole estate of anyone who dies over state retirement age. Other inheritance tax, that currently catches about 4% of estates, stays in place as well on top. The extra 2% death tax covers the cost of social care for all elderly who need it. People no longer have to pay for care, and the death tax is collected from everyone, whether you needed care or not.
I think it was the LibDems who suggested it but it was quickly struck down by the howls of 'its not fair, why should I have to pay if I didn't need care!'

More so. I’m disappointed that it’s being so timid although i obviously understand why.

I would say she is bang in the squeezed middle territory.

I was talking to the OP, not you @Beefcurtains79

@Meadowtrees This is meant kindly, but I think you are panicking unnecessarily. Although I don’t work in a school, we have a lot in common. The way I see it, we all need to be prepared to pay more tax to get the services we rely on running acceptably. Pretty much everything we all rely on, from water, to road infrastructure has gone to shit in the past 14 years.