George Osborne Gets Booed Handing Medals at the Paralympic Athletics Medal Ceremony

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The nation boos at the Tory scum:

Claig why do you want to link to the labour party website? Are you thinking of switching sides

I'm on the fence, with the country. It's not looking good for the Tories. I think we may see a Lib-Lab coalition.

There are people who support Gideon, like the poster called twofingerstogideon, who are proud to give Osborne Churchill's V for victory salute, but alas they seem to be in the minority.

People on higher incomes bare the brunt of taxation simply because they can. Are you suggesting someone on 20K should hand over the same percentage of their income? I agree in principle to a flat rate of taxation but that is because I believe we should tackle income/wealth inequality in other ways as well. Taxation alone will not solve the inequality neither will it provide the treasury with the income needed to invest in the state sector and pay for welfare. That is why we are in debt, investment is socialised and profits are privatised.

The problem isn't just one of who and how to tax. There are huge levels of (private) capital that could be invested into growth and job creation. Companies have chosen financification over investment into their core business which would create jobs. Workers wages have stagnated for 30 years despite greater productivity, less and less workers are needed, skills change and people are thrown on the scrap heap unable to retrain. Business moans that there are skills shortages, will not invest in training and upskilling but expect the government to offer solutions. In a first world economy you would expect that we wouldn't have a skills shortage but capital flows to where workers are cheap and labour unregulated. China has spent billions on road and water to attract capital to exploit it's cheap workers!

Cross posted with you claig, it's nice to see you

Nice to see you too, Mini.
You are right about business moaning about skill shortages. They always seem to do that, so that people rush to train in those "shortages" and then find that wages have dropped because there is an oversupply. Maybe it's another way to depress the workers' wages.

Maybe it is but one thing can not be denied, businesses profit from well trained and skilled workers but fail to invest. Years ago a business would train someone and reap the rewards of their loyalty now they just want greater productivity and profit without the inputs.

Yes, but that is understandable in a way, because businesses can't guarantee that they can hold on to the workers that they have trained. Workers are often snapped up by companies who haven't trained people, but can offer higher wages.

In the old days, people often stayed at one company for life and the loyalty between employer and employee was two-way. But the worker earned less. Now the worker or the footballer or the banker can easily move and aim for a higher salary, and they have less loyalty towards the company and vice versa. There is more short-termism now than before, and workers and companies both seek quicker and greater rewards with less investment.

In one way, people have become freer and have more choices, but the flip side is that they have less security. The same phenomenon happened in politics, where tens of thousands of lifelong Labour supporters abandoned their parents' loyalty to Labour and switched to Thatcher. Now companies and political parties have to woo the workers and voters, which is why we saw the rise of teh professionl New Labour spinners, desperate to pull the wool over trhe voters' eyes.

Labour presided over light-touch regulation and saw the economy go down the pan. They thought they could fool the public like they did before and spin their way out of it. But the public was too astute and flushed their bullshit down the shute.

But now, this lot are not doing too well, and the economy is flat-lining. The public can't win, it looks like we are heading back to the days of spin, to the days of fines for not closing your bin, to the same bull and the same old scaremongering sh*t, the tired old tripe of '50 days to save the planit'. For the public, it's out of the frying pan and into the fire, back to the future, back to the spin of a Bliar.

And apparently, some of the public booed Osborne, May, Hunt and Cameron and actually cheered Gordon Brown, according to reports. It seems unbelievable, but shows how bad things have got.

Hello Claig. Long time no see. I made the point about the crowd cheering Mr Brown way back up thread. It amazed me too.

Hi, Exit. Love your name, it always makes me laugh imagining the bear

They probably cheered Brown without really meaning it, just to emphasise how fed up of the current lot they are.

Foodunit, I think you are missing my point.

I do think people should pay tax, and as Minitheminx said, the reason people with more money should pay more tax is because they can.

However, an accountant can give you advice, but they will not make decisions for you. I completely agree that people have an obligation to pay tax, but for many people the amount they should pay is not clearcut, and they also have to consider the impact of tax payments on cash-flow and their ability to trade.

By "helping the chancellor", I was talking about somebody overpaying tax in error, not somebody just paying tax.

I would generally support higher taxation/more government spending. However, I don't think this argument is helped by a tendency on the part of some people to demonise higher rate tax payers and assume that anybody who has to plan how much tax they pay is vulgar/on the fiddle, and that there is never any link between having more money and working hard and being innovative.

This way of thinking is about as helpful as assuming that all benefit claimants are feckless and fraudulent and that anybody in a minimum wage job just needs to try harder.

There are huge levels of (private) capital that could be invested into growth and job creation.

There are government schemes that encourage individuals to do this by giving them tax breaks on income tax and capital gains. Of course you have to be vulgarly thinking about tax planning to be aware that they exist.

What seemed a dream 30 years ago to us in the west is now a nightmare and that is globalisation. Capital flies to where the conditions exist to create the greatest private profits. Economists on the left and the right have acknowledged that America is in decline because it's own businesses have gone "global" we are now consumers not producers and governments seem to be paralysed by fear. They need to create the physical and economic conditions in which business will thrive (see Xenia's posts) which also means taking a smaller share of those profits in to public hands. We have one of the lowest rates of corporation tax in the world so the next step is health and safety (as we now hear today) and of course deregulating labour supply. Building airports and roads, dealing with water supply etc, these investments are made and to a large extent the only benefit we see is when business flock to our shores to exploit our labour, however that will be at greater cost to us because we also need to compete on wages. Of course the little people with less in the their pockets bare even less of the tax burden (Xenia and those on right fail to address this issue) this pattern of taxation is likely to continue.

We need loads of regulations abolished. There is a heap of jobs which are like having 4 cloakroom attendants at Soviet toilets where no one turned up for work but they were just jobs for the sake of it, which are pointless inspections. it really is over the top to require most small shops and offices to do things like have a fire extinguisher serviced or checked once a year. We need to rely on people being sensible and then if they do endanger life prosecute them but be rid of all the many pointless rules which protect no one like all the over the top vetting still required by those in many jobs and even if they were vetted just last month by someone else.

I don't know what the right are not addressing, mini. The right know that capital goes where profits are to be made. I am not quite sure what pattern of taxation you mean. If low earners are taken out of tax whilst that means they may not buy into the system (one reason the NHS works is people that earn what I earn use it and often find it better than private care and standards are kept up) that is still probably more sensible than making them pay tax and then hand them money back. Income tax was introduced as a very temporary measure 200 years ago int he UK to fund the Napoleonic wars and in 1900 I think very few people paid it. I cannot remember the exact figures.

From the Guardian..
"Tax In 1900 the standard rate of income tax was 8 old pence in the pound (2%)."
Can't find what % paid it.

But checking the fire extinguisher etc is a job for someone, which is surely a good thing - quite apart from meaning the members of the small office are less likely to perish in a fatal blaze!

That';s the fascinating issue. The Communist made loads of jobs, cloakroom attendants and thelike and peo-ple certainly are happier if they have some kind of job but it did not really work very well. In the N of England at present there are I think more people in public sector often nonjobs, created for the sake of it jobs. Certainly my view is we need to be rid of those so have bigger cuts and lower taxes to create the climate for more real jobs, wealth creation and business.

It is about the difference between personal responsiblity and rules. The right will say most sensible employers will avoid fires. We like our employees. We mostly seek to protect people. We do not need a nanny state which encourages box ticking and which can as a result have an effect that people never consider the bigger picture - is this place safe. No one is replacing laws which allow prosecution for those who do not keep people safe.

Well yes of course most people try to avoid fires, but they do happen and when they do I'm generally of the opinion it's nice to be able to extinguish them.

I assume when you say 'real jobs' you mean in the private sector and industry, but of course those are the first to go when things get tough - and there's not much sign of them getting any less tough right now! Nonjob is in the eye of the beholder - it may be that someone who doesn't really know the industry/sector can look at a job cited in the Mail or something and breezily assert that it's a 'nonjob' - but it could always be that you actually don't really know that?

And on balance I would rather have a properly trained person putting out a fire than Gary from Accounts with a bottle of Powerade.

Perhaps the crowds cheered Gordon Brown because when he was Chancellor he actually did try to regulate the banks but the votes ended up going against his ideas.

The fiscal stimulus strategy was the last resort, kind of like a jumpstart for a car where the battery has run out.

Xenia I do hope you realise I am not agreeing with you. What I am saying is that to be competitive in the global market place under capitalism we will need low wages, less red tape and less regulation, more socialised investment to create greater private profits and attract businesses to invest and employ here. Do I think we need more of the same Thatcherite policies of the past 30 years?

For that reason we need to put natural value above monetary value and think way outside the box

Oh and I won't be drawn into a debate about communism because the only communism we have ever witnessed has been state socialism, something entirely different.

Yes, I know the argument that we have never really had communism so it's not been tested. There was an article nit he weekend press about Israel kibbutzm then and now which was interesting. These days they tend to let people keep their own money and the children live with the parents rather than pool them.

Many of the silly regulations in place are for jobsworths and are totally pointless. Not all of course but a good fair few so I'm glad in theory something is being done to be rid of them but I will believe it when I see it.

Most people in the UK amazingly are employed in companies with under 5 staff, fascinating statistic so it is small businesses ilke mine or those on the entrepreneur's thread which make jobs for many one here, one there and which will help move the country out of recession if we can be bothered to take anyone on. If it's all too complicated and not worth the effort we won't bother.