Autumn Statement 2013 - your thoughts

[RebeccaMumsnet]

The Autumn Statement is currently live on the BBC

Thought to be included are a potential faster rise in pension age, married couples tax allowance, growth forecasts to be revised up and a fuel duty freeze

Share your thoughts below.

Unlikely, Lib Dem share predicted to plummet. UKIP are a worry in some areas so could be interesting.

I'm prepared to emigrate if UKIP manage to do anything significant.

Agree with everything Orphelia said. It was rubbish and why wait till 2015 to bring in this capital gains tax on foreign property owners? Perhaps Osborne's worried about crashing the London property market before he finally gets booted out (can't wait and counting down the days).

It will probably be a Lab/Lib coalition.

So what would a lib/lab gov be like?

I have no idea. Labour will be too chicken shit to reverse many of the Tories' policies, and too beholden to corporate interests in any case. We don't really have a functioning democracy.

It might not be quite as nasty as the Tories... maybe a bit less racism and hatred of the poor, disabled, and unemployed, but it will most likely be a continuation of the same neo-liberal policies we'd have for the past 30+ years which has given us such gross wealth inequality, suppressed wages, huge personal debt, privitization, etc.

Who knows what the Lib Dems stand for - treacherous bastards.

It's a giant ponzi scheme. The young are being sacrificed in every way possible so that the older generation can "have it all" because they are the ones that vote.

So the younger generation can look forward to;

No pension until they reach 70 (if they live that long),
Never owning their own home and having to pay perpetually to rent a hovel from a slum landlord, taking up most of their pay (if they have a job),
Huge university debts (if they bother to educate themselves),
No jobs and low pay for the jobs there are
Competition from foreign workers who will work for a pittance and live in squalid conditions, courtesy of slum landlord,
High cost of food, energy, travel whilst the older generation get multiple subsidies (free bus passes, winter allowance, warm home grants etc).
Basically a return to Dickensian times for the young or renter scum.

Basically the Tories hate the young (and they are all multimillionaires so have no need to worry how their own young will cope).

Why do you thnk I'm voting UKIP?

ophelia27, that's not far off the truth, some good points there.
But it's not about old vs young, that is what they want us to believe with their think tank inspired "intergenerational divide" and "intergenerational injustice" that they talk about on our TVs.

Just to explain further why it is not a good ride for the old.

Cost of living is going up, prices are going up and their savings of a lifetime are declining because interests rates have been held down in order to try and get some recovery and growth. Old people getting worse care in care homes and in hospitals, some even dying of dehydration on wards.

How many 70 year olds do you ever see on TV or as politicians?

The Tory party is full of trendy "modernisers", young progressive A-listers straight out of Oxbridge, never done a job except for in a think tank, PR, spin or aa a speech writer. And Tory party membership has declined by half as older members who have believed in them for years and worked for them for years have abandoned them because the "modernisers" with their "hug a hoodie" policies don't represent their views.

And Labour are not much different. Everybody is being screwed - young and old - on the big, global, macro scale.

However, on the micro scale, which is the only scale the politicians have any power over, I thought the budget was not so bad.

Rate freezes and cuts for business and new businesses, free school meals and an attempt to let hardworking people keep more of their money. All good and all attempts to reward enterprise and growth. Better than what New Labour would offer - more irresponsible spending and waste which would only create a bigger mess in years to come.

This budget was an attempt to climb out of the pit that Labour hurled us down. It's going to be a struggle, there is no easy ride, but at least Osborne has given us a ladder to start our climb.

Osborne said something like council tax had doubled over New Labour's rule, but that he had capped the rise over the Tory five years.

That's good. Keep it up Gideon. Let people keep what little money they earn instead of siphoning it off to be wasted by bureaucrats and government fat cats.

Shame Osborne was defeated in his attempts to get more tax from this proliferation of what are called "charities" all over the land. Maybe if they get in next time, they'll be able to stop all these "expenses" claimed by the progressives who seem to be all over those "charities".

Anyone who thinks Gideon is doing good job at economic recovery needs to read the IFS response to the growth forecast today..

This will be overshadowed (understandably) by the news of Mandelas death to Gideon's relief.

Labour didn't hurl us down any pit, public spending was not the cause of the financial crisis.

Sorry, go back to home and start again.

I think Osbourne made Ed Balls look very foolish.

Autumn Statement -

Green deal still a bad deal. Chucking extra cash at councils for their buildings, and landlords for theirs is not helping the millions that need this deal. The interest rate for a Green Deal loan is at 7% when a home improvement mortgage can be got for 3%. In Europe green deal rates were BELOW mortgage rates. I'm sitting here shivering while the Germans have free umweltfreundliches underfloor heating and pleasing town centres with buildings that aren't damp and dilapidated.

Pension age - so what? The poor won't live that long or will be disabled by the age of 70 and the wealthy work as consultants as long as they can anyway - as a result of a healthy lifestyle due to only working part time from their middle age due to their high incomes. It just means higher childcare costs for the government as grandparents are too busy.

Wages have hardly gone up for 25 years. This needs to change and the government should NOT be subsidising tightwad tescos with working tax credits while TTs invest their enormous profits in taking over the universe and all its convenience stores.

Small businesses - there aren't any able to survive once the creditors and contractors get the scent of blood. The bigger businesses bring them down because they can - and this budget hasn't made them any more capable of surviving against this ruthless pack.

This is the start of the reception campaign it will be only "good" news from now on in, take all of these 2015 policy proposals with a massive pinch of salt. They've already deleted their pre election promises from the website from the last election so that doesn't install much confidence in any of this Autumn Statment...

Opps " election " not reception!!

I thought the one significant thing that came out of the exchange was that the Labour party are in no fit shape to take over in 2015. Balls' performance was woeful and his repetitive messages about flatlining and how the austerity measures aren't working ring very hollow in the face of the stats. Now better growth is predicted and tax receipts are going to rise it makes it a lot easier to cut public spending, ironically. Trump card will be if the Coalition can turn a surplus.

The fact that the whole of our economy is based on hoping and doing everything possible to make house prices completely unaffordable for anyone who isn't a millionaire higher (in order to win the votes of the older "my home is my pension" generation) and get tax receipts from stamp duty/inheritance tax is such a dreadful economic policy it basically shows how inept and clueless these politicians are. The fact that they all come from one elite group of rich Oxbridge graduates (Major was right) who have no real work experience but get jobs based on their wealth and connections just shows how out of touch they are with ordinary people.

I don't think people vote based on whether Treasury decides there is a surplus or not.

People vote based on what they see around them, their friends losing jobs, their friends children being forced to work at tescos for tuppence or do free internships, their requests to councils, hospitals, services for support which are turned down or not possible because of the cuts.

Labour is making the same mistake of assuming that general bleatings in the House will make people support them. It might work inside that room, but it doesn't work in the real world where millions are unable to heat their homes and feed their families but wages aren't going up.

And tweaking these things doesn't help either - a few pounds here and a few percent there makes no difference if year on year the economy only benefits the big businesses, the landed gentry (homeowners) and the overpaid professionals. I do wish they would stop treating people like idiots and get on and mke some real changes.

Raising the pension age is a classic example of 'oh shit money's really running out now, let's do something quick that looks good to the IMF and covers me and my friends backs.'

There are alternatives to this - like increasing tax on high pensions.

well done to the landlord-haters, you've got it into this thread.

to save effort next time, copy and paste this: 'all rented properties are slums and all landlords are crooks.'

why not start a petition to make owning property a crime?

BTW, those who can't sell properties and are renting them; the CGT exemption period has been halved, from the last three years of ownership to 18 months. But of course as you make a fortune from your shivering tenants who always pay the rent and never trash the place, and you don't have to pay big insurances and all the other maintenance costs, you don't care.

of course if savers weren't dirt you might not have gone into the whole process in the first place, because your diligence and lack of extravagance would be rewarded. But no, you are stupid for saving, you should have spent on things with someone else's name on and energy guzzling gadgets. You can get good rates on loans for those.

(end of rant)

I don't think the main is thinking that all rented properties are slums or that all landlords are crooks, but there is a lot of frustration that unlike many other places, the government has refused to give tenants much protection from slum landlords or estate agents that encourage them and rising prices. They're doing nothing on that front because so much of property is in the wealthiest hands, those that back political parties as well as their political ideology that home ownership is the be-all of responsible adults and mostly ignore tenants unless its to help us to buy. It's the government and politicians that are the aim of the frustration, not hardworking landlords.

Indeed. Labour will be much worse.
I also agree that it was a pity the abolition of charity tax relief did not get through when they last tried. I want simple low flat taxes (and a much smaller state) and no distortions from the complex tax reliefs the state keeps introducing from the patent box to relief for film makers. They just distort the market and are state sanctioned avoidance.

Most landlords rent out one property. Many rent it out because they have had to move for work and they rent themselves in the town of their new job. Until we removed frozen rents and tenancies for life there was no private rented sector - only those as old as I am remember those days and they were not the good old days; they were the very bad old days of renting. Most landlords are lucky to make 4% before tax on their rented property (I know that is the case with my daughter who cannot afford to live in her own flat and in fact in her case the expenses are not covered entirely by the rent so owing it is simply an expensive hope/risk that at some point she can afford to live in it).

When I was a little girl, the father of one of my friends committed suicide: he rented out a house but the controlled rent he got in did not cover his outgoings and he had no right to give notice to the tenants, and no way he could sell the house with them in situ. He spent all his money (earnings from a job) subsidising the tenants before he finally could see no other way out without leaving his family destitute - he was relying on his life insurance to see them get through.

Rent control was finally abolished because, surprise surprise, no new properties were coming onto the rental market and owners would rather leave properties empty than risk getting into the kind of situation that befell my friend's father.

If you want landlords to let out houses (we do) then you have to let them charge enough rent to make a return, and you have to give them the security of knowing that they can get their asset back within a reasonable time frame if they ever need to. Competition will keep the prices down if there is sufficient supply. The current rising prices are due to the lack of supply which itself is down to an increase in the number of households together with insufficient house building. These factors are not the landlords' fault.

Profplum your example is sad but extinct.

Juliet if you want 'low, flat taxes' try living in Afghanistan, Algeria or Albania. Choose from this list. There is an interesting trend you will find that the most developed healthy countries have higher taxes and the most dysfunctional hostile ones have low taxes. Think it through.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_rates

something what exactly is your complaint - are you a saver or a landlord? Highly iikely to be both. If landlord life is so hard, sell your property and invest it in something more profitable.

Bah humbug. And if you think charities are ripping you off, don't ever go to the foodbank when times are tough.

Not something wrong name, specialsubject