Labour - is there any hope left?

[Selectivemute]

Life feels genuinely tough at the moment, and I am trying to remain optimistic.

But what has this Labour government actually achieved since July 2024?

Please tell me the positives, because I am struggling to see any, right now.

Yes, but so-called "assisted suicide" wasn't one of them. It was a private member's bill. The pp's critique was less than honest.

@nearlylovemyusername yeah when I looked at it, I couldn't see any benefits for us

Is whiskey cheaper or something

I didn't get it

For sake of clarity and using my example below, I wasn't just suggesting offsetting- I was suggesting a full tax credit.

So let's say I have a £1million portfolio that normally generates £100k income per year. This is then taxed at say 50%, so the investor only gets £50k.

The credit would mean that if the investment portfolio say lost £100k one year then, the investor would be entitled to a £50k payment from HMRC.

I also have no objection to such a policy in principle. But the secondary impact of such a policy would be to encourage higher risk and higher return investments as you know that if it goes wrong then you can get 50% of your losses back.

Why would you do this instead of putting everything in bank savings account?

Because the return on investment in stocks and shares is usually much, much better.

Do you understand the relationship between risk and return?

The reason that investments in shares carries a higher return than a bank savings account is that investments in shares carries a much higher risk of losing your initial investment.

Indeed. That is one I whole heartedly support.

I think the problem with MN is that it appears most posters think the arguments are binary, when in fact, we are discussing some very complex issues. Let's face it, if politics were as easy as most of the posts on here appear to believe it is, we wouldn't be in this mess.

There are no (well very limited circumstances) where a loss can create a tax repayment where no tax has been paid. So your point isn't reflected by past nor present tax laws. At the moment, if a trade/business makes a big loss, unless it makes a profit the year before or a profit in later years, it won't get any tax repayments for that loss. Nothing at all to suggest the tax laws/rules would be any different if we moved to a systems of equal rates for all different types of income- there's simply no precedent for it, so no reason to think it would be brought in upon a change to standardised/streamlined tax rates.

But on your specific example, it could be one of the "very limited circumstances" already allowed by HMRC where losses on certain investments, i.e. risky Venture Capital Trusts, "can" create a tax repayment, under special rules encouraging people to invest in risky investments, but even then, losses from risky investments such as VCT schemes (and EIS/SEIS schemes) is usually a "tax reducer" i.e. reduces income tax otherwise payable meaning potentially a repayment of tax already paid, rather than any kind of tax repayment where the taxpayer hasn't actually paid tax, so it's still usually a set off, rather than repaying more than they paid (or are due to pay).

There are already rules, one way or another, so any new standardisation can be adapted so that similar results are achieved to what we already have if there's a political will to either encourage risky investing, or not encourage it. It's all according to the will of the politicians of the day as to what they want to happen, ie. which "levers" to pull.

The tax code in 1997 was 7,00 pages.

It is now 23,500.

It's a whole new industry just to understand it, tax avoidance (legal) is rife and easy, it's a compete bloody mess!

As you say, it's now too complicated to change.