The Labour Party leadership election

[Amethyst24]

Make leader, male deputy, male candidate for London Mayor. I fucking despair, I really do. I've been going on about this on social media and I can't seem to make myself shut up about it, it makes me so incredibly angry.

squidzin You either use other countries as an ideal and copy them, or you suggest a new way that makes sense. You cannot argue that other EU countries are better, but we want the best bits of the UK and the best bits of the EU without a coherent plan.
There is not a person who doesn't want free healthcare, free education and great support for the vulnerable, but no society anywhere has achieved this.
Why? Because we are inherently selfish. In a global context, the 1% have $34,000 - £23k - basically the UK median earner is the 1% worldwide, yet many on the Left say we should reduce global aid.
Why is acceptable to tax rich people at high rates solely so people in a limited geographical boundary can live well, but not so the genuinely starving can have more than $1 a day?

Sweden and Denmark function well as countries because they all basically agreed on the level of the services they want AND agreed on the high taxes to pay for it.
In the UK, we seem to aim for European levels of services and US levels of tax, so we have ever worsening public services and a worrying public deficit.

Borrowing is fine for improving infrastructure, but not for "annual running costs" with the current state of Uk finances.
Politicians say we need austerity to reduce the deficit, but they only consider cutting public expenditure, rather than raising tax income. Cutting IHT was outrageous.

I'll only believe a political party that promises to improve services when they also promise to raise income tax / IHT / mansion tax / wealth tax too.
Not chickening out and claiming they'll only cut "waste" (never happens) - or "Peoples QE" (maybe illegal under the Lisbon Agreement)

It is quite feasible; Our taxes are historically low - we paid much more in the past and the country prospered.

It's the constant whinging about 'tax payers' money' in the red tops that creates this sense that paying tax is somehow an unnecessary obligation.

What else should tax payers' money be used for, if not to pay for services?!

There's no joined-up thinking on behalf of most people - or even some in government. If we don't generate the revenue from tax, where else are we going to get the money?

No carol, my point is that despite "rationing" yourself to only one child you probably take more from the state then you give.

Ah yes, the 1970s when the country was broken.

When there were no food banks and very few people living on the streets.

Also Carol not sure what the eye-roll was for, did you not read my post properly, I said:

"But that wasn't representative of "equal societies" either, was it? It's not helpful to take just one example and declare it representative of a whole idea."

There is not a person who doesn't want free healthcare, free education and great support for the vulnerable, but no society anywhere has achieved this.

Well, apart from the UK for about 20 years, until the Tories started taking it apart piece by piece.

biwi tax-payers money can easily be used by the taxpayer themselves for whatever they want. the level of taxation in a country is very important and needs to be agreed by society - this is exactly what we are arguing.

ask we were doing so well in the 70's that the IMF came and congratulated us on our spending levels and took lessons for use in other countries

plays Again, it was all using borrowed money and excess tax revenues from banks and housing as the asset bubble was deliberately stoked by Gordon Brown. Additionally, most of the new schools and hospitals were build using PPI which was not included in the spending. None of this was sustainable.

There is no such thing as free. There is no free healthcare, free childcare, free education. It all has to be paid for somewhere along the line. Depends how much the electorate want higher taxes in order to pay for all this.

What does this even mean?!

tax-payers money can easily be used by the taxpayer themselves for whatever they want

Of course it can't! We all pay tax for the government to use to pay for the things they provide for us - you know, like education, or the NHS or the army or ... etc

I'm not quite sure, either, what you mean by it being agreed by 'society' - who is society?

One thing is for sure, as a civilised society, we all should pay a decent amount of tax to pay for the services we all require.

And I doubt very much that the IMF were really that impressed with us in the 70s, seeing as we had to borrow a record amount from them in 1976!

As pressure on the pound continued, the government approached the IMF for a loan of $3.9 billion in September 1976. This was the largest amount ever requested of the Fund, which needed to seek additional funds from the US and Germany.

From The National Archives

Viviennemary, free education and free healthcare was perfectly sustainable until Westminster spent all our money on the private sector's financial crisis.

Most people will be perfectly happy to pay a bit more in tax to preserve the things that made us an amazing country such as free education, healthcare and legal representation.

These are being destroyed by the austerity myth, which keeps the wealthiest top centile growing, while impoverishing everyone else.

To believe otherwise is to be willingly duped.

BIWI don't worry about caroldecker they are a terrifying right-wing lobbyists.

I would add rather dense to that description

BIWI apologies my sarcasm didn't come across - it was a response to posters saying the 70's were a great time.

The 'right' level of tax is what we are discussing. There is only the tax-payers money that the government collect. How much that should be is the main point of the debate.

squidzin I think you are wrong about most people and we have never paid enough tax to fund what you want, just got away with borrowing money to spend on it in certain periods of time.

Golly!

Gordon Brown was around in 1968?

He's looking good on it.

caroldecker, well, you may be right in your circles. The wealthiest always have had a problem paying tax.

How do you think the private sector functions if not through "borrowing money through certain periods of time". It's called cash flow management.

The public sector operates no differently re borrowing, but there is the very crucial issue regarding profit, and profit allocation.

In a nationalised public sector, profits circulate, are controlled and reinvested nationally. For the benefit of actual people actually living in the county... Not creamed off to be retained in some offshore tax haven.

Tax is coming from VAT, PAYE, inheritance... there is shitloads of it. We are supposed to be this great wealthy nation. We're literally giving it all away through privatisation.

squidzin In the 70s far less people went to far fewer universities. I went to university in Scotland in 1977. There were 7 universities in Scotland then (had I gone in 1975 there would have been 6) There now 15. John Major turned technical colleges /FEMALE colleges into universities- 1 or 2 year vocational courses morphed into 3/4 degree courses.

In Germany higher education is still free. And they have three times the number of universities, despite population ratio of
64m UK : 81m Germ.

Germany has a lower % of people in university than the UK.
The UK govt has borrowed in 57 of the last 69 years - hardly cashflow
Very few, if any nationalised businesses made profits - they were mainly loss making

I think there is a wider issue here of the extent to which the public purse is being put at the disposal of private companies. Through a whole load of measures, from housing benefit to private landlords, tax credits to boost terrible corporate wages, right up to PFIs, public cash from the taxpayer is being shovelled into private hands, where it disproportionately is used to enrich the wealthy. This cannot be sustainable or right.

Not to mention tax payer paid "subsidy" right into the pockets of multinational offshore tax dodgers to the tune of £3,500 per hh.

www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jul/07/corporate-welfare-a-93bn-handshake

squidzin

Of that £93bn,

£44bn is tax allowance on capital investment - ie allowing companies to reduce their profit by the cost of machinery etc. That is not a subsidy, it is the same as allowing them to reduce tax profits by the cost of employees. Removing it would be the same as taxing turnover.

£15bn is private provision of services for the govt, so you should include all the NHS spends on drugs for example.

£4bn is subsidies for green energy

£15bn reduces airfares and train ticket costs because fuel is not taxed.

So bollocks that it is right into the pockets of multinational offshore tax dodgers

erm, however you break it down using faux-intellectual reasoning...

Your reply makes less sense than those who used to justify slavery.