No good candidates just leads to loads of candidates. What was it last time, 10?
Theresa May's Conservatives
Jeremy Corbyn's Labour
Tim Farron's Liberal Democrats
Paul Nuttall's UKIP
2 people's Greens
Nicholas Durgeon's Scottish Nationalists
Satan's Sinn Fein
Dr Ian Paisley's DUP
Some other bunch of nonces
I'm foreign, but I wish I were an Englishman
No good candidates just leads to loads of candidates. What was it last time, 10?
Next out of the limo is (checks he's still alive) Ken Clarke.
Can Cameron run now he's a lord?
Ultimate heel turn.
I'm still holding on for my god knows how many years ago prediction of one day seeing Prime Minister Jeremy Hunt. Not a chance, sadly. Well, not sadly really.
Conservative Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Just call an election for fuck sake. I'm not say Sir Keir Starmers Barmer Armers will be any better, but atleast we get a fresh set of shambles to enjoy.
Hunt considering cuts to inheritance tax.
Aside from the merits of that, as my wife pointed out to me, that's a journalistically challenging sentence. Can't see everyone making it through without at least one cunt slipping out.
The problem with inheritance tax is that the people who should really pay it never end up paying it they speak to a financial adviser and a tax adviser and never get caught.
It catches people who just happen to have bought a house 40 years ago for a certain price and never gave any thought to it.
When I did my financial advice training we were very much told that inheritance tax is an optional tax and any customers should be made aware of that.
Yeah, it's a completely pointless tax and, as you say, completely fails to serve what I presume is its purpose, to somehow halt or stymie the transferring of generational wealth.
Just ends up fucking over Mavis' kids when it turns out her tiny hovel in East London is apparently worth a fortune.
What is the rationale behind the state taking 40% of your stuff when you die, stuff you have presumably acquired through monies that have already been heavily taxed?
Because the state can (supposedly) spend that money more efficiently for society than if it all went to your kid.
Its raising is a big favourite of what I would tenderly refer to as the moron left, who would all have it at 100%, as if the family as an socio-economic reality does not exist or should be replaced by some form of faceless administration.
I’m (very) left and I’d bin it off completely.
Same old Tories.
Anyone supporting the binning of inheritance tax because it doesn't work can't be serious. Make it work. But they won't, because they're the beneficiaries of the loopholes and nothing will change while that remains the case. But yes, let's focus on benefit fraud. Serious stuff indeed.
Britain is finished.
Last edited by Spikey M; 18-11-2023 at 08:38 AM.
You can’t lump avoided and evaded into one column and label the graph evaded, they’re two different things.
And for a board that’s always going on about boomers ruining everything by stealing all the monies, I’d have thought the opportunity for some of that to go back into the state from those that haven’t avoided it would be welcome.
And Britain finished? Have a lie down. Tories have been banging on about benefit fraud since I was in short trousers.
How do you make it work? Abolish the system of trusts that most of the economy [the entire pension system] seems to rely on? I'd be all for it but can't help but think it might have somewhat ruinous implications. IHT isn't avoided via 'loopholes', there's a whole field of law built up over hundreds of years dedicated to the mechanisms.
Pensions being outside of the scope of IHT through some weird system whereby you can't tell the pension company to give it to your kids but can 'express a wish' that they do so was news to me, and seems a bit odd.
Nuking/Self-defending against Guernsey/Jersey would see those columns drop right off tbf.
Not only would it not, but those two also have higher levels of corporate transparency than most EU nations/the UK.
Probably better off nuking Dublin or Luxembourg if it's revenue that you want.
I always feel like Switzerland gets off so easy in these conversations. Just smack back in the middle of Europe pretending it's fine.
IHT only raises £7 billion a year anyway. Tobacco duties raise £10 billion. Government receipts and spending are mental when you look at it. The NHS costs 20% of all government receipts to run (more than the total of all NI contributions, for example), and this is when the Tories are supposedly underfunding it.
I always liked that Miliband-era 'statistic' that there is an easy hundred billion quid of avoided tax revenues just waiting to be claimed, but, rather than do so and use it to win every election for a generation by abolishing VAT or doubling health spending, the Conservative Party are too beholden to Their Rich Mates.
The outright benefit fraud looks tiny on that graph and what counts as benefits unclaimed? Are we talking winter fuel payments? PIP claims where the claimant's deceased and the next of kin can't be contacted?
It's not a good graph.
Love also the way the arrows point to the two bars suggesting they’re separate things rather than different estimates of the same things.
I'm not an economist / accountant / whothefuckever and I couldn't really care less about the "hows" of stopping rich cunts dodging tax, or whether they've avoided or evaded it. They haven't fucking paid it, whatever you call it and we should be stopping that shit a long time before we point the finger at Brenda for not telling UC that she has a new boyfriend and they should be on a joint claim.
Correct. And it somehow still works to deflect attention from their rampant corruption.
Britain (probably the West as a whole) absolutely is finished, yes. Aging population, people have stopped having kids, wages stagnant, homes unaffordable, society constantly at each others throats. Our population is due to start declining within the next 10-15 years with less and less people paying more and more tax to keep the shrivelled old fogies (us) alive in our unfunded care/torture homes. The future is bleak.And Britain finished? Have a lie down
On the other hand, Richard Curtis has a new Christmas variety show called Christmas Actually.
International breaks send people to dark places.
Not much more than 100 years ago we were eating mud and children were working 60 hour weeks. The idea that we’re ‘finished’ is genuinely laughable and I realise I say that from a position of privilege, but this narrative of doom that’s festered from social media really does need to be pulled into check.
Exactly, dark places.
What international teams are calling up Southend players? Sealand?
Afghanistan, Sierra Leone and erm... "Sao Tome and Principe", wherever and whatever the fuck that is
The country shouldn't be finished insofar as what is finishing it could be fixed relatively easily - make it easier to build things, close half the universities, induce a few million foreigners to leave, etc. - but it won't be so it is.
Switzerland deals with the Arabs and the Americans. The English money is in the Caymans, why expose yourself to moving money abroad when there's a sovereign nation to funnel it through.
The core issue is that once you get to a certain level, 99% of your wealth isn't made by your income which is the only black and white and easy to follow paper trail. Once you move past that any individual investigation requires resources to pursue and the people with resources worth persuing can use said resources to jam the works for years. It's cheap and easy to go after some bint with 6 kids on welfare because they've not got an entire industry created to prevent her from getting caught.
He thinks it turns people woke because he’s a weirdo that thinks education has been perverted by communists generational goal to corrupt the population against the ideas that would save the nation. Those ideas just happen to be ‘agreeing with this loser on every subject’.
I think it's a large-scale misallocation of human resources, acts as a visa machine for pointless foreign students, screws half the people who go there with debt, and leaves the taxpayer with a massive liability since half of it never even gets paid back.
This from a guy who did a PHD in History.
And, after my period of unemployment, currently works in a job that requires me to know enough about history to decide what historical information is released to historians.
So you're saying after your 8 years of higher education followed by near enough a decade of sponging off your Mum that you consider yourself useful to society in ways that wouldn't show up on a stats sheet? Sounds like a good argument for accessible higher education.
My experience isn't particularly representative, so your previous post was stupid.
‘I’m special’ is such a perfect summation of your world view.
I am fortunate to have found a job that my qualifications are perfect for. This is not typical of most people (and wasn't for me for long enough). Therefore, generally speaking, it is not a controversial idea that university does not necessarily - whether by that or the financial side of it - work for most people. Why can't you read and understand anything you massive retard?
You only ever got a decent job because of your mum's name, Phonics. As soon as you left her teet you were stuck working behind the bar of a flat roof pub.
If that’s aimed at me, I’m lost.
Wasn't the whole idea of sending everyone to university in the first place to pad the unemployment stats?
I don't really get the current system. The government pays the high fees, cheques are immediately cashed by the higher education institutions and most people get to live their lives under a cloud of debt which the government never gets paid back. Seems the system only really exists for the benefit of the bloated university sector.
A mentality probably needs to shift, whilst we're at it. There's a prestige still attached to your kids going to university.
Nowhere else would you get qualified uni students stacking shelves because their degrees are useless.
Isn't that because traditionally those people have come over here to work in Pret?