So... Politics? Anyone???

[silverzx]

Did someone mention bacon?

[Magenta Sunset]

yep (seen Tremors?)

[MisterGTR]

No mention of the money they find for illegal wars any nuclear weapons. Which just happens to line certain pockets.

We currently have a bunch of self serving xxxxxxs in the power in the UK and the so called opposition keep voting with them.

[Magenta Sunset]

Guido Fawkes was a man of integrity by comparison

[r3k1355]

yep (seen Tremors?)

Have you seen the new one?? (god it's bad!!)

[Dum-Dum]

That corporate tax avoidance malarkey is a daft lefty red herring.

All these big companies do not need to have UK head offices, they could trade from any tax haven in the world they like and sadly if you start making them pay proper tax they will just up sticks and bugger off somewhere cheaper (IIRC google did this). If these companies all up sticks then suddenly you have thousands possibly millions of unemployed people who aren't paying hundreds of pounds a month each into the system. Consider facebook probably employs 1000 staff on an average of £60k/pa thats around £25k/pa per employee in income tax or £25,000,000 into the UK economy and that's before you include the tax on them spending any of that money.

[Redordead89]

Christ I reckon you're defending the indefensible as you said earlier people are dying due to cuts in welfare and the Tories not really giving a toss that this country (UK) HAS to change! Where you live and work is in its own financial bubble and doesn't mirror any other part of the land so in short you would say that living on London!

[Paul_13]

I do agree with that, I occasionally work in Canary Wharf and the amount of people with their head so far up their arse they can see their tongue is unreal.

Being a country "bumpkin" as my London friend calls me, it's a bit of a shock to me how many people do not give a flying f*ck about you or your personal space in London.

I don't know if any suffers from "supermarket rage" here (I know Anthony does ) but I get the same in London, people getting in your way and having no sense of personal space.

It's all about image, wealth and individuality (read that as strange dress sense, sexual preference and dodgy hair cuts)

Where as at my parents which is pretty much country side, there is a real communal spirit and we look out for each other

[toseland]

Don't they say you should never talk about religion or politics?

Exactly this!

Bacon is my religion, because bacon is real and no wars have ever started because of bacon but i bet a few have been solved by it!

bacon gives you cancer! its a muslim/left wing conspiracy according to britain first lol

[Dum-Dum]

Christ I reckon you're defending the indefensible as you said earlier people are dying due to cuts in welfare and the Tories not really giving a toss that this country (UK) HAS to change! Where you live and work is in its own financial bubble and doesn't mirror any other part of the land so in short you would say that living on London!

I'm being sensible, yes people are dying in the cuts, sucks if it's anyone here's relations or friends but they were going to die eventually anyway.

You won't get £25 MILLION tax out of Facebook before they ship off elsewhere and we don't get a penny, the economy does get £25 Million in income tax and NI from the employees of facebook UK. Which makes our economy better off both physically and in comparison to other countries?

[Redordead89]

Nah mate it sucks if it's anyone dying because of cuts when our country has so much wealth!

[Paul_13]

Should of taken a leaf out of dumdums book and got out of Scotland while you could

[Dum-Dum]

Nah mate it sucks if it's anyone dying because of cuts when our country has so much wealth!

But we don't have the wealth, to have the wealth we'd have to put up taxes if we put up taxes then the high earners will leave and we'll end up with less money. Trust me, I f*cking hate higher rate tax, I'm considering going part time to stay under the threshold as for every quid I earn over the threshold I only see 34p in my pay packet.



As for people dying because of the cuts let me give you an example and one where I can talk from a position of knowledge.
There are less police on the streets because of the cuts, about 15,000 less officers (10% for arguments sake) across the country. This is a fact.

Some of those missing police officers were traffic police and some were patrolling officers who used to find time to give motorists tickets, process the worst ones to court and arrest the really dangerous drivers. Because of this lack of officers to deal with traffic offences (most of which are offences because they are dangerous in some way) I see less tickets going through the supervision tray.

As it happens it looks like road death is going to rise this year. I cant prove the correlation but similarly you couldn't prove there isn't a correlation and on a balance of probabilities most would accept I'm probably right. Those extra road deaths then, all those extra families where someone never came home, they are a result of the cuts.

[Redordead89]

Serious respect for the job you do Chris! Especially in London and yes Tax sucks but so does having to rely on tax credits to pay £650 a month rent because there's no council houses left due to a previous gov's roll of the dice and selling all the housing stock therefor pushing up rental and buy costs for those who don't have enough to buy! Catch 22 bud and it's crap!
I Honestly do see the merits of the flip side to recover the economy but this will mostly serve those at the top with the wealth! And to try to recover a third of the 12 billion needed from those who literally don't have it to give is criminal and if not it should be!

[MisterGTR]

I find it laughable that the Tories ( supported by the media)/still blame Labour for the current financial state.

They've borrowed more since they came to power, and still running a defecit missing all their fiscal targets.

They bailed out the banks with our money. Yet they attack those who can least afford to pay while the bankers are doing alright. NB I used to work for Barclays Capital.

[Niall]

I find it laughable that the Tories ( supported by the media)/still blame Labour for the current financial state.

2 points there, first. Its dependant on which programs you watch or paper you read. Some support Tories, some blame them because their finger went through the paper whilst wiping their arse that morning.
Secondly, labour openly admitted they cocked up by selling off shit load of our gold dirt cheap. This was just one of the many things that landed us in the situation we have been in.

I live in London so i live in this "bubble" everyone is on about. I have spent the past 7 years working all over central London so i think i can safely say I've seen a lot of change in that time. In the past 7 years, we have had this recession everyone keeps going on about, hit rock bottom and started to climb again.
People say that the recession never hit London because its full of rich bankers etc. I can tell you now this is not true at all. The recession hit London just as hard as it did elsewhere and affected a lot of people. Its also getting a lot better. People seem to think that whilst the rest of the country were struggling to live, people in London were still sitting around drinking champagne. Again, that wonderful thing called the media painted this portrait and i (as well as anyone else that spends their time in London) can tell you its just not true.

[MisterGTR]

What I mean is there is no hard questions asked of their fiscal policy in the media. Certainly not on sky, BBC or ITV. It's as you say affecting everyone including Londoners. But like most of my family who own property in London the effect is offset by the artificial property bubble. But I wonder how sustainable that is. At some point they're going to have to build affordable housing.

[Redordead89]

Mate I know there are a LOT of poor folk in London as well as wealthy folk and I kinda pity those poor souls more than some up here due to the stooooopid high living costs involved in London but these problems won't be solved by me and you unfortunately, it can only be fixed from way up the tree and until we get people in charge who actually give a dang about everyone and not just the " hard working" families and workers coined so often by the tories (as if the poor don't actually work hard!) yes I know some don't but they are a tiny minority in the bigger picture!

[Niall]

Tbh i won't trust any media with this sort of thing. The way i look at it is all media is supported by some form of political party so will be biased. People should be doing their own reading into the different parties and making their own mind up rather than just watching the news at 6 which will list some seriously over inflated issues and bang on about how we are all going to die tomorrow because of a new law being discussed.
Affordable housing is built in London and is available in London. All multiple occupancy new builds in this country must give a minimum of 30% affordable. The definition of affordable for a particular area is based on the average wage for that area. For example, if i told you a new development in Clapham i have been working on currently which has 55% affordable living and a 1 bed flat under said affordable living scheme costs a shade over 300k, you would probably say that is an unreal amount. I would agree with you but the average wage is going to be substantially more than somewhere like Leeds for example.

One other thing i will say is i work for a company that specialise in the residential sector and we just can not cope with how quickly we are growing currently. We are growing this quickly because of the amount of new housing being built or reinvestment into older housing. Although i do this in London, we are a national company and this is happening to us all over the country.

[Kezzieboy]

Funny that there seems to be a North/South divide (or rather South East/Everywhere Else divide) in this discussion.

I don't think anyone thinks all of London has been unaffected, it's that the City of London and Westminster seem to be untouched. Politicians get a pay rise, the financial sector goes on unregulated, bankers who had a pivotal role in the crash keep their jobs (and enormous wages), the top earners double their wealth in the years directly following the crash...it's as if the whole thing never happened for them.

Sadly Chris' argument is partly correct, but that doesn't mean we should be combating tax avoidance. We have actual off-shore tax havens under our regulatory control; the Channel Islands, Cayman Islands and British Virgin Islands. Why aren't we working together, at least in the EU if not the world to help force the wealthy to make their contribution to society?

I don't mean you, Chris, much as you bemoan the fact you have to pay taxes (even though it pays for your wages, education and healthcare), you are not the target of all this. The target are those earning 10x or 100x or more even than that of what you earn, and pay less tax as a percentage of their wealth. Does that not piss you off?

[Dum-Dum]

With Niall's point on the media if your ever not doing anything much for a day watch a couple of hours of BBC news 24 or Sky News then flip to Al Jazerra and watch the same stories again, see how different EXACTLY THE SAME STORIES are. Al Jazerra are the least biased mainstream news channel IMO.

As for the "high earners" in the south east being able to afford it, WE CANT. I live in a very modest 1 bed house on the outer edge of the commuter belt (an hour train journey to the center of town) but my mortgage DOUBLE what a northen member would pay for the same house. My council tax is more, the supermarkets are more expensive (by pennies mainly but they are), pubs and resturants are more expensive and TBH anything where they have to pay staff is as the staff have to earn more for the staff to be able to afford to live in london and the south east. Yeah we earn more but the cost of living is substantially higher. I read a statistic a few months ago that said that most of the country spend about half of their earnings on their mortgage/rent, in london it's 2 thirds!

---

Sadly Chris' argument is partly correct, but that doesn't mean we should be combating tax avoidance. We have actual off-shore tax havens under our regulatory control; the Channel Islands, Cayman Islands and British Virgin Islands. Why aren't we working together, at least in the EU if not the world to help force the wealthy to make their contribution to society?

I don't mean you, Chris, much as you bemoan the fact you have to pay taxes (even though it pays for your wages, education and healthcare), you are not the target of all this. The target are those earning 10x or 100x or more even than that of what you earn, and pay less tax as a percentage of their wealth. Does that not piss you off?

You will never get the entire world to agree level taxes and TBH when we do facebook will launch an intergallactic space station from which to base their operations and as nobody owns space they will pay no tax. I know you wont believe me and think that is the most mental of ideas but consider this, How much did facebook make last year? How much to launch a space mission? Which is cheaper, I'd bet the space mission if it isn't cheaper would pay off in a few years.

What pisses me off is something I found out while doing a fact check for posting in this check in an earlier post. At £100 or £150k/pa you go into the highest rate of income tax jumping from the 40% I pay to 45%. Could be more maybe but did you know that past about £50k you only pay 2% NI rather than 12% that most of us pay which pretty substantially offsets the higher income tax.

[Kezzieboy]

Agreed on the media comments, I read for analysis, not for facts, to be honest. I try to read a variety of viewpoints and then make my own mind up.

And what's the answer then Chris? Who's fault is it that London is unfathomably expensive to live in? What possible reason, or justification is there for that fact? Someone is buying all those £1m houses, but it's not middle class people like you, so who is it and how can we make it fair again?

[Dum-Dum]

I think we all accept that we need to cut the deficit, yes?
We cannot afford to borrow more than we earn every single month forever either socially or financially.

There is 2 ways to cut the deficit, we either need to cut spending or earn more.

Personally my feeling is both, the cuts hurt but we do have too much of a nanny state where people can't solve their own problems and so look to the state for help which costs alot more, the state also wastes a phenomenal amount of money with ridiculous rules on who gets government contracts so we end up with government agencies paying £20 for a stapler or £50 for someone to come out and change a headlight bulb. We need to encourage business at all levels from the Tesco/Starbucks of the world to your local independent butchers and massively encourage tourism.



As for who's buying all the million pound homes it IS the middle classes, even in outer london borough in the nicer areas (the places I'd consider living if i could afford it) a standard 1930's 4 bed semi is worth approaching a million. These people get substantial help from extended families and/or end up up to their eyes in debt. Sadly you can't solve the housing crisis without building a fucktonne more houses and the country doesn't have space for that. This country needs less people, especially less of the economically inactive.

[lolsteve]

Frankly I don't get the north/south divide your housing is cheaper, your bills are cheaper, you don't earn any less.
In the 5 years I've lived up here I've only seen true poverty a couple of times, once was a young school boy age lad begging for money (which i gave him some despite coming back from a failed job interview) and a group of children who hung around my friends car when we were doing a head swap but wouldn't look out of place in a "if you gave £3 a month" charity advert. Although when i asked around about them it turns out they were from the questionable eastern European house with boarded up windows and a child who would sit watch for police. Felt sorry for them until they tried to steal a thermostat ..

In regards to londons wealthy. Whether you like it or not we need them.
London is seen as 'the place to be' and as such attracts over foreign wealth, this foreign wealth then spends money in the local economy and builds new structures. These structures use (or did) British made steel in areas like Scunthorpes tata steel plant or one of the other steel fabrication shops located in the north. They also use northern companies (like mine) to design and engineer them. The engineering company then hires people on a pretty decent wage including the shop lads, who then pay their taxes which goes to fund the people who moan that the rich don't give them shit.

I might seem quite conservative but sometimes i fail to see why people struggle when my parents have done alright through shear hard work.

[highwayman306]

Bankers and big business owners have politician friends...
A lot of politicians own companies, or shares in companies, they have 'plebs' working for them earning their money. They do talks and get paid, they turn up at events and get paid. They don't see what the real world is like. The vast majority of people in the UK appear as figures that if they shave a bit here they can use a bit elsewhere...or pocket, whichever the case.

Fact:

There is a divide, but to coin a phrase that has been marred, 'we are in it together'...we are all in the shit together.

Fact:

Talking politics on a public forum was never going to be a great idea due to everyones individual views/beliefs.


Final fact:

Bacon makes the civilised world go round Even vegetarians salivate at the smell of cooking bacon...
But even bacon butties can be divided....
In yam-yam land, they call it a bacon butty...but do not butter the bread! You order in a cafe and you don't get it buttered standard, in London you have to ask (if you're that way inclined or a yam-yam) for 'No butter'. My argument has always been you can't call it a butty if there's no butter...

Food for thought, drivvle for free

[Magenta Sunset]

"Bacon makes the civilised world go round Big Grin Even vegetarians salivate at the smell of cooking bacon...
But even bacon butties can be divided...."

this is true, there's also the ketchup/brown sauce divide

[Toms306]

You shouldn't be ruining bacon with any sauce!

[Mattcheese31]

Brown sauce /thread, don't start me on politics I'll fall out with folk lol

[r3k1355]

That corporate tax avoidance malarkey is a daft lefty red herring.

All these big companies do not need to have UK head offices, they could trade from any tax haven in the world they like and sadly if you start making them pay proper tax they will just up sticks and bugger off somewhere cheaper (IIRC google did this). If these companies all up sticks then suddenly you have thousands possibly millions of unemployed people who aren't paying hundreds of pounds a month each into the system. Consider facebook probably employs 1000 staff on an average of £60k/pa thats around £25k/pa per employee in income tax or £25,000,000 into the UK economy and that's before you include the tax on them spending any of that money.

IIRC they are required to have some kind of office in the EU for tax purposes, which is why most operate a post box is Ireland.
They usually have something going on with the Cayman Islands as well.

They can't fully up sticks and move to bonga bonga land because they still need an army of very skilled individuals working for their company.

You've also got to consider the likes of Starbucks, who quite obviously can't leave but still abuse the shit out of the tax system.

[Magenta Sunset]

Brown sauce /thread, don't start me on politics I'll fall out with folk lol

when waking at a bike rally, a bacon, (or bacon & egg) buttie -With Sauce-, and a mug of tea is essential!