The services have certainly not got better in the last 5 years. This Government is fiscally illiterate and has hit the top of the Laffer curve and is now trying to go down the other side.
This government have been in power for less than 2 years. Despite launching a lot of trial balloons on raising taxes they haven't actually raised the headline tax rates (other than allowing fiscal drag to do so).
Overall the tax burden in the UK is middling for western democracies. It's actually on the low side for low earners - which is probably a problem because the distribution is such that the majority pay very little.
The other problem being cliff edges and complexities which distinctive chasing pay rises and working more for a lot of people.
The biggest problem is that the tax on a median taxpayer is not just "middling", it's a bit over a third of what a median German taxpayer is paying. The rest of the fiscal problems (convoluted tax rules, cliff edges to try to claw something back, abrupt tax increases like the one on pubs) are downstream from that.
> the tax on a median taxpayer is not just "middling", it's a bit over a third of what a median German taxpayer is paying
Could you put the actual numbers in for that please, because to me that implies German tax rates of 120%? Is that across all forms of taxation, including local (the relevant one here!)
Apologies, brain glitch: it's half, not third. Also, I'm talking about the effective tax rate, not the marginal tax rate. Here are the numbers:
Median salary of a full time employee in the UK in 2023 (to match the German source): £34,963 [1]
Take home on that salary (after income tax and NI): £28,692 [2]
Effective tax rate on a median salary in the UK: ~18%
Median salary of a full time employee in Germany: €4,479 pm [3] or €53,748 per year
Take home: €34,281 [4]
Effective tax rate on a median salary in Germany: ~36%
Tax _rates_ are not that different, but the previous British governments really ramped up the tax-free allowance, which significantly reduces the effective tax rate.
Unfortunately, if an election were to be held today, the morons at Reform would have the greatest chance of winning, thanks to Starmer's ostrich syndrome, Corbyn dividing the Labour vote and the Tories being absolutely irrelevant after 15 years of continuous rule.
I'd be interested to know your view on how you think Britain should be governed and the extent to which you think others would agree. Serious question: can you offer a link to some such description?
Curtail immigration to pre-Brexit levels (with a strong focus on repatriating criminals and net tax non-contributing immigrant households), focus on the working class and devise a route for the UK to get back into the EU. Also refocus policing to focus on actual societal issues - child grooming and the rise of fundamentalist elements (as evidenced by the UAE banning their citizens from studying in the UK) - as opposed to elderly citizens tweets. Devalue the GBP to refund the NHS and roll back austerity while investing further into energy independence and removing bureaucratic red tape for consumer scale mitigation technologies.
Any party that does all of these will be guaranteed electoral wins for decades - I've seen the data back when I was a Tory. Problem is, these points are kryptonite to the very identity of either major party.
Thank you! I took a bet with myself on what you would say (if you did) and lost! Seems to me that the EU as presently constructed is a huge problem; on some other points I'd agree.
Disagree on being subsumed into the stagnating EU (far better to align with dynamic English-speaking economies with strong growth, like the US).
The EU customs union prevented the UK striking bilateral global free trade deals, and the legacy of EU over-regulation continues to curtail our innovation. The UK has a solid history of global trade and innovation, and it can acheive more if unshackled from the EU.
Austerity is absolutely necessary. If we keep giving the NHS above-inflation pay rises inline with what their staff demand, it would consume the entire annual excess wealth from the productive half of the economy in a matter of decades.
What we need are sensible and pragmatic policies like Reform's scaling back of net zero, for example. The cost of Ed Miliband's net zero measures are an estimated £4.5 trillion over the next 25 years, and a gross cost in excess of £7.6 trillion.
That's more than our entire GDP. Just one example is the 20 year wind farm contracts that Miliband has set up, with a guaranteed energy cost that's nearly double the market rate for gas power (and then on top of that we need to pay for wind curtailment, grid upgrades and expensive backup power plants to cover low wind days).
We were promised that renewables would reduce energy bills. That was a total fiction, and the politicians are to blame.
Green energy could be a massive success story, and it could make our bills cheaper, but inept politicians from the Tories and Labour have focussed instead on vanity metrics.
Y'all got any of those bilateral trade deals yet? Brexit was done and dusted by 2019, it's been 7 years now. Where are those deals you're talking about? Where's your trade deal with English-speaking economies like the US? Heck, not even CANZ want to deal with you guys now.
On the NHS, of course, gut the only thing that's keeping the country sane. I can literally not keep count anymore of the number of skilled doctors and talent who have left the UK after years of practice because the pay was becoming untenable with current living needs. Remove the NHS and you might as well call yourself a client state of the US.
On renewables and net-zero, yes, what we need is more reliance on conventional fuels so that we can be ever more reliant on Russia and the Middle East and the US right? Meanwhile economies like China, India and even your brethren in Australia are racing to put in more renewables capacity because it is just so much more cheaper and efficient now. Those guys are forging real paths to energy independence, unlike you lot.
Renewables haven't been reducing your energy bills because you guys haven't been putting up anything of note. Wake me up when Hinckley Point C comes online.
We’ve struck an incredible 71 trade deals since Brexit. And there are more in the pipeline. We genuinely have a better global position now than we did in the customs union.
You think the NHS is “keeping us sane”. Two of my family members have been close to death waiting for an ambulance that never arrived / waiting in a crowded emergency waiting room with internal bleeding for hours. I pay about £10K per year in tax to the NHS for a service that is inferior to the private care I receive for approx £1K a year. The whole system is a shambles and gets worse every year. It underpays and mistreats its staff. It is inefficient.
On your point about renewables, I never claimed we needed more reliance on fossil fuels. I think we should be building more nuclear plants. France is a shining example of how to generate electricity. And then, once we have affordable battery storage (in a few years) we will be able to expand wind/solar in a sensible fashion without our stupid politicians making our energy bills the highest in the developed world.
> Renewables haven't been reducing your energy bills because you guys haven't been putting up anything of note.
The UK is #1 in Europe for wind capacity and #2 globally for offshore wind (behind China). And we have the highest energy bills in the developed world
- A strong leader and a weak bureaucracy, so that your vote means something.
- A good constitution that puts hard limits on what they can do, no boiling the frog with freedom of speech restrictions like Canada, Australia, and The UK
So basically an elected dictator with a functioning kill switch. Not a parade of faceless, temporary, unimportant prime ministers and elections which don't matter.
> freedom of speech restrictions like Canada, Australia, and The UK
Unlike in the USA, where speaking out to, or disagreeing with, the president will get you removed from positions of authority?
(If you haven't already gathered, such bogus claims of free speech restrictions in other countries are distracting you from the reality of what is happening in your own country.)
> your vote means something. - A good constitution that puts hard limits on what they can do
Quite a lot of serious problems arise when voters want things that are ""unconstitutional"". What if the voters want speech restrictions? That's a big part of why they're implemented, public/media campaigning for them.
The actual soviets - they remained in operation for the first few years after the Bolshevik coup, and the revolutionary slogan "All power to the soviets!" gave Lenin a convenient figleaf for sidelining the elected Duma.
Of course, the soviets also proved unwilling to entirely subjugate themselves to Lenin's whims, and made a habit of choosing non-Bolshevik delegates. This culminated in the failed Kronstadt rebellion of 1921, after which any pretense at democracy was finally ended.
But - in theory - the soviet model sounds akin to what you're looking for. Being made up of delegates rather than representatives meant that the power of recall on demand was baked-in at every level, and power flowed upwards to a strong executive leadership.
In reality, it's hard to see how any sufficiently strong leader wouldn't be able to override or simply ignore any sort of kill switch or other constitutional arrangements that might happen to stand in their way - as has happened every time it's been tried in the past.
I think the person elected should hold a lot of powers. Because otherwise, what is the point of voting if they're just going to leak it all to the civil service?
By "kill switch", I just mean you need a way to stop a leader with a lot of powers in exceptional circumstances - such as violation of a constitution.
