This is indeed the question

We know the answer to this one… any move towards lower taxes will be resisted by the Swamp, The Blob, and Davos Man. Just ask Liz Truss.

We are told that our government now raises more in tax than at any time since the Attlee government in the late 1940s. There is good reason for that. Public expectations of government are much greater today than they were in Attlee’s time. When Covid struck, the public rightly expected the government to spend whatever it took to treat the sick and preserve the social fabric.

I actually quite like Chris Mullin – he is very much old Labour. Socially fairly Conservative but with the paragraph above he details why contrary to his belief there needs to be a freeze on public expenditure and a return to the original principles of the welfare state. If you’re unwilling to work when you are physically able
To, you should not be entitled to a living. Housing and the associates benefit shouldn’t be paid to the most feckless. At every stage we reward pathology – so I think if you were to suggest a return to workhouses and soup kitchens it would reinstate with the second and third deciles of the income scale. Then get those people out of taxation to the greatest extent possible.

Tax, fairly raised and wisely spent, is the subscription we pay for living in civilisation. in fairness this is better phrased than some other variants of the argument but it’s still one I like Tim, absolutely despise- we need to maintain a high base rate to ‘keep civilisation’. We have porous borders with a city the size of Newcastle coming in annually. A third of our police forces have not successfully resolved a single burglary in the current year. Our schools breed generations of Green and Labour Party supporting morons. How is expenditure on that ‘wise’ in any sense of the term. As Longrider said on his blog – show me the accounts and my goodness you’ll see some cuts. Up to 4 million non productive public sector workers could be sacked and at least 20,000 regulations be repealed without the general public even noticing.

The past couple of years have revealed some UK public services -health, education- as abysmal and exhorbitantly expensive with those employed therein less concerned with providing a service than consulting their own convenience. Other services -infrastructure, defence- are the underfunded Cinderella services.

So, yes, it should be crunch time with government finally relinquishing those services that could be better provided by private contractors and where the money follows the patient or the pupil rather than being doled out willy nilly as an appropriation by the state regardless of its effectiveness.

John B
A quick Google shows that the CAP was 31% of 2021 the EU budget, approx 56 billion Euros! Of which, France got 17%.

“When Covid struck, the public rightly expected the government to spend whatever it took to treat the sick and preserve the social fabric.” What a moron. When Covid struck the government gave into panic from The Science, and hysteria from the electorate.

It didn’t spend on treating the sick: it actually discharged infected patients from hospitals into the care homes thus killing off large numbers of frail ancients. Also, much of the NHS simply closed apart from making videos of nurses dancing in empty corridors – the very opposite of treating the sick. The bits of hospitals that continued to function used their notorious absence of skill at infection control to bump off even more citizens who had been uninfected on admission.

As for preserving the social fabric – that’s cretinous. Lockdowns and school closures were damaging attacks on the social fabric. The fact that the teachers’ unions share responsibility with Boris just shows how many people need a good hanging.

Mullin is a fool.

A third of our police forces have not successfully resolved a single burglary in the current year.

Given that only 6.6% of robbery and 4.2% of theft offences are charged/summonsed, that isn’t at all surprising

https://www.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/hmicfrs/publication-html/police-response-to-burglary-robbery-and-other-acquisitive-crime/

“Is this a record? The chap in the PO said 3-4 weeks turnaround time.”

It’s not a record if your application is straightforward and you have a photo (or one online in the system already, as I did).

I filled in the online form on a Saturday and received my new licence the following Tuesday, ie one working day including the postage.

It’s a problem only if you need some sort of manual intervention, I guess.

Similary, I submitted my online tax return yesterday. Took all of about five minutes, for a moderately complicated return (two jobs, property income). The benefit is probably I’ve been doing this for 20 years now, and I dilligently do my accounts, so I have all the data already presented on a summary page of a spreadsheet with the relevant items highlighted. I dread “consultants” or, horror, politicians getting their claws in and trying to “improve” things.

Interesting statement by the former Governor of the BoE, Mervyn King yesterday, on a BBC politics show:

‘If I were to blame anyone,’ he said, ‘I would blame the economics profession for encouraging [central banks] to print money [like] it didn’t matter.’

Hmm. Who has been saying exactly that on these very pages?

America isn’t low tax anyway, although it depends a lot on which state and city you live in.

Singapore, now they are low tax.

Steve:

>Highest tax burden since Clement Atlee
That is appalling.
>Rishi and Hunty are about to put corporation tax up by 30%
Not good, but the incidence is on employees and consumers, so it won’t deter FDI.
>Fags cost nearly £15 a packet
Make it £25. Smokers treat the world as their ashtray.

Theophrastus (2066) @8.28:
Smokers contribute £11 billion (drinkers £12 billion+) in tax yet cost the NHS around £2.5 billion (£3.5 billion for alkies) in healthcare, so I’m quite happy for them to use the world as their ashtray, so long as I’m not sitting next to it.

TomJ @ 5.49, +100

Drivers License

That it gets done so quickly demonstrates it’s automated. £21 for a robot to print a bit of plastic and put it in the post? I bet this is the break-even price for the DVLA as well, which tells you all you need to know about government procurement.

When the Celtic Tiger took off with a vengeance, I looked at Wikipedia’s page on Ireland and did a double take at the GDP figures. It was obviously hokey and something strange was clearly going on.

Shame the UK can’t seem to lower corporation tax to compete against these low tax jurisdictions. You would think that it would be a winning combination together with the City of London.

It’s almost as if we are being deliberately prevented from competing with the high tax, highly regulated EU.

Sorry, should have used quotation marks when quoting Charles in the previous comment.