The Guardian is agin:
As recently as the buildup to May’s local elections, Reform was pledging to raise the threshold at which people start paying income tax from £12,570 to £20,000, bringing many thousands out of tax but costing the exchequer more than £40bn a year.
Amid increasing scrutiny about how or if this could be paid for, Farage has rolled back. Quizzed after the speech on whether the policy still stood, he said he would “want” a £20,000 threshold but this was an eventual aspiration.
It was, he said, impossible to know what state the economy would be in by the time of the next election, meaning most firm promises would need to wait for now. There was one exception – Farage said he would reverse Labour’s changes to inheritance tax on farms.
Whatever Labour achieves over the rest of the parliament there will be a difficult inheritance. But raising the tax threshold is difficult to justify when it mainly benefits richer taxpayers who can earn more before they hit the 40p tax rate.
The actual truth of raising the personal allowance:
As Tim Worstall and the Adam Smith Institute has long pointed out, the
difference between the Minimum Wage and the Minimum Income Standard
/ Living Wage is almost entirely due to the taxes charged by government on
work. The most straight forward way to ensure every full time worker
earned a Living Income would be to align the Income Tax and National
Insurance thresholds at the annual equivalent of the Minimum Wage. This
would in effect convert the current Minimum Wage into a Living Income.
Fuck off, Guardianistas.
The Socialist approach to income and tax always confuses me. The current Prime Minister supported an old codger with aspirations to be PM with the slogan “For the many, not the few”. How this aligned with the pension scheme enacted in law for one specific individual out of however many millions we currently have residing here by way of The Pensions Increase (Pension Scheme for Keir Starmer QC) Regulations 2013 left me confused.
Isn’t the politicians’ slogan “from the many, for the few”?
The UK ( indeed much of Western Europe ) will be such an economic basket case by 2027 ( let alone 2029 ) that we may never see tax cuts ever again.
Farage alas can see this and has the balls to admit it.
we may never see tax cuts ever again.
I think you could. But government would have to renege on a lot of previous governments’ commitments not just “cut spending”. Start with the “renewable” power industry. Terminate the subsidy structure. If the renewables companies go bust & investors loose their money, so be it. Be an enormous boost for the rest of the economy. End benefits for foreigners & dependents. If they don’t have a record of paying in they don’t get paid out & no top-ups for low income. If you can’t support yourself here, FO.Likewise no public housing or rent subsidies.
Target the pain onto the minorities & the benefits onto the majority.
* Stop sending billions of pounds to Ukraine.
The National party here in Oz has decided to dump its adherence to Net Zero. Labor aren’t sinking the boot into the Liberal leader, who’s dithering about whether to follow, because this could lead to the Coalition dumping it as well and actually giving us Aussies a choice as to whether we all support Climate Change.
After all we might all vote no.
You have to decide what government should do, and keep doing that and cut all the bullshit. It’s not about 5% across the board. It’s still paying for street lights and primary education, but you cut the bollocks.
We spend £12bn/annum subsidising empty trains that should be a coach or a bus. And most of the population barely use trains anyway – one return journey or less per year. You could close down 70+% of the network and it would actually lower CO2.
Hello Dr Beeching.
This is more Serpell. Sadly, Mrs Thatch didn’t push the button on his report.
Thank you for calling out the bullshit that is train travel. I’m all for it, prefer it mostly to long car journeys. However, if it doesn’t pay for itself, then it shouldn’t be there.
“End benefits for foreigners & dependents”
To end their benefits you will have to deport or kill them. The current state of affairs is set up to route money around any obstructions to the favored voting blocs. Which will vote to continue the current state of affairs.
Which likely also means deporting or killing pretty much every immigration lawyer now working.
Yes, “kill” is pretty blunt.
The first thing that’s necessary is to repeal all the legislation the lawyers are using. Withdraw from from the ECJ & other international bodies. Then remove the Indefinite from Right to Remain.
Then I would suggest concentration camps where you can put economically inactive immigrants. Provided accommodation & the basic necessities of life & nothing further. Whether they stay there is up to them but there is no route back into the UK. Start aggressively negotiating with their countries of origin over accepting them back. Generous financial settlements would be far cheaper than supporting them in the community.
And you need to get rid of the corrosive idea of individual “rights”. And replace with obligations. Whether an obligation exists requires the consent of those with the obligations. So you can’t demand a right but you can request (politely) an obligation.
Nige’s problem is that the answer to lower tax is lower government spending. Problem is that everyone wants more but with the “rich” paying for it.
der lange Marsch durch die Institutionen has ensured that the electorate are ill prepared for lying politicians (her Budget will be one of growth and fairness) or basic arithmetic/economics (not enough rich people to pay for all the handouts).
everyone wants more but with the “rich” paying for it.
People say this, but you might be surprised how many would be happy to see the public sector fever swamps aggressively drained, as long as they feel the benefit in their pocket and as long as they feel like the country is on the right track.
Maggie understood this.
I don’t think Maggie undestood it all. Public sector spending rose as exorbitantly under Maggie as it did under all the other post-war governments. The message has always been government will do more, not less. Privitisation just moved some of it into the private sector. But the moved the obligations with it.
Any cuts in spending mean someone gets less money from the government and therefore gets angry.
Government has gotten really good at spreading it around, so any cuts mean a lot of people get a little less. There’s pretty much no area you can cut where only a few people will suffer and they can’t rally what looks to be a lot of support.
So you have to figure out who you will annoy, and just say “You’re right. We’re doing it anyway.”
You’ve got to sell not spending to people. Firstly, stop talking about £100bn. Talk about per household. The thing I learned from trying to get people to oppose the Olympics was telling them how much it personally cost them. Once you say “here’s a choice… an Easyjet trip to Europe with the Mrs, or spunking money on temporary stadiums”, people choose the former.
We have calls for subsidised childcare, which are the result of subsidised jobs that mothers do. Endless amounts of utter bullshit. Look at Japan. Does it look like chavsville because mothers aren’t working? No, it doesn’t. We tax men harder to pay for the bullshit jobs their wives do, and require them to have 2nd cars and childcare. If we started cutting all the bullshit jobs, a lot of women would turn into righties. They would not want to subsidise other women’s childcare as they would be looking after the kids.
Aside, it’s basically impossible to take turns looking after friends’ kids, because of all the vetting, certification and other red tape. You would naively think that five families could get together, take turns doing each other’s childcare, and every household work 9 days a week and pay nothing in childcare.
But you would be wrong, because the government will not let you.
Which is why my idea for a Reform government is just to repeal laws. Forget passing new ones, and trying to get the Blob to enact and enforce them (they won’t) just repeal everything in sight. Then people actually can do as you suggest. And no-one in the Blob will be able to do a blind thing. Thats how you bypass the Blob, take away their power over individuals. Then you can start cutting their budgets, as they’ll have nothing to do, and removing them from the State payroll won’t affect anyone anyway.
Amid increasing scrutiny about how or if this could be paid for
Where was this “scrutiny” when MPs voted to spend trillions of pounds on Ed Miliband’s Climate Change Act?
Climate Change Act was Brown 2008, with another tranche by May 2019. Milipede’s is just the latest installment
Ed was the Minister for the 2008 Act.
The brother was the Environment Secretary crafted it for Brown
Nope, Ed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Miliband
My last days suffering a UK government was the David at Environment waffling about climate change but you are indeed correct. My humble apologies. The Ed doesn’t appear on my political radar until the Edstone. Whoever chose his photo for Wiki must truly hate him. He looks crazed axe-murderer. Although, of course, he could have chosen it himself…
You’ve been out of the country for a while. The habit now is to refer to Weird Ed. There’s no longer any need to wonder how many Ls there are in his surname.
“There was one exception – Farage said he would reverse Labour’s changes to inheritance tax on farms.”
Why the fuck would you pick that policy?
Of all the things Labour has done, making it so that the people who raise pigs get the same IHT as the people who run engineering companies or making video games seems like a rare good thing to me. The arguments against are mostly a load of romantic tosh, about how they’ve been custodians of the land and isn’t agriculture super important? (no).
There’s also fuck all votes in it, no more than 150,000, and a risk of Labour being able to say “look at Farage looking after rich Tories” to voters.
What you want is to look at wasteful bollocks that the other parties absolutely will not cut, and announce a cut and tax credit. Like ending the rail subsidies. £12bn/year. Ending the green subsidies. £25bn. Put together a list, add them up, divide by number of taxpayers and announce you’ll cut Y and take £x off every taxpayer’s bill. And not “£37bn in savings”. But per tax payer. Tell people that obviously we can’t know what we’ll do 4 years ago (which is reasonable), but this is the shit we absolutely will do. It’s fully costed, and the other parties can’t copy it as these are sacred ground.
If you’re going to do Reform, it isn’t just about cuts. It’s about starting with a blank sheet and deciding what the role of government is, figuring out the differences between now and that, and then prioritising policy changes to get to there.
People really don’t want to know the numbers whether it applies to them or not.
For example, UK.Gov spunks about £1,200,000,000,000 per annum. The country supposedly has 70,000,000 people in it, so the per person spend is about £17,000 give or take.
Average wage is £30,000 which means contributing £5,000 per annum in income tax. Sure, you’ll also get fucked for another 20% VAT on most of the rest (another £5,000) but on average most people are still £7,000 in deficit on what they contribute. Okay, some other taxation will knock a bit more off, but not all the remainder.
How will the electorate respond to being asked to cough up that much more?
How much of that 1.2T is being paid for via pieces of paper promising to pay it back?
About £100,000,000,000 is the annual deficit and another £100,000,000,000 is used to pay for previous government largesse.
If you’re going to do Reform, it isn’t just about cuts. It’s about starting with a blank sheet and deciding what the role of government is, figuring out the differences between now and that, and then prioritising policy changes to get to there.
+100
“Of all the things Labour has done, making it so that the people who raise pigs get the same IHT as the people who run engineering companies or making video games seems like a rare good thing to me.”
Ah, I’m guessing you were not aware that as well as Agricultural Property Relief on IHT, there was Business Property Relief on IHT as well.
People who ran engineering companies DID pay the same IHT as people who raise pigs before the change – they paid 0%.
People who run engineering companies DO pay the same IHT as people who raise pigs after the change – they pay 20%
Exactly.
I’ve never understood why the changes to IHT were framed as ‘the farm tax’ because last years budget increased the IHT on ALL small and medium sized privately owned businesses, not just farms.
https://metro.co.uk/2025/10/24/snail-breeding-farms-londons-expensive-buildings-23075682/
Somewhat relatedly, “shell companies” for business rates avoidance in London
F*ck you, cut spending.
“But raising the tax threshold is difficult to justify when it mainly benefits richer taxpayers who can earn more before they hit the 40p tax rate.”
WTF are they talking about?
Current – personal tax allowance £12,570, next £37,700 taxed at 20%. You earn over £50,270 you pay tax at 40%.
Changed to, say, personal tax allowance £20,000, next £30,270 taxed at 20%. You earn over £50,270 you pay tax at 40%.
Probably bad wording. What they meant was the “rich” (AKA higher or highest rate taxpayers) get to keep more of the earnings from the government’s greedy stealing mitts.
Or, say, £26,000 PTA, next £30,000 30%, over £56,000 you.pay 40%.
But yes, I get the principle
.
I remember running a mind gammon two colleagues, both senior to me. Should there be more tax and who should pay?
“Yes, and ‘the rich'”.
“Who are the rich?”
Answer was anyone earning over XXX. The funny thing was XXX wasn’t more than they were earning, it was just a bit more than their target amount they thought they might one day earn.
I’ve always said that ‘the rich’ starts at about 1.5 times the definer’s current income, whatever that might be. Thus giving them a bit of wiggle room should they end up doing a bit better for themselves in the near future.
Being rich can be defined as having more money than you need.
I quite like the definition (see next paragraph but one)
That can explain why people think someone earning a bit more than their salary/their hoped-for salary are “rich” because they have a bit more than neded for their own/own-targeted consumption.
When closing out the end of some financial support to a very worthwhile charity with which my little sister was involved I had to talk to a youngish female law clerk who expressed surprise that I had coughed up (in my view modest) amounts of cash each year (while my brother-in-law did all the hard work) so I told her that although my income was much less than she might consider rich I was rich because I could afford to do that.
This also explains why it is easy for populists (except Nigel who was a self-made millionaire before he entered politics) to win votes from idiots by saying thattheywill tax “the rich”.
British judge rules that laws don’t apply to Just Stop Oil, lets them walk free after vandalising Stonehenge:
Judge Paul Dugdale told the jury in his legal directions they had to assess where the “balance lies” in the case and whether a conviction would be a “proportionate interference” with the defendants’ rights.
He said: “In any society there will be those whose opinions we agree with and those whose opinions we disagree.
“The essence of a free society and freedom of speech is that everyone’s entitled to express their opinion even when we disagree with what they say.
“If individuals disagree with what our Government is doing on certain matters they are entitled to protest about the Government’s actions or inactions.
“There are times when protecting the right to freedom of speech and freedom to protest can mean that activity that would otherwise be unlawful would be regarded as lawful by the court to protect those rights.
Anybody want to bet whether this bewigged ponce believes the right to freedom of speech and protest applies to people protesting rapefugees?
I’d like to know how vandalising a prehistoric temple is “free speech”. Or in fact “protest”.
And Stonehenge? What are they protesting about?. Stone Age oil refineries?
If laws don’t apply to them could somebody, I don’t know, hit them with something heavy and get away with it? No reason. Just wondering.
Why doesn’t Farage point to how much of that 40 billion a year is taken from these poor people, skimmed off the top by government and quangos, and then paid back to them in benefits?
And how’d they get to keep it *all* without the skimming – thus the government’s budget could be cut by 40 billion *and* these people get more money.
It could easily cost £40bn in lost tax revenue but also save £40bn in welfare payments. Some % are paying that tax and then getting it all back in work welfare. Some don’t work and stay on welfare due to the high marginal rate of tax & lost welfare.
The tax and welfare system is a shambles.