Your Tax Money At Work

The tax burden on workers is greater than at any time over the past 40 years and is likely to rise to a record level within three years, according to a free-market think tank.

The Adam Smith Institute says “tax freedom” day falls on Thursday, six days later than last year and 20 days later than before the pandemic. It has not been this late in the year since 1985 when the Thatcher government was attempting to rectify the disastrous public finances after the economic crises of the 1970s.

Tax freedom day is a symbolic indication of how long into the year the average person would have to work to pay their annual tax bill, with all money earned thereafter going to themselves.

The think tank says that under government tax and spending plans, tax freedom day in 2028 will not arrive until June 24, which would be its latest date. That would make the tax burden higher than it was during the Second World War or the Napoleonic Wars.

Well, there isn’t an excuse, is there? We’re not fighting off the Germans nor the French. We’re just suffering from the fiscal incontinence of the babykissers that get elected.

Bring Back The Tyburn Tree!

Instead, the Chancellor prioritised a “record” funding boost for the NHS, which will now get an extra £29 billion a year compared with 2023-24, despite the lack of a detailed reform plan.

Well, there we are then. Spending on the national religion.

Survivors of Ireland’s mother and baby homes are being “retraumatised” by the prospect of losing benefits in the UK if they accept compensation from the Irish state, Westminster has been told

Benefits are for those without a pile of cash. If you’ve got a pile of cash you don;t get benefits. And?

Ireland has begun the process of confronting one of the most painful chapters in its history by offering compensation to thousands of unmarried mothers who were shunned by society and hidden away in the church-run mother and baby homes.

However, up to 13,000 of those survivors who are living in Britain risk losing access to essential means-tested benefits if they accept the compensation, which can range from €5,000 to €125,000 (£4,230 to £105,000) depending on the length of time people were resident.

“Sadly, for thousands of survivors in Britain, what was meant to be a token of acknowledgment and apology from the Irish government has instead become an additional burden,” the letter states.

Bugger off.

Sir Keir Starmer’s Chagos “surrender” deal will fund tax cuts for Mauritians, it has emerged.

The Mauritian government has said it would use almost £500 million in payments under the terms of the Chagos agreement to pay off its national debt.

This will allow ministers to abolish income tax entirely for 81 per cent of employed Mauritians, and raise minimum salaries.

Rachel wouldn’t have let us keep the money anyway – tax cuts are for foreigners.

The Government’s official climate change adviser is to spend £8.2m on a report assessing the risks of global warming to the UK – roughly five times the cost of the previous study.

The Climate Change Committee said the significant funding uplift was needed because of the growing complexity of the task.

But as we’re getting stuff sorted, building out Ed’s dreams, then it’s getting simply, no? Only the last bit to go?

On the other hand, maybe C Northcote was right about bureaucracy?

As Rachel Reeves is so fond of telling her cabinet colleagues, she didn’t get into politics to talk about fiscal rules.

This week she will attempt to counter claims she has become the “austerity chancellor” by announcing hundreds of billions of pounds of investment.

Sigh.

So they start to confiscate assets:

Rachel Reeves has granted herself “dangerous” new powers to direct where millions of savers’ pension cash is spent.

The Government’s Pensions Bill includes sweeping provisions that will allow the Chancellor to force pension funds to invest in private equity, debt and land in an attempt to boost the UK economy.

Details of the new legislation were published on Thursday.

There’s 6, mebbe 7 trillion in pension pots. You didn;t think a politician could see that and not want to spend it, did you?

Despite the rainy climate, the Danes appear to feel lucky: liberal, carefree, law abiding, egalitarian and homogenous. But coming from London, it didn’t feel very multicultural or diverse, and it’s soon clear why. The Danes may have a Social Democrat prime minister in Mette Frederiksen, they were the first country to legalise same-sex unions, men and women share equal maternity and paternity leave. But they also have possibly the toughest rules on immigration in Europe with a new “zero refugee” policy and draconian laws on integration.

It’s possible to suggest that the way to have that Scandi social democracy is to be entirely unsentimental about it.

But after winning election in 2019, when migrants were one of voters’ top concerns, Frederiksen went further. She ensured the right to residency was temporary, granted for one or two years with the assumption that most asylum seekers would return “home” one day. Applicants must promise to learn Danish, a difficult language, within six months or face expulsion. Those refused permission to stay are offered up to £50,000 to leave immediately. The process is managed by the Danish Return Agency, which houses those being sent back in three centres across the country. Convicted criminals are banned from ever acquiring citizenship and non-EU residents are only allowed to study and work at a few universities.

As with their unemployment pauy. It’s high – really high. The retraining opportunities are truly great as well. And after 2 years you get nowt. Because two years is long enough to learn to do something useful – so get on with it.

Sure, sure, really generous to those who need a helping hand. And hand outs – you c’n get fucked.

Lord Hermer declined to review “unduly lenient” sentences given to a rapist, a paedophile and a terrorist fundraiser despite signing off on the prosecution of Lucy Connolly.

The three criminals all received softer sentences than Connolly, who was imprisoned for 31 months for a tweet about last year’s Southport attacks.

But The Telegraph can reveal that, when asked to look again at their cases, the Attorney General’s office opted not to refer the decisions to the Court of Appeal for review.

Also the bloke who insists on giving away Chagos.

Labour has opened the door to “progressive” water bills that would force those with larger family homes and gardens to pay more.

Ministers have said they support utilities companies trialling new tariffs that charge the heaviest users of water a higher rate.

It’s the system I live under here in P and it is indeed economically rational. There’s a very low priced amount for each household. Which covers fairly decent average household usage too. €8 a month, summat like that here and now. Covers bath and showers and washing machines etc etc for two easy peasy.

Watering the lawn and filling a swimming pool, that puts it up. Can be 80 to 90 a month at peak. But perhaps it should be in a place so subject to potential drought? And the water system probably should take such costs out of my hide rather than some poor sod on minimum wage (about €800 a month around here).

So, yes, makes sense to me. Of course I expect any UK implementation to be wholly and entirely fucked up but that’s another thing.

Rachel Reeves’s National Insurance raid has left Britain descending into a doom loop of higher taxes and lower growth, economists have warned.
…
It comes as a civil war brews within Labour over proposed cuts to public services including policing and social housing. Economists said this raised the risk of further tax rises later this year.

The basic problem is as I’ve long said. The activists, the Labour Party, had convinced itself that the Tories had done “austerity”. That there was some vast pot of unspent money that could be turned to glorious uses.

They didn’t realise that their own propaganda was, well, it was propaganda. There wasn’t, isn’t, some vast unspent pot. Because the Tories didn’t austerity.

Rachel Reeves has been accused of betraying Britain’s farmers again after it emerged that a major nature-friendly fund will be slashed next month.

The Chancellor is looking to scale back the environmental land management (ELM) scheme when new departmental budgets are announced in a fortnight.

Good. Cut them all. Go the full New Zealand. No money for nowt.

Of course, that also means freeing farmers form near all regulation as well. But then I’m already the guy shrieking that we’ve got to blow up the TCPA – kablooie.

Rachel Reeves is being forced towards a tax raid of up to £30bn by benefit giveaways and her struggle with rising borrowing costs.

Experts fear higher taxes are now inevitable after Labour pledged to restore winter fuel payments and review the two-child benefit cap, piling costs on the beleaguered Chancellor.

Recall, we’ve just had all those shrieks, for 15 years, of austerity and the gralloching of the state as people tried to get expenditure down – as a %ge of GDP – to the levels of Brown, G’s, last year as Chancellor.

The problem is that they really do believe that spending was curbed in some massive manner. Cannot grasp why there isn’t some vast pot unspent.

Angela Rayner will give councils powers to seize land from housebuilders who fail to complete developments on time.

For the first time, developers will have to commit to delivery timeframes before they get planning permission. They will also have to submit annual reports to councils showing their progress.

So we get to steal the land of every nuclear power station then. Of HS2.

Come to think of it, of every government led development project ever?

Sir Keir Starmer’s deal to give away the Chagos Islands will cost the UK up to £30 billion.

On Thursday, the Prime Minister was accused of “lying to the public” as he announced the agreement to give the Indian Ocean island chain to Mauritius and rent back a key military base.

He claimed that the deal would cost £101 million annually, amounting to £3.4 billion over 99 years.

However, the true cost will probably exceed £30 billion in cash terms because of rising inflation and additional schemes to fund development projects in Mauritius.

How do we get to £3.4 billion? Well, that depends upon the discount rate, so what is the one they are using?

Ah, here: 5%

No doubt Spud will be along in a moment to decry that use of discounting. It’s bad, see?

Train ticket prices nationwide rose by 4.6pc in March.

Government-backed train operators required £4.1bn in subsidy from the taxpayer during financial year 2024, ORR statistics show.

This is below the previous year’s £4.6bn but well above the pre-pandemic figure of £1.4bn.

Well done everybody, vry well done.

The NHS was given an extra £11 billion for two years, but much of it has been swallowed up by the 22 per cent salary increase for junior doctors, now known as resident doctors.

One NHS trust revealed it had to cut 600 clinical roles along with a further 1,000 office jobs to reduce costs. It also told NHS England it would no longer provide some specialised services if it did not receive extra funding.

Another trust is cutting palliative care beds in the community, restricting stop smoking services and reducing hospital referrals, while a third trust is no longer accepting referrals for adults with ADHD.

When’s the “Save the bureaucrats” demo?

After finishing his shift, the man was off to his second profession – as a salaried employee of the local council.

Similar tales of staff moonlighting, and people working two jobs simultaneously, are becoming increasingly common across Britain.

So-called “polygamous” working is on the rise as home working makes it easier to hold down another job in secret – and officials in the public sector are growing increasingly suspicious of the trend over the risk to taxpayers.

That’s because there are concerns that the public sector, where home working rules are particularly lax, is most vulnerable to abuse.

Doing some Uber outside normal paid working hours is fine. No better or worse than picking up a pub shift.

The problem with local councils is that the average employee is doing so little work that they can do two jkobs in hte same paid working hours with no one the wiser…..

The Treasury overshot its borrowing forecasts by £14.6bn last year, official figures showed, as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) delivered a blow to Rachel Reeves by cutting its growth forecasts for Britain.

Public sector borrowing, excluding banks, hit £151.9bn in the year to March, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

It was well ahead of projections made just last month by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) that Treasury borrowing would hit £137.3bn for the 2024/25 financial year.

Remember, always, it’s the spending that is the tax.

Who knew, eh?

“This is yet another example of Peabody’s casual neglect of their residents. They do not respond to emails from me or senior council officers and have also ignored an enforcement notice served on them by planning officers,” the chair of Islington council’s planning committee, Martin Klute, recently told the Islington Tribune.

Peabody owns more than 5% of Islington’s nearly 112,000 properties. And it has well below average performance on every key indicator of landlord services. Inaction on dealing with hazardous cladding, damp, rodent infestation or broken-down lifts, and failure to tackle neighbour nuisance or other forms of antisocial behaviour, are typical of the concerns that Peabody tenants raise regularly.

Apparently the solution is to subject them to local authority control.

Err, yes……

And, of course, it would be interesting to have a comparison of the social housing groups with private sector institutional landlords, no? Which is worse?