Comment by louthy 2 days ago
Yes, it’s getting quite ridiculous now. Labour, for sure, have not done themselves any favours in their first 18 months in charge, but the level of attack and vitriol is exceptional and beyond any reasonable level.
It makes me wonder what exactly is driving this.
They have done a lot of sensible, boring things that are objectively positive but are going largely going unnoticed (plus of course a few massive footguns that make the headlines).
I keep recommending r/GoodNewsUK on Reddit. It’s often just a lot of press releases and government announcements, but there seem to be a continual stream of them, and it’s hard to hear about them by any other source.
I largely agree, expect I think my expectations were lower than yours to start with. The ruling class all think alike regardless of party.
They have pushed ahead with the Tories Online Safety Act. Legislation I have looked at or that affect things I know about such as the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act is terrible.
There is a lot of smoke and mirrors. For example, if you assume the justification for the "mansion tax" is that people who own higher value properties should be taxed more, why does someone with a £50m house not pay more than someone with a £5m house? Its designed to hit the moderately wealthy but not the really rich.
Although I agree it should be proportional to value, a £5M property puts you in the top 1% of property prices in the country. Even within London, it’s also within the top 1% of all but the most expensive boroughs. The average home property sale in the UK is less than £275,000.
A tax on a £5M home is not a tax on the moderately wealthy, it’s a tax on the wealthy.
No, it's designed to maximize what they can raise without pissing off too many voters. Even as it is, it's going to raise barely half a billion pounds, which is relatively insignificant in a budget worth hundreds of billions; but it's something, and something they (think they) can sell to their core electorate as a bit of token redistribution, when in reality it's just a cash-raising exercise.
If they'd targeted the really rich harder, it would have looked more consistent but would have probably raised even less (because, when a tax starts being significant, the really rich have the means to find ways to avoid it). As it is, it looks insignificant enough that the really wealthy will just pay it and move on.
> because, when a tax starts being significant, the really rich have the means to find ways to avoid it
Taxes on property are something they cannot avoid though.
One of the reasons the rich are able to find means to avoid taxes has always been government reluctance to stop them. There are many deliberate tax breaks for the rich - think of how long it took to get rid of non-dom status, so I really do not think the government has ever tried very hard to stop avoidance by the rich.
> Taxes on property are something they cannot avoid though.
Yeah, definitely nobody ever "avoided" stamp duty... /s
There are plenty of loopholes and corner cases, you just need skilled accountants and lawyers (companies registered abroad, etc etc). That's why there is legislation about "ultimate ownership" and such: authorities are increasingly desperate about being able to prove who owns what.
Starmer does not really care about not pissing off too many voters. He already has but he is also safe from them as the next election is far away. On the other hand, he is at risk, high risk, from his own party so he does what placates them. We've seen it before with private schools, now again with the 2-child cap, for instance.
Well even at the GE, his party was less popular than the previous offer by Corbyn. Labour only really got in because of the collapse of the Tory vote.
2019 GE Votes
Labour: 10,269,051 22% R 32% T
Tory: 13,966,454 29% R 44% T
LibDem: 3,696,419 8% R 12% T
Labour: 9,708,716 20% R 34% T
Tory: 6,828,925 14% R 24% T
LibDem: 3,519,143 7% R 12% T
So that he got even more unpopular seemed a given, unless he managed to be competent and actually improve things for the people who elected his party.
The public do not see or agree that they have done well in any areas, hence their appallingly low popularity. And that was before this budget announcement.
It does not take a crystal ball to understand that the British media, which are vitriolic on a good day, will have an absolute free-for-all. It's nothing new.
> The fact that they were elected as a 'change' government and have barely done anything that really faces up to the scale of the challenge the country faces?
They have done a lot. But they haven't even stopped the runaway train yet. And the fundamental mistake they have made is not explaining to people clearly enough, during the election campaign, that it would take the first three years just to stop it.
Then you have the absolutely shameful, racist, nihilistic, fact-free intervention of five MPs that the media thinks will run the country in future so they are getting ten times the airtime of anyone else.
> They have done a lot.
I really don’t agree. Look at the first year of 1997 Labour:
* Good Friday agreement signed and referendum * Introduction of Minimum Wage * Human Rights act introduced and passed * Scottish and Welsh devolution set out, Parliament voted on it, referendums passed * Bank of England independence
A government coming into a mess of a country on a platform of change cannot just fiddle around with minor things, which is what many of the changes they have done, though positive, are. And at the same time, they’ve also wasted so much political capital on some really stupid things that it’s hard to see where they can go from here.
This is an unfair comparison. The economy Blair inherited was very different, thanks to Ken Clark's preoccupation with eliminating the 'Public Sector Borrowing Requirement'. The pressure on public finances we see now, in part because of privatization under Blair, wasn't there in 1997.
I don't think it's unfair at all, stuff like BoE independence was planned prior to the election and implemented quite quickly.
The planning reforms of Labour have been held up largely by their own MPs. I don't particularly care about it but House of Lords reform seems to have been abandoned. Their 'charter for working people' has been largely unworkable and they're arguing internally an enormous amount. Lots of these don't have a huge amount of bearing on them based on the economy at all, they're largely cost neutral to the government itself.
Instead we've had (a) more bungs to pensioners via the triple lock which they're too scared to deal with at nearly a 5% increase this year (b) getting rid of the cap on benefits for more than 2 children, which is terrible optics for everyone working who can't afford more than two kids and doesn't get any support (c) a rise in employer NI which has hit hiring and pay rises massively for anyone working (d) a rise in employee NI to pay for all of this via stopping salary sacrifice, which only hits private sector employees.
Yes and I'd argue that this is because they have not been elected on merit but because the people rejected the Tories. I believe that Corbyn got more votes than Starmer!
They have neither talents nor a plan. So far it seems that Starmer has picked policies to make him survive and he knows that this means placating power bases in the Labour party, not generally good policies for the country. Opinion polls are scathing.
This is politics so attacks will always follow blunders on either side.
In this case this is an extremely unpopular government to start with that increases taxes across the board while handing out more benefits and claiming that they had no choice because of the state of the public finances, and we learn that they possibly misled the public on that latter point. So, yes, in politics and especially British politics this means a riot against the Chancellor (who was also caught recently having let her house without the required legal licence, btw, after the [now former] Deputy PM was caught dodging taxes on the purchase of a second home...) because everyone "smells blood" but that's the game and it's not completely undeserved, either.
They were elected with 33% of the vote thanks to our FPTP system, the lowest in history. They were unpopular when they were elected and have done nothing to change that.
The fact that they were elected as a 'change' government and have barely done anything that really faces up to the scale of the challenge the country faces? If you're below the age of about 55, then the budget did absolutely nothing for you except put taxes up, and not even to improve services.
I appreciate things time but so far the government have enormously walked back their planning reform proposals, which was one of their few pro-growth policies, and haven't really made any dent in anything else substantive. It's been pretty clear since even before the election that they didn't really have a plan, and they got a fairly light scrutiny through the campaign because the Tories were so appalling. Then since they got in they're just scrambling around looking fairly incompetent and the dearth of talent on the cabinet has been pretty plain to see as well. Largely I want Labour to succeed but they're not making it easy to like them.