Goat B Smith ... Loved early eaighties cell block h
The 2015 Popularity Contest (aka UK General Election )
- Thread starter rascal
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Sorry mate...I don't speak Welsh...
Ffs.... You can have that one.
Yoozzulee mi sbelin iz furnomimul
Mrk
Player Valuation: £40m
I'd love to know how making people on low incomes pay less tax doesn't help them...
But with regards to VAT, many 'essential' items (heating, electricity, gas etc) only have a 5% VAT rate and even more essential items (most food, children's clothes, books etc etc) have a 0% VAT rate - so many things that the poorest of society need to get by aren't impacted by the rise in VAT.
Interesting paper here on the impact of minimum wages around the world on poverty levels in those areas
http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/tbb_70.pdf
<disclaimer>it is produced by the Cato Institute, which is probably enough to discredit it from the off in many eyes</disclaimer>
Rather frustratingly, a lot of so called research into this is very much predictive, in that they guess at what might happen rather than looking back at what has actually happened.
http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/tbb_70.pdf
<disclaimer>it is produced by the Cato Institute, which is probably enough to discredit it from the off in many eyes</disclaimer>
Rather frustratingly, a lot of so called research into this is very much predictive, in that they guess at what might happen rather than looking back at what has actually happened.
Toffeelover
Player Valuation: £80m
When you talk of the lowest incomes, how much pay are you talking about and for what hours.
Are you one of those on lowest incomes?
As for the VAT, I will ask again what is it those on low pay are buying that is subject to this tax?
On 100 it is 2.5, on 50 it is 1.75, on 25 it is .82, on 10 it is .25,
Clint Planet
Utter Cad.
Are you gullible enough to believe that David Cameron is opposed to tax-dodging?
In 2012 David Cameron reacted to the tax-dodging activities of the (so-called) comedian Jimmy Carr by saying that"Tax-dodging is morally wrong"; in May 2013 he said that he was "opposed to all aggressive tax avoidance"; and for the last four and a half years Cameron and the Tories have been churning out their "getting tough on tax-dodging rhetoric" every time the subject comes up.
If you are the kind of gullible person who takes the words of politicians at face value without engaging your critical judgement you might imagine that the Tories are sincere, and that they have actually been clamping down on the tax-dodging activities of multinational corporations and the super-wealthy minority, but you'd be completely wrong. They've made a few token gestures, but under David Cameron's watch only one out of the 1,000+ people caught up in the Swiss HSBC tax-dodging scandal has faced prosecution and multinational corporations have continued to get away with shifting their UK profits overseas in order to avoid paying tax here.
The Tories know that the tax-dodging activities of corporations and the super-rich are an issue that the public feel very strongly about, but they've assumed that the general public are so gullible that they'll simply believe it if the Tories do nothing more than say that they're getting tough on tax-dodging, whilst simultaneously benefiting from tax-dodging themselves, and even actively facilitating the tax-dodging activities of others.
In this article I'm going to give a few examples that prove that Tory party statements on tax-dodging are just empty rhetoric and deliberate misdirection.
David Cameron
David Cameron is a direct beneficiary of tax-dodging as a result of inheriting £300,000 from his father, which was made via a network of offshore "investment funds" in places like Panama and Geneva, which were explicitly designed to help wealthy people avoid paying UK tax. [source]
Samantha Cameron
David Cameron's wife works for Smythson, which is a leather goods and luxury stationary company that is based in Luxembourg for the purposes of avoiding tax, and controlled via a network of other shell companies based in the British tax havens of Jersey and Guernsey. [source]
Eton college
David Cameron was educated at the most elitist private school in the United Kingdom, which charges more than the average annual wage in tuition fees (currently £34,500 per year). What many people don't realise is that since November 2010 this elitist training camp for the children of the establishment is registered as a charity for the purpose of avoiding tax.
Gary Barlow
Within a week of David Cameron publicly condemning the tax-dodging activities of Jimmy Carr, he absolutely refused to make a similar public condemnation of the former Take That member Gary Barlow when it was revealed that he too had been using an elaborate scheme to avoid paying UK tax. It hardly seems like a coincidence that Gary Barlow is a very high profile Tory party supporter. [source]
HSBC
Not only do HSBC have a track record of helping wealthy UK citizens dodge paying their tax, they've also ripped off their own customers with the PPI fraud, rigged the Libor and Forex markets, channeled funds to terrorist organisationsand laundered hundreds of billions of dollars for murderous Mexican drug cartels.
David Cameron has numerous links to HSBC. Not only have the holders of HSBC Swiss accounts donated £5 million to the Tory party, but Cameron also handed the former HSBC boss Stephen Green a place in the unelected House of Lords and appointed him as the Trade and Investment minister. In February 2015 when the HSBC tax-dodging scandal reignited, Cameron refused to answer a simple question about whether he had ever discussed HSBC tax-dodging with Stephen Green four times in a single debate.
HMRC cuts
One of the things that really puts the Tory rhetoric on combating tax-dodging into perspective is the fact that they have ruthlessly cut the number of HMRC staff working to recover tax from high net worth individuals. Not only does this totally undermine their "tough on tax-dodging" rhetoric, it's also a display of economic illiteracy because cutting the jobs of tax investigators who recover far more than their salaries in unpaid tax each year is almost the definition of a false economy. [source]
Tax-dodging Lords
Since coming to power in 2010 David Cameron has handed out peerages to a whole load of Tory party donors. Several of these wealthy Tory donors that Cameron has stuffed into the unelected and anti-democratic House of Lords are tax-dodgers.
One of the most notable examples of Cameron's unelected tax-dodging Lords is Stanley Fink, who at first threatened to sue Ed Miliband for saying that he had avoided tax, only to change his tune and admit that he had been dodging tax, but that it was Okay because it was only "vanilla" tax avoidance, that it is "normal in British society"because "everyone does it". [source]
New tax-loopholes
Despite harping on about how much they oppose tax-dodging, the Tories have actually opened up a number of new tax loopholes for the benefit of British businesses seeking to avoid paying tax. One of the most egregious of these new loopholes was a scheme announced in the 2013 budget to allow British companies to avoid paying tax in 3rd world countries by shifting their profits into tax havens.Distracting public attention
Instead of taking the revelations about the Tory Party accepting millions of pounds in funding from tax-dodgers, David Cameron desperately tried to distract attention away from the scandal by announcing social security sanctions for benefits claimants who are deemed by the state to be overweight. There is a damn good reason that the Tory party and the right-wing press love to fixate on people like benefits claimants and immigrants as if they're the biggest problems in society instead of dealing with the bankers who wrecked the economy, the corporate fat cats who are enriching themselves at a faster rate than ever whilst contributing to the longest sustained decline in wages since records began, and the tax-dodgers who cost the country tens of billions a year by hiding their wealth in offshore accounts.
The reason that the Tories are so keen to distract attention away from these much more serious problems is that the people responsible are David Cameron's donors. They are the people that the Tory party exists in order to serve. There's absolutely no way that David Cameron could turn on his wealthy paymasters, even if he wanted to.
In 2012 David Cameron reacted to the tax-dodging activities of the (so-called) comedian Jimmy Carr by saying that"Tax-dodging is morally wrong"; in May 2013 he said that he was "opposed to all aggressive tax avoidance"; and for the last four and a half years Cameron and the Tories have been churning out their "getting tough on tax-dodging rhetoric" every time the subject comes up.
If you are the kind of gullible person who takes the words of politicians at face value without engaging your critical judgement you might imagine that the Tories are sincere, and that they have actually been clamping down on the tax-dodging activities of multinational corporations and the super-wealthy minority, but you'd be completely wrong. They've made a few token gestures, but under David Cameron's watch only one out of the 1,000+ people caught up in the Swiss HSBC tax-dodging scandal has faced prosecution and multinational corporations have continued to get away with shifting their UK profits overseas in order to avoid paying tax here.
The Tories know that the tax-dodging activities of corporations and the super-rich are an issue that the public feel very strongly about, but they've assumed that the general public are so gullible that they'll simply believe it if the Tories do nothing more than say that they're getting tough on tax-dodging, whilst simultaneously benefiting from tax-dodging themselves, and even actively facilitating the tax-dodging activities of others.
In this article I'm going to give a few examples that prove that Tory party statements on tax-dodging are just empty rhetoric and deliberate misdirection.
David Cameron
David Cameron is a direct beneficiary of tax-dodging as a result of inheriting £300,000 from his father, which was made via a network of offshore "investment funds" in places like Panama and Geneva, which were explicitly designed to help wealthy people avoid paying UK tax. [source]
Samantha Cameron
David Cameron's wife works for Smythson, which is a leather goods and luxury stationary company that is based in Luxembourg for the purposes of avoiding tax, and controlled via a network of other shell companies based in the British tax havens of Jersey and Guernsey. [source]
Eton college
David Cameron was educated at the most elitist private school in the United Kingdom, which charges more than the average annual wage in tuition fees (currently £34,500 per year). What many people don't realise is that since November 2010 this elitist training camp for the children of the establishment is registered as a charity for the purpose of avoiding tax.
Gary Barlow
Within a week of David Cameron publicly condemning the tax-dodging activities of Jimmy Carr, he absolutely refused to make a similar public condemnation of the former Take That member Gary Barlow when it was revealed that he too had been using an elaborate scheme to avoid paying UK tax. It hardly seems like a coincidence that Gary Barlow is a very high profile Tory party supporter. [source]
HSBC
Not only do HSBC have a track record of helping wealthy UK citizens dodge paying their tax, they've also ripped off their own customers with the PPI fraud, rigged the Libor and Forex markets, channeled funds to terrorist organisationsand laundered hundreds of billions of dollars for murderous Mexican drug cartels.
David Cameron has numerous links to HSBC. Not only have the holders of HSBC Swiss accounts donated £5 million to the Tory party, but Cameron also handed the former HSBC boss Stephen Green a place in the unelected House of Lords and appointed him as the Trade and Investment minister. In February 2015 when the HSBC tax-dodging scandal reignited, Cameron refused to answer a simple question about whether he had ever discussed HSBC tax-dodging with Stephen Green four times in a single debate.
HMRC cuts
One of the things that really puts the Tory rhetoric on combating tax-dodging into perspective is the fact that they have ruthlessly cut the number of HMRC staff working to recover tax from high net worth individuals. Not only does this totally undermine their "tough on tax-dodging" rhetoric, it's also a display of economic illiteracy because cutting the jobs of tax investigators who recover far more than their salaries in unpaid tax each year is almost the definition of a false economy. [source]
Tax-dodging Lords
Since coming to power in 2010 David Cameron has handed out peerages to a whole load of Tory party donors. Several of these wealthy Tory donors that Cameron has stuffed into the unelected and anti-democratic House of Lords are tax-dodgers.
One of the most notable examples of Cameron's unelected tax-dodging Lords is Stanley Fink, who at first threatened to sue Ed Miliband for saying that he had avoided tax, only to change his tune and admit that he had been dodging tax, but that it was Okay because it was only "vanilla" tax avoidance, that it is "normal in British society"because "everyone does it". [source]
New tax-loopholes
Despite harping on about how much they oppose tax-dodging, the Tories have actually opened up a number of new tax loopholes for the benefit of British businesses seeking to avoid paying tax. One of the most egregious of these new loopholes was a scheme announced in the 2013 budget to allow British companies to avoid paying tax in 3rd world countries by shifting their profits into tax havens.Distracting public attention
Instead of taking the revelations about the Tory Party accepting millions of pounds in funding from tax-dodgers, David Cameron desperately tried to distract attention away from the scandal by announcing social security sanctions for benefits claimants who are deemed by the state to be overweight. There is a damn good reason that the Tory party and the right-wing press love to fixate on people like benefits claimants and immigrants as if they're the biggest problems in society instead of dealing with the bankers who wrecked the economy, the corporate fat cats who are enriching themselves at a faster rate than ever whilst contributing to the longest sustained decline in wages since records began, and the tax-dodgers who cost the country tens of billions a year by hiding their wealth in offshore accounts.
The reason that the Tories are so keen to distract attention away from these much more serious problems is that the people responsible are David Cameron's donors. They are the people that the Tory party exists in order to serve. There's absolutely no way that David Cameron could turn on his wealthy paymasters, even if he wanted to.
There's an interesting piece here on party funding, written by Adam Lent, who's the author of 'Small is Powerful'
https://www.thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/rsa-blogs/2015/02/wealthy-donors/
"
So that perennial issue of wealthy donors bending British politics to their will is back although this time it has the added bitter twist that while the donors seem very keen to hand their millions over to party HQ, they seem rather more unsure about HMRC.
Like those other problems - House of Lords and electoral reform - that A-Level politics students have been writing balanced essays about for decades but in which the status quo serves the interests of the main parties, the donor issue never seems to be resolved.
This is not for lack of solutions. Two obvious ones have been talked about for ages: a cap on donations and taxpayer funding of parties. The politicians have never managed to agree on the former and none of the main parties is brave enough to face the ire of voters for formally proposing the latter although the super-patrician Ken Clarke has stepped manfully into the breach today.
The parties’ reticence on this is quite right: I think I am far from alone in being distinctly unimpressed by the idea of my hard earned salary funding some of the most dysfunctional, self-interested, short-termist organisations in the country.
Mark Wallace at Conservative Home has suggested that the only alternative is for parties to become much more reliant on raising money from large numbers of small donors – what might be called the ‘crowdfunding solution’. This is certainly preferable but I remain unconvinced that parties in their current form could undertake such an exercise with any success. The main parties are almost universally hated, there is no clear Obama moment ahead which will inspire millions to hand over a few quid and, anyway, such moments are just that: ephemeral spikes in enthusiasm rather than a long-term funding solution.
There is, however, one relatively simple measure that would kick wealthy donors or, at least, their influence out of politics for good and, unlike taxpayer funding, it has the benefit of deepening our democracy. It is the introduction of a statutory requirement for MPs to discover and represent the views of their constituents in Parliament above all else.
A non-statutory, voluntary version of this is already happening at the grassroots in Stroud with plans afoot for similar initiatives in other constituencies.
The deliberative, direct and democratic system this would usher in would make it far more difficult, maybe even impossible, for donors to have an influence over policy.
Want more privatisation of the NHS because of the juicy contracts your company can hoover up? Well, you could bung a few million to either or both main parties but who knows if privatisation would even be approved following a year’s worth of nationwide deliberation and decision-making by the voters.
Expecting a left-leaning Labour government to finally roll back the trade union legislation of the Thatcher era to placate your threats to withdraw funding? Good luck. You’d do far better behaving like a grown-up and entering into the 650 conversations in constituencies about the issue before any vote in Parliament.
Of course, this doesn’t immediately answer the question of how parties would be funded but it does offer a route to kicking out the over-weaning influence of donors as well as the whips, party leaders and the media which the research tells us the public are not too keen on either.
The chances are that under such a system, parties probably would move towards Mark’s crowdfunding approach largely because the big donors would lose interest. In fact, parties themselves would almost certainly change radically to being looser associations of MPs with a shared agenda for discussion to take to the nation rather than a set of hard and fast policies to be whipped through parliament. All to the good, I feel.
But until such a constitutional shift is enacted, I can’t see the parties voluntarily resisting the seductive sight of a millionaire and a chequebook."
https://www.thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/rsa-blogs/2015/02/wealthy-donors/
"
So that perennial issue of wealthy donors bending British politics to their will is back although this time it has the added bitter twist that while the donors seem very keen to hand their millions over to party HQ, they seem rather more unsure about HMRC.
Like those other problems - House of Lords and electoral reform - that A-Level politics students have been writing balanced essays about for decades but in which the status quo serves the interests of the main parties, the donor issue never seems to be resolved.
This is not for lack of solutions. Two obvious ones have been talked about for ages: a cap on donations and taxpayer funding of parties. The politicians have never managed to agree on the former and none of the main parties is brave enough to face the ire of voters for formally proposing the latter although the super-patrician Ken Clarke has stepped manfully into the breach today.
The parties’ reticence on this is quite right: I think I am far from alone in being distinctly unimpressed by the idea of my hard earned salary funding some of the most dysfunctional, self-interested, short-termist organisations in the country.
Mark Wallace at Conservative Home has suggested that the only alternative is for parties to become much more reliant on raising money from large numbers of small donors – what might be called the ‘crowdfunding solution’. This is certainly preferable but I remain unconvinced that parties in their current form could undertake such an exercise with any success. The main parties are almost universally hated, there is no clear Obama moment ahead which will inspire millions to hand over a few quid and, anyway, such moments are just that: ephemeral spikes in enthusiasm rather than a long-term funding solution.
There is, however, one relatively simple measure that would kick wealthy donors or, at least, their influence out of politics for good and, unlike taxpayer funding, it has the benefit of deepening our democracy. It is the introduction of a statutory requirement for MPs to discover and represent the views of their constituents in Parliament above all else.
A non-statutory, voluntary version of this is already happening at the grassroots in Stroud with plans afoot for similar initiatives in other constituencies.
The deliberative, direct and democratic system this would usher in would make it far more difficult, maybe even impossible, for donors to have an influence over policy.
Want more privatisation of the NHS because of the juicy contracts your company can hoover up? Well, you could bung a few million to either or both main parties but who knows if privatisation would even be approved following a year’s worth of nationwide deliberation and decision-making by the voters.
Expecting a left-leaning Labour government to finally roll back the trade union legislation of the Thatcher era to placate your threats to withdraw funding? Good luck. You’d do far better behaving like a grown-up and entering into the 650 conversations in constituencies about the issue before any vote in Parliament.
Of course, this doesn’t immediately answer the question of how parties would be funded but it does offer a route to kicking out the over-weaning influence of donors as well as the whips, party leaders and the media which the research tells us the public are not too keen on either.
The chances are that under such a system, parties probably would move towards Mark’s crowdfunding approach largely because the big donors would lose interest. In fact, parties themselves would almost certainly change radically to being looser associations of MPs with a shared agenda for discussion to take to the nation rather than a set of hard and fast policies to be whipped through parliament. All to the good, I feel.
But until such a constitutional shift is enacted, I can’t see the parties voluntarily resisting the seductive sight of a millionaire and a chequebook."
there was a bit in one of the papers this morning, saying that low pay and low wage rises not going up in line with what the goverment expected had cost them 33 billion last year alone.
Wonder if thats what prompted dodgy dave to say last week, that the country deserves a pay rise , or maybe its just the election being around the corner, bet the bosses thought, get to fook dave who do you think you are kidding, have a few bob for the party and let the plebs eat cake.
The Tories will spend more on this years General Election this year than any other party in history how can that be fair?
It's a bind though isn't it? Membership of political parties seems to be plummeting at around the same rate as engagement with politics in general, so it seems unlikely that politics will ever be funded by the 'masses', which tends to leave the only alternative to be funded by rent seekers looking for a favour of one kind or another.
Sadly, lots of things don't seem fair about the electoral process, whether it's the funding of the parties, the way the boundaries are measured, even the way seats matter more than votes (so minor parties might get a lot of votes and very few seats). There isn't much about our democracy that's particularly fair I would say.
they make me laugh going on about trade union funding the Labour party thats about 7 million people saying yes we back a party to fight are aims which are quite clear, workers rights ect, through are dues, you can opt out of the political levy if you feel that way.
Agaist a few hundred very wealthy people whom nobody knows what they want or expect, for the money they pay in, even Ken Clark see it as a bad thing for the party.
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