> just mentioning increased immigration
One of these seems like the solution to the other.
> as long as those people leaving are straight, white males, or their families, they're being told "good riddance" regardless of the brain drain and loss of tax income
Having UK work experience and having talked to thousands of british folks over a decade, I find this hard to believe.
I started working with folks from the UK right at the start when social media really took off, and I personally think that what ails the UK is the same as what ails the world. Too much social media.
The UK has always been an empire in decline, but the wheels didn't come off until everyone became glued to feeds. It's Garbage In, Garbage Out. If your view of reality is driven by stuff that you see online, it's a distorted lens which then leads to distorted decision making that then leads to authoritarian creep.
Just my 2¢.
If the per capita spending is exceeding per capita taxation, increased immigration does not solve the problem. More people requires more spending.
> The UK has always been an empire in decline
I find this fatalistic attitude to be very unhelpful in determining good policy decisions. If you start with the assumption that the empire is in decline then it doesn’t seem as bad to add policies that contribute to decline, as long as you get some short-term win out of it.
A common thread is that when people complain about too much media consumption, they’re always talking about other people consuming other media. Few people believe their own consumption to be a societal level problem. Almost nobody believes that their sources of media are the bad ones. It’s always about other sources that other people are consuming.
This is why age verification has the most support of these topics: Adults see it as targeted specifically at a group that isn’t them (young people) whose media they dislike the most.
The peak of the empire was around WW1, where the victory was immediately followed by Irish home rule, and Churchill(!) putting the UK military into austerity to save money, which is how it came to be that evacuating from Dunkirk involved a lot of civilian ships, amongst other things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Year_Rule
WW2 was a Pyrrhic victory. Not that Westminster collectively realised the nation's weakness until the Suez Crisis and the Wind of Change: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_of_Change_(speech)
I'm not sure the people of the UK have yet fully internalised this decline, given the things said and written during the Brexit process. Perhaps social media really did make it all worse, but it's been authoritarian, chauvinistic (both internationally with imperialism and domestically via the aristocracy), and theocratic, ever since Harold Godwinson may or may not have taken an arrow to the eyeball.
The other factor is that everyone now knows how powerful social media can be. Remember when we had positive movements like Occupy Wallstreet, the Arab Spring and Anonymous Hacktivism all facilitated by social media? That doesn't happen anymore. Small things like getting traction for a petition still work, but anything that questions existing structures has no chance of succeeding anymore. Instead social media is overrun by bots that simulate broad consensus on many issues
But social media is different. For most forms of media, TV, movies, books, radio etc. You had some degree of agency and choice over what you consumed. You couldn't set what a channel or station was playing, but you could change the channel.
You don't choose what you see on social media. You see what an algorithm thinks is most likely to keep you hooked / going.
Our brains only know what's real based on what's in front of it. You can acknowledge something is rage bait, but as you process it, you will still feel some degree of anger / discomfort. You can acknowledge that something is a cherry picked example, designed to tug the sensibilities of users, but it will still tug on your sensitivities.
And so sure enough, as you keep getting rage baited, concern trolled into algorithmic oblivion, it changes your gestalt. Your worldview shifts to one where those are data points, and it starts distorting your perception of reality.
Garbage In. Garbage Out.
Other people have said that it's like electricity consumption. No. This is very much like tobacco. I don't use social media. Even though I get paid to post to it.
Technology is advancing much faster than humans can biologically evolve and very few people seem ready to seriously tinker with the human genome to keep pace.
Perhaps "the feeds" are just the inflection point where the information overload becomes obvious and baseline humans actually need a majority baseline human experience with all of the associated problems in order to prosper?
I only have to look as far as my own wallet to see the effects. I'm being taxed to the eyeballs while there is a glass ceiling preventing me taking any more pay home without a major jump which just isn't coming due to stupid tax rules keeping the working class from bumping into the middle class.
I see mine and my family's living standards drop only to be told by the news that I'm a likely target for more tax hikes, and there's just no room to tax me more while my bills have also gone up significantly, and something will have to give. If it gets to the point where I can't pay my bills despite being a "high earner" I'll have to start considering whether I leave with my family, and where to.
I'm not exactly the milky bar kid, but I imagine beyond my friends and family, I imagine the consensus would be very much the same, yet there goes two "successful" professionals and the children we were raising probably to be high earning professionals too.
I don't do social media, but I do keep on top of the news from all outlets, I try to look beyond the biases and form an opinion on a combination of sources.
Emotional phrases aside, what is your total NI + income tax deduction percentage, and what percentage do you think you should be paying?
And that’s without putting things like dating apps, advertisements and privacy violations in the mix.
Without money society is just doomed.
Thatcher reversed the feeling by selling off the nation to rentiers and foreigners in the 80s, we rode that money in the 90s, and the wheels came off in 2008.
They're well known an documented, but I'm sure you know that already.
However the uncomfortable truth is that many people enjoy what they see in social media, just like they enjoyed the manufactured bait of Jerry Springer and Jeremy Kyle on TV.
It is funny you say these are well known and documented, yet provide no links or sources.
That is not how marginal tax rates work. Each income band is taxed at the rate for that band. It’s why it’s called “marginal” - because the rate change happens at the margin between brackets.
You are taxed 0% on your first £12571. You are taxed 20% on your next £37669, or, £7359.80 on £50270 of income. If you then earned one more pound, or £50271, you would owe £0.40 (40%) on that one additional pound only, for a total of £7361.20. There is no income stage where earning more money has you taking home less.
On the part from 0 to 1000, no taxes
1001 to 10000, ten percent
10001 to 20000, twenty percent
20000 to 30000, thirty percent
30001 and more, forty percent
So if you were earning 29000 and get a raise to 31000 those 29000 are still taxed as they used to and the extra 2000 are split among the two bands around 30k.
Edit: Ah, there's a baseline personal deduction (12.5k) that disappears between 100-125k, meaning, for that narrow band, every dollar earned in that range has a higher effective tax rate due to that deduction slowly disappearing. It's still progressive, so you don't suddenly start paying 60% tax on everything.
https://www.brewin.co.uk/insights/earn-over-100k-beware-the-...
Absolutely. It's not the only problem, but it is a serious and deep problem.
there are several
there's one at around 50k (where child benefit is removed) and another at 100k (where childcare vouchers are removed)
Here’s an explanation of the figures:
https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/money/article/high-i...
Could you elaborate? From over here the Netherlands seems almost a paradise of modern society.
https://www.gov.uk/income-tax-rates https://www.gov.uk/tax-free-childcare
For other readers who don't want to go through that:
Say you earn £99,999 and get a pay rise to £100,000 and have two pre-school aged children, you lose £4000 (£2000 per child) per year, so you now earn less.
Now for the next ~£25,140 you earn you'll pay an effective tax rate of 60%, so from £99,999 you first have to hit ~£110,000 to break even, then it's ~60% tax up to £125,140, then beyond that it's 45%.
The truth is I don't know the exact numbers but it's not relevant to my point, as I've tried to point out elsewhere.
EDIT: it's interesting that anyone genuinely asking and trying to understand is getting downvoted as opposed to anyone who just disagrees with me.
Also, if you’re paying a decent amount in to your pension your effective salary is lowered and won’t hit that child benefit threshold until your salary exceeds £60k or more, and you still get to keep all of that money.
I wish this were the case so badly... it seems to be more the opposite with many companies doing RTO now.
The real kicker is the 99,999->100,000 trap where you lose all tax free childcare care allowance, £2000 per year per child, it's assessed quarterly, and if you exceed it by a single penny, not only do you lose it, they also demand immediate repayment of all childcare allowance so far that year.
I struggle with the child tax credits. If I'm childless and move from 99,999 to 100,000 it doesn't change my situation at all. I don't think we can view that in the same light - it's a tax credit benefit, but it's not just a matter of earnings. The goal is to support lower income families, so the line has to be drawn somewhere, and whether it's gradual or not someone is still going to complain about it going away.
We do suffer from many political parties not willing to cause short term pain to improve long term outcomes. There are a few urgent issues going on in politics at the moment. Stuff where a decision needs to be made now and action should be taken. But the political parties do not want to make those decisions because they would inflict short term pain to some voters but would also improve the long term quality of life and economics of the Netherlands.
The worst part is that those issues have been known for a long time, but decisions were postponed over and over again because politicians didn't want to make the decision. Making the issues worse and more urgent over time.
At the same time populism is clearly on the rise in the Netherlands. A famous thing happening in a debate before the previous elections was a populist saying "But this woman cannot wait for the costs to be decreased, she needs it now." about decreasing a specific part of healthcare costs for citizens. Of course when the same populist became the biggest party during the elections, they never introduced anything to decrease that part of the healthcare costs.
https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2024/10/17/reform-income-tax-end-th...
If you go from £99,999 to £100,000 and have pre-school aged children, you lose £2000 in tax-free childcare per child. If you have 2 children, that extra penny cost you £4000, 3 children, £6000, you take home less, fact.
Combined with the 60% marginal rate, you now have to get to £110,000 just earn the same you did at £99,999 and then there's the side point that a couple can earn £99,999 each, or £198,999.98 and still benefit from it while any single parent who hits £100,000 loses it completely, so a single parent high earner loses out vs a couple. I'm not a single parent but that doesn't seem reasonable to me.
EDIT: and that person who hit £100,000 has the extra burden of having to file a tax return from now on simply because they hit an arbitrary number, and despite being on PAYE, though perhaps some people love doing tax returns, so not necessarily a negative point.
Every inch of our economy is now owned by some faceless fund. All serious capital generated in the country is extracted out into the pockets of fund managers and Californian pensioners.
We're screwed until we can stem the outflow. I always thought taxing money leaving the country might be interesting way to approach the problem.
Having it go away is less of a problem than having it go away all at once. If it was phased out over a range of incomes such that every marginal dollar of gross is still a marginal increase in net, that'd solve the problem mentioned in this thread. Key property of a tax system: the function from gross income to net income should always be monotonically increasing.
https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/52410-nine-years-afte...
I don't know where you're getting this information, but it's in stark contrast to all of the statistics I've ever seen on the matter.
https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/51484-how-do-britons-...
Even Nigel Farage has called it a disaster.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-leave-...
Nobody is expected not to use it if they earn below the point it is taken away, it's just an arbitrary tax on parents who earn 100,000, while at the same time a few other paper cuts are piled on.
I know Americans always do tax returns, sounds like a pita for you guys, and I believe until recently you had no choice but to use some sort of service and couldn't DIY it?
Here if you're PAYE (salaries), it's dealt with on your behalf, the tax is deducted before you're paid and you don't have to deal with it, unless you're self employed. It's not necessarily a huge issue, but it's a time cost and that has to have a price, and if you get it wrong, HMRC are notoriously hard and will demand full payment immediately, if you're lucky and they accept your "excuse" (their word), they might let you split it over 3 months.
At this point it's best to make sure you have £10,000+ in savings aside just in case.
I've not had to do a tax return yet, but I've frequently seen tax bills in the tens of thousands from family and friends because their accountant got it wrong, and holds no liability.
I don't think it's as big an issue for me people have taken from my original wording, that's fine, poor choice of words on my part perhaps, but it has certainly been blown out of proportion including some minor jabs at me and (incorrectly) at my political leanings etc. Despite this really all having nothing to do with politics or news and quite clearly as I pointed out at it's direct effect on my family finances.
As the saying goes here in England, "I'm sorry I mentioned it".
Social media is a forum for people to complain about the problems they face, if you don’t like that the solution is not to censor the messenger but to fix the problems.
As someone who grew up in the UK I can tell you that the elitist mindset of the UK is a huge part of their problem: only the elite are capable sophisticated right-think, all others are wrong-thinking simpletons and must be silenced for their own safety. The BBC is a huge part of the problem as it is inevitably pro-government but trades off a strong image of neutrality, to the extent that it regularly misleads the public and they lap it up.
There have been a number of public scandals regarding immigrant crimes, along with subsequent anti-immigrant riots started via social media and people being sent to jail for internet posts. Social media seems to be more of accelerant for social unrest than than the cause. For me (an outsider) observing the situation, it seems to be mainly caused by immigration.
So this might or might not be in line with official guidance but I was exactly in this situation and I expected to earn around £99k last tax year then I was given an unexpected £4k bonus in my march salary, and I wasn't told about it until it was in my account already so it was too late to put it into pension. I asked HMRC about it and they said as long as I was being truthful at every quarterly questionnaire where they ask if you expect to make over £100k and I told them the situation changed as soon as I became aware of it I don't have to pay anything back for the free childcare hours. I asked my accountant and she said since I have it in writing it should be fine(but HMRC can always change their mind so who the hell knows).
Compare that to the insane situation of the benefit for carers where people are being asked to repay benefits going back years if they went over the threshold by a single pound - I imagine HMRC is being incentivieed to go after benefit takers more than other areas like childcare hours, for various more or less political reasons.
So politicians LIED?! Color me shocked.
People also complained about literacy rates and the printing press, but how would we have been better off without any of these things so far?
Maybe whatever X newest way to communicate is bad, but when the only evidence against it is the same old arguments that failed to hold up to scrutiny over and over again, I see no reason to give it any more prudence than someone claiming carbonated beverages have caused all out problems. There needs to be compelling evidence beyond people complaining about the collective woes of society that have a cacophony of sources and contributing factors.
To me, different and new communication methods only bring a spot light on issues that we already had. Having a town crier instead of a newspaper, radio, or TV isn't going to make me better informed or less likely to have my information manipulated against me. Sure, it limits the number of sources of information, but that doesn't curate the sources of that information any better when I have no control over them.
For example, if you pollute 99 ppm, then you're good. If you pollute 100 ppm, you're bad.
Are you sure you replied to the right comment? Where have they claimed that?
I take it you lost your allowance for the rest of the year due to the bonus?
Luckily for me the childcare tax people contacted me about it the first time it could have become an issue because I received a bonus at the start of a tax year, so I adjusted my pension contributions for the rest of the year lowering my take home. By this point though I'd already been taxed that marginal 60% thanks to the bonus being paid to me, like yourself without being notified.
> taxing money leaving the country might be interesting way to approach the problem.
This would end very poorly because what the U.K. sorely needs is investment (to create new productive capacity). For example, Americans invested huge sums in North Sea oil and created an entire industry (before we destroyed it). Conversely, if you force people to keep wealth in the country then you just make things more expensive: they will bid up the price of property and the like. Nothing is added to the UK’s real economy by increasing the number of pounds flowing around in it - it’s only helpful if it’s invested. So what you actually want is tax breaks for foreign investment, but with some kind of ownership cap.
Obviously very different if you're self employed or have income mostly from investments or properties, but the you have an accountant to do it for you.
IMHO, there's nothing authoritarian about either editors or social media. It only becomes authoritarian when they intentionally align with a central political authority.
I don't support censorship. But increasing the accuracy of the information most people are getting is a difficult problem to solve.
Here's some Farage quotes, so you can see that there is no contradiction between the comment you were replying to (him saying it was a disaster is compatible with all this) and him still being a leaver:
“I don’t think that for a moment,” Mr Farage replied when he was asked if the UK would have been better off staying in the EU, the world’s largest single market area. “But what I do think is we haven’t actually benefitted from Brexit economically, what we could have done.”
“I mean, what Brexit’s proved, I’m afraid, is that our politicians are about as useless as the commissioners in Brussels were,” he added. “We’ve mismanaged this totally, and if you look at simple things…such as takeovers, such as corporation tax, we are driving business away from our country.
“Arguably, now we’re back in control, we’re regulating our own businesses even more than they were as EU members. Brexit has failed.”
News coverage of child grooming convictions in the month of their conviction was dominated by a different group of scumbags who were convicted of similar crimes up to a decade earlier though, which underlines my point about obsessions quite neatly
There's been enough in the way of tax breaks and "derisking". A huge part of the problem with our public finances is being on the hook for some very ill-advised "investments".
The money going out exceeds the money going in, because that's what an investment is. An opportunity to make money.
This. The UK was a band of feudal kingdoms that somehow managed to create an overseas empire. The empire is now gone, and the feudal kingdom is struggling to transform itself into a modern nation.
We could imagine fixing the problem by making the childcare voucher phase out between 80k and 100k, and at 100.2k you'd get exactly the same amount as you get under the current system.
In this hypothetical would you still say taxed to the eyeballs? If so, what would your justification be?
Yeah they were: https://www.cps.gov.uk/cps/news/operation-stovewood-seven-me...
You're pointing to another rape case(ironic there's so many of them) but the other one was the OG that exposed the British government being involved in the cover up of migrant crimes to not seem racist, where the British citizens talking about the Muslim rape gangs were the ones being persecuted instead of the gangs themselves.
You can't make this shit up. It was a betrayal of the British people of epic proportions, whose trust in their leader was lost forever, because if they're willing to sweep that under the rug to protect their image, what else have they been covering up. Then the post office workers comes up.
What the UK desperately needs is actual shareholder capital actually being invested into British companies, so that they can create new wealth. They are welcome to take a share of the wealth they create! Everybody wins!
Implying that the recently -convicted gang who spent several years hosting "rape nights" targeting minors in Glasgow I've linked to was somehow less depraved than people of Pakistani descent doing the same thing in Rochdale years earlier because they weren't members of an ethnic minority does kind of underline my point.
This seems to be me to be a weird framing. It's a tax benefit for parents that's taken away when you hit £100k. When you hit £100k you don't face an arbitrary tax, instead you're now playing by the same rules everyone else is. You're in parity with your child-less coworker. Not disadvantaged, just no longer advantaged.
Even China with extreme capital controls and pervasive surveillance can't stop money leaving the country. Unless the UK was willing to go fully authoritarian and ban its citizens from spending money overseas, and ban crypto (and build all the internet firewall/DPI infrastructure that doing so would require), it wouldn't stand a chance. And attempting to do so would destroy the value of the pound, because nobody with any options would want to hold a currency that could only be spent in the UK.
The same thing is true in Sweden. People vote for the party that blames the immigrants and then goes on to rule with the liberal conservative part. They all know that during the time they claim is the downfall of Sweden, we have more than one third of state tax income and had the worst privatisation of schools worldwide, . Yet the problems with schools and healthcare is immigration.
Demagogues are what they are.
What I see is every national asset, every successful company, and increasingly land and housing sold to (typically overseas) capital, with the proceeds sucked offshore.
Whether it's new housing in London, ARM, the water, the electricity, most products and most supermarkets: the beneficial owner is outside the country, being largely taxed outside the country, and spending their money outside the country.
We're discussing this in the context of a deeply dysfunctional Britain. If the "wealth creation" route were in any way effective, we'd be in a very different place right now. There's been concensus among pretty much every party in my lifetime around supporting "growth", "investment", number go up. It's clearly not working for most of us. Everyone but a select few in this country is living on the edge.
I personally see a major component of our malaise as the rentierism practiced by largely foreign interests throughout our economy. Alternative explanations are welcome, but it's hard to see how we'd be worse off without the vampire squid up each and every orifice.
With a progressive tax band, the burden is different, you're aware of it ahead of time and you set your living standards accordingly, you won't see a big sudden drop and can adjust accordingly. You can't suddenly sell your home or find a much higher paying job in the same space of time a small pay increase took you over the cliff.
For my generation, a professional that's having a family has probably focused on their career to get there, having there kids once they break some income threshold at a certain age, let's say it's 80k to fit with your numbers. You bought your home somewhere where those higher salaries are, paid a premium, higher SDLT on a small new build flat, you upsize when you have kids, buy a(n) (old) house, now overpriced due to property price jumps in the last few years, another chunk of SDLT, bills much higher, then you hit 100k as your costs have gone up significantly, that might be manageable, but you've just lost 2k per child to the tax credit trap, then the next 10k breaks even, after that you're taxed at 60% while your salary can't/won't be able to increase enough to offset that additional tax burden and your living standards have materially dropped because you got a pay rise.
I suppose the nuance I'm trying to convey is one of timing compounded by cliffs in the tax system that wouldn't become the sudden problem they are if the tax system wasn't set up the way it is.
One could argue that you could have known this, but I don't believe anyone would be seriously aware of the pitfalls until they have kids or hit a salary where you're going to be hit with a big step in tax burden.
Sure it won't affect everyone the same, but if you happen to meet those specific criteria with that specific timing, it can certainly feel like being "taxed to the eyeballs" even if that isn't the best way to put it. I'm far from the only person in that position, it's just the natural progression for some.
I hope that explains my position a bit better. I wasn't trying to say "I pay too much tax as a percentage of my income", in fact I DON'T think that, but I and others I've spoken to in this situation believe it's a tax-based ceiling on our progression and is a tax-based contribution to the growing wealth devide pushing anyone down that attempts to break into the middle class, which as a whole just makes the rich richer and the poor poorer; no I'm not putting myself in those brackets before someone jumps on me, but pushing the middle down makes the rich richer and the poor poorer (sorry slight tangent at the end there).
Now despite your previous admission, you are here telling me that you did answer it and I just didn't like the answer. The question has revealed more about you and your motives than we could have ever imagined.
Contrary to your statement, the UK is a center of education, innovation, and still a major player in finance. The current malaise infects the West and is much more than “brexit” or “colonial hangovers”.
The government has been clear they want you to work harder and earn more, they also want you to have children and raise future tax payers, if you do have children either your career and earnings take a hit or you need to put them in childcare, in that case I think all child care should be tax free, they're only in there so you can work and earn and pay tax. It's typical that your wages should increase with experience but you can't un-have children, perhaps you didn't even know you'd hit that threshold when you had them, or more likey that such a threshold even exists.
If we don't think of it like that, but simply that you're no longer advantaged as you put it, the issue is that it's sudden and affects unevenly, two parents can earn £99,999.99 EACH and still receive it, but a single parent or one person in a couple earns that extra penny they're now £2000/child worse off and still have to put their children in childcare.
Of course there's an option to have or not to have children, but I'd argue that the global consensus in countries with ageing populations, like the UK, is that the government want you to work more, and for longer and have more children, so it should be fair to say that from the government perspective, having children is the expected norm.
On average as a tourist, the Netherlands is straight up just a better version of Germany. However a friend of mine recently moved. She’s from India, moved to Germany and then fell in love with a Durch man she ultimately married. In the process of moving she of course also switched into the Dutch health care system and that I think is legit worse than the German one but I don’t know how much that might be a symptom of a greater issue in the Netherlands.
The difference is essentially that the Dutch health care system tries to be profitable which is nice but then results in procedures not being covered by health insurance that a German doctor would find essential. Specifically preventative care and child birth related stuff where very problematic for her.
But otherwise I think the Netherlands takes a very practical approach to society. Is it annoying for cars to navigate Dutch cities? Yes but also it’s the only country where you can basically always take a bicycle anywhere and be safe. Is 100km/h on the highway annoying? Yes but it’s also the most relaxing drive in heavy traffic I can imagine. I think in a quite literal sense, i think the Dutch are less conservative than we are. The way things were done matters less which results in people seeing the benefits of change much more. Like everything car related. Youd start a riot in germany just doing parking like the Dutch do.
That's not where I would say the line between working class and middle class should be drawn.
I’m no longer eligible to have an opinion UK or local conversations. “how would you know”, “the city’s changed a lot since you left”, “why are people who chose to leave so interested in X”, statements specific to ex-pats.
For those from outside the UK, ex-pat (expatriate) as a singular term is almost always derogatory regardless of context or publisher.
Because if they knew about the welfare policy before they started typing, they would've actually mentioned it then - it's a specific problem, with several obvious solutions (i.e. don't means test at all or taper off more gently) unrelated to the concept of tax brackets (and potentially not related to the actual bracket index values themselves.
There's a strong focus on streamlining and reducing "unnecessary" care (including a lot of preventative care that is accessible in other countries) but without doing that now the whole system will not be affordable in 20 - 30 years.
Is that the optimal approach? I'm not sure, taking a patient wishes into account and doing (some) preventative care does probably have a positive ROI. Having said that I can see both sides of the coin but as a younger person I'm glad they're taken future demands into account.
And you wouldn't be receiving it at all if you didn't have children.
Like I would choose to not means test such a policy were in charge, but it's also got nothing to do with marginal tax rates - it's why liberals like me generally oppose means tested welfare policies (because it costs more to deliver and tends to deliver less).
If you don't like it you must be foreign; I'm not, I was born and raised in England to British parents. Nowhere did I say I was even planning to leave, I merely suggested that if things got worse I might have to consider it, and I was jumped on for that.
Things ARE getting worse, but I'm not at that point yet, maybe we'll have a miraculous turn around and our public services will improve and our economy will grow, I'm not even asking for it to be sunny for 3 months of the year, but if they don't, am I just supposed to sit here on a sinking ship with my children next to me?
And let's be real, it's not even about me at this point, it's about what is and what will be for my children, I've worked hard to give them a better life than I had as a kid, and I'll be damned if I don't do it.
Your second point is a hallucination on your part. Nobody is saying it's bad because they're minorities. We're saying it's especially bad because the government was implicated - they very people charged with keeping children safe sacrificed them for political reasons, by the thousands, for years, and still are. That, combined with the scale of crimes by the Pakistani and other rapists and the acceptance these crimes received in their community, form a different type of crime - a massive crime committed by authorities and a whole community over years. That's what's so especially horrifying.
Owning a home, having significant savings, holidays abroad at least once a year, sending your children to private school, etc are probably some things I'd consider markers of being in the lower middle class.
On that basis, homes are becoming harder to own, savings are being eaten up by higher cost of living, the pound is weakening and taxes are making it untenable to send your children to private school.
Maybe my idea of what being middle class is is wrong, but it can't be far off, and that's exactly the group of people who aren't going to go much further beyond that to whatever comes at the next stage, I don't know what living standards look like for people above that; multiple properties, significant portfolios, not working for a living?
If my perspective if off, I'm willing to hear it.
You also don't have childcare costs once they go to school, so the loss of that outgoing makes up for the loss of the tax credit.
I'm also liberal, and I think that everyone should be given the child tax credit, if the government wants you to work, and earn, and have children (it does), the tax credit is an effective way to help everyone work harder and earn more.
The issue I've been trying to describe, is that after you've already had children, and you then hit 100k, you lose it entirely, making you 2k per child worse off, so let's say you get to 100k, and you already have two children in childcare, you lose 4k, then you get a pay rise to 110k, with the loss of the 4k and at the same time you also hit a marginal tax rate of 60%, you now earn exactly the same as you did at 100k.
If you got a with-inflation pay rise every year from 100k onward, you'd be earning less for almost all of that time until those children go to school.
Lowering the higher band threshold to 100k from 125k and not tapering the personal allowance would actually leave you better off.
EDIT: Typo in my numbers (100k > 110k).
knowing HMRC it's because they can't figure out how to work it out
at least without giving infosys/fujitsu a couple of hundred million quid
Capital controls. By the time they are applied it's always too little, too late, and they only ever apply to the plebs -- the wealthy always have ways to move money out (and back in, later -much later-, if it becomes necessary or advantageous). Always too little too late because -I suspect- capital controls don't really work -- not against the wealthy.
Sorry to say, gizajob, you would make a terrible dictator.
> There's been consensus among pretty much every party in my lifetime around supporting "growth", "investment", number go up.
Yes most U.K. governments have talked about fine talk but other than Thatcher, failed to actually deliver on securing enough investment. It’s not that the investments are bad, it’s that they have been decreasing for 25 years:
https://www.economicsobservatory.com/boosting-productivity-w...
It’s funny that you mention ARM because it was created under Thatcher back when the U.K. was willing to start businesses. Yes it should never have been sold.
The only successful professional white men I know and have known for the last 10 years are self employed...and even that is under attack. If you want a permanent job as a white man in the UK, your hope of career progress is minimal at best. You will only be promoted if there is no other option.
There is so much home grown talent in the UK going to waste in the name of modern ideology.
Its creating a kind of apathy towards work for a lot of people. Especially those now reaching their 40s. There are loads and loads of professionals with 20 years under their belts that have seen nothing but stagnant wages and slow / non-existant career progression.
The sad thing is, all of this hard line "white and male is stale" rubbish hasn't changed the balance in terms of wealth distribution...you can still he financially successful as a white man in the UK, just not through permanent work and definitely not working for British businesses.
Ive seen it first hand, I spent ages pitching a business idea and prototype to raise some funding. Not a sausage. As soon as I had a couple of black ladies involved (great lovely women, but far from the top of their game) money fell put of the sky. They didn't even have to deliver high quality pitches.
What is equally as sad is these two ladies don't want to be given hand outs based on their race. They struggle to work out whether what they're trying to do actually has value or whether they're just being given money because they're black and female. It messes with their heads as well.
I appreciate the proximity of the two sentences made it unclear, but the general population isn't what I'm critical of in this case. I briefly had an Iranian project manager, that nation is almost as high as you can get on the theocracy scale (IIRC it would be beaten by Afghanistan), but he absolutely was not and had tattoos of video game characters.
Also, I should say that the use of "theocracy" in the modern sense is somewhat looser than the historical, and therefore ask if we're actually disagreeing? Certainly I don't mean in the sense of the deification of the Pharaohs.
Re the rest:
Given my focus is the rulers and not the people, I think the Lords Spiritual remain relevant (the attempt to replace the HoL with an elected one being promised by the HoC in 1911, still waiting).
Likewise that the head of state is also the head of the national church and there being a religious requirement for being crowned monarch, and that there is no desire to reform away the monarchy as an institution, likewise the Establishment nature of the CoE, making this the only non-meta conversation I've ever had where I can legitimately use the longest (recognised, non-systematic) word in the English language by saying that the UK political system is one of antidisestablishmentarianism.
I don't think I'd count the coins, even though this is about the ruling classes who are much more likely than anyone else to speak Latin and thus recognise the abbreviation printed on them. "FID DEF" has an ironic history, but so does the much easier to read "In God We Trust" and I'm not (yet) going to describe the USA in this way.
Aside from all of that, there's also the requirement of schools that:
All maintained schools must provide religious education and daily collective worship for all registered pupils and promote their spiritual, moral and cultural development.
Collective worship in county schools and equivalent grant-maintained schools must be wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character, though not distinctive of any particular Christian denomination.
I suspect it's nowhere near the 95th percentile of earned wealth.
You're literally doing what you're accusing me of "hallucinating" yourself, bracketing a group of crimes by the ethnicity of the perpetrators, and ignoring white British people doing exactly the same thing and also getting away with it for years, and pinning the blame on the crimes committed by ethnic minorities specifically on the "entire community"; Somehow the Glaswegian associates and neighbours of the "Beastie House" aren't tarred with the same brush, and according to the person I was replying to even the perpetrators aren't as depraved. Police and social services (not generally considered part of "the government") failed to put a stop to grooming gangs for a wide variety of reasons; yes, in the case of Rochdale specifically where there were a number of warnings that shouldn't have been ignored that made it warrant a public enquiry and elevated news coverage. Needless to say social media coverage driven by agendas tended to skip the more robustly established findings that police repeatedly didn't take victim reports seriously out of assumptions about the behaviour of working class girls staying out late at night and often failed in fulfilling basic child protection protocols in favour of the "politicians covered it up and still are" angle. Back in reality, we've had a lot of convictions, multiple public inquires and people from all political parties talk more about them than most other sex crimes put together (even including Jimmy Savile)
In any case, the wider discussion was whether the UK's current ailments and political schisms are "mainly caused by immigration", and its quite hard to logically connect even the immigration-driven controversies like Brexit, "caps on migrant numbers" and fixation on small boat crossings to crimes committed by gangs of mostly second generation British Pakistanis, mostly in the early 2000s.
All of the currently-rich nations had a multi-generational baby boom*, long enough for their systems to assume and become dependent on that population growth.
* babies being the most extreme example of "influx of illiterate people, totally dependent on government handouts", though people only objected to them in the UK when I was a kid when it was single mothers producing them
Families started to have fewer kids, but the systems still presumed and needed more people to avoid stagnation. Japan chose stagnation instead of welcoming as many immigrants as it needed, and "the lost decade" became a plural: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decades
> Healthcare and insurance, literally everything is pricing the middle class out of existence.
I assume from this that you're American? That's basically just America that has this problem. Healthcare and health insurance is fine in most other developed (and developing) nations, even e.g. here in Germany in those few years where it took on around a million asylum seekers.
IMO, many of the UK politicians themselves don't realise how out of touch they are, both with the people and with the systematic reality of the world in which they exist. (Thinking back to David Davis on Brexit, saying they had a good idea what Czechoslovakia wanted from negotiations, despite it having ceased to exist in 1992).
If the income of everybody above the 80th percentile dropped to be equal to the 81st percentile, the 80th percentile income wouldn't change the ones above would just be very closely bunched.
(Last time I checked the opposite was true and they got more spread out)
You come across as out of touch and entitled. You live in the future - enjoy it!
That said, I agree that is pretty stupid.
The only connection to marginal tax rates is that the pay bands line up though?
With no intention of downplaying the particular scandal that you're referencing, I don't think this is correct. Victims of sexual abuse by the Catholic Church are also usually estimated to range in the thousands, particularly e.g. in Germany
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_sexual_abuse...
The school results are worse. Even here the claim is that it is the immigrants' fault. The privatisation of the school system in sweden has led to increased segregation of the school system. Private schools can be found in areas where they get "easy students". Yet they fail to deliver any better results than public schools. Which is amazingly dumb. The state pays private schools (they are open for anyone and have no tuition fees). The schools can then let less money go to tuition and more to the share holders/owners, while being able to claim that they are just as good as schools with all the tough students. By all measurements they should be much better. It is such an enormous failure.
And who do we blame? Immigrants.
And social mobility is going downwards. Not nearly as low in the US, but I want to think that we at least still believe in the value of hard work.
>Somehow the Glaswegian associates and neighbours of the "Beastie House" aren't tarred with the same brush
Because this is an isolated incident, not something happening at a mass scale in that community.
You are helping mass rape continue by trying to minimize it; you are part of the problem here, right here, right now. Your kinds of thoughts and words are the support that those ongoing mass gang rape of children requires to continue. Hope you're proud of yourself; at least nobody can call you racist.
>crimes committed by gangs of mostly second generation British Pakistanis
It's hard to connect immigration to crimes by committed by ethnic immigrant gangs? Dear lord.
Look up the stats on sex crime convictions per capita by immigrant origin in various European countries.
The income numbers are already there and if I want to check it's easy: my employer gives me a form with the same numbers in the same numbered boxes. I just need to specify how much income I had from bank interest.
The tax witholding system usually works as well - the main exception being straight after starting work for the first time or changing jobs, when you can have a temporary code. In these cases I just called HMRC and told them what was going on. The employer gives my pay numbers to HMRC and HMRC give my employer a tax code that determines how much to withhold each month.
Although at police level, it came out yesterday that multiple officers in Rotherham were under investigation for sexually exploiting the victims themselves. Which would sound a much more likely reason why victims were ignored until they became part of wider investigations than some high-level conspiracy to empower taxi drivers to rape. I'm quite comfortable in being able to declare this is a major scandal without having to wait for the ethnicity of the police officers to be identified to decide whether it was an isolated incident or the fault of the entire community.
Only one of us is implying that some gang rape perpetrators and groomers are less of a big deal than others; it isn't me. Whether that is your intention or not, it certainly isn't helping victims get the support they needed or crimes get solved.
> It's hard to connect immigration to crimes by committed by ethnic immigrant gangs? Dear lord.
I mean, yeah, it's super hard to connect immigration routes that British Pakistanis and their ancestors didn't use at any point to crimes some of them committed.
> Look up the stats on sex crime convictions per capita by immigrant origin in various European countries.
We've got stats for sex crimes per capita for the actual UK, for convictions and for reports and for those targeting minors specifically. They certainly don't support your argument that white Britons' sex crimes against kids are "isolated incidents". Statistically, they're actually slightly overrepresented on a per capita basis, and that's after decades of large investigations into specific crimes committed in specific communities.
But it’s not obvious that the standard of living associated with being better off would ever have been near the 90th, let alone 90th percentile of salaries?
Not convinced that sending children to private school would ever have been seen as a ‘lower middle class’ expectation.
But I’m also not convinced that the markers you describe are not available to someone at the 75th percentile of income, say, let alone to people at the 95th percentile. Now the luxuriousness of those markers may not be at the level marketed in glossy brochures etc but isn’t that an issue with unrealistic expectations?