Reply to: 1001 reasons NEVER to vote Labour

[The Lone Gunman]

Jowel is on her way out. I have seen her on the TV and she has the full support of Tony Blair, as did Blindgit, Mandy etc etc.. Kiss of death.


I just wonder how many times foney Tony can nail his colours to the mast and then not do the decent thing when his judgement is once again shown to be dubious.

[mcquiggd]

Its been increased to 1002... we even have Italians paying off nu labour - to get themselves off corruption charges while serving as elected officials of a foreign country ....

Cant get more messed up than that.... makes Lakshmi Mittal and the Hindujas look like amateurs....

Wonder why Al Fayed didnt get his passport... perhaps he doesnt understand the Scottish concept of private bids and 'offers over'... ?

[DimPrawn]

Back from the dead.

Now where were we.....?

[zathras]

Here's a few more

thebusinessonline

IT’S official: Great Britain is no longer a low-tax economy. For the first time in recent history, Germans will pay less tax than the British this year, signalling the end of an era and Britain’s 15-year dalliance with economic liberalism. It is a hugely significant milestone in Britain’s renewed economic decline but one which predictably has gone completely unnoticed by Westminster and the economically-illiterate media that covers it.

One of the longstanding concerns of this newspaper is that the once healthy gap between euro zone tax-and-spending rates and those of Britain is being slowly and stealthily eroded, thanks to Chancellor Gordon Brown and a belated recognition from euro zone economies that they had to slim their bloated states to survive in the global economy. Now our worst fears have come to pass.

There is always a lag between policy changes and results so it will be a few years yet before the true cost of Mr Brown’s reckless and retrograde policies are fully felt by a still largely unsuspecting British public; but continental-style growth and unemployment rates will be the most painful change and the current economic slowdown provides a taste of things to come.

For those who still think Britain a relative tax haven and Germany a paragon of socialism, the figures are shocking, painting an economic map which most will not recognise and the government has successfully hidden. As we report on page 1 today, the share of tax and non-tax government receipts in Germany has eased significantly from 46.7% of gross domestic product (GDP) in 1999 to an expected 42.1% in 2006, according to internationally comparable and reliable figures from the independent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). In the UK, the share of tax and non-tax government receipts in GDP has risen from 40.7% to a forecast 42.4%. From a gap of six percentage points in the British taxpayer’s favour just six years ago, the advantage has now swung dramatically to Germany, albeit by just 0.3 points of GDP. Mr Brown’s highly-suspect Treasury figures paint a rather different picture; but unlike those produced by the OECD they are not internationally comparable.

A similar trend is true of public spending, as the OECD figures also reveal. German general government outlays have fallen from 49.3% of GDP in 1996 to 46.8% in 2005; and between 2000 and 2005 the UK share jumped from 37.5% to 45%. For 2006, the OECD expects the German share to fall to 45.7%, within striking distance of the UK’s 45.4% share. In 2007, the OECD even sees German government expenditure (45% of GDP) moving below that of the UK (45.7%), an equally significant milestone. Thus is the Europeanisation of the British economy is almost complete.

The British people may reject the euro, the European constitution and the harmonisation of income tax but the eurosceptics have lost the real battle. When it comes to tax and spending, Germany and Britain are now the new Tweedledum and Tweedledee of the global economy. The German labour and product markets remain more rigid than Britain’s, but even here Britain’s lead has been significantly reduced, partly because the British government has wrapped business in so much of its own red tape since 1997 and partly because most laws with an impact on business now come from Brussels and are the same across the European Union (EU). It was always, of course, a fallacy to argue that Britain’s status as a freer and more successful economy than Germany was somehow part of the natural order of things, an inevitable consequence of Britain’s “Anglo-Saxon” heritage. The reality is that at the height of Germany’s wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) in the 1950s and 1960s, Germany was a far more liberal economy than Britain. The foundations for Germany’s success were laid down by Ludwig Erhard (who later became Chancellor) in 1948 when he pushed through one of the most radical and fastest liberalisation programmes ever to be introduced in a non-communist economy. Even though there are no Erhards in Germany today – unfortunately for Germany’s legions of unemployed workers – Britain has no God-given right to a lower-tax economy than Germany.

Britain and Germany’s convergence towards social-democratic centrism goes a long way to explaining the collapse in British competitiveness, productivity growth and private-sector job creation of recent years. It also helps to explain why the German economy, while still in a terrible state, is gradually improving. Last year’s 1.7% British growth rate was about 0.8 points below the consensus forecast of a year ago, the biggest shortfall since 1992; Britain did worse, relative to expectations, than all other major countries or regions, an analysis from Citigroup shows. The number of people claiming unemployment benefit has now risen for 10 months in a row, the worst run since 1992. Despite slowing pay gains, inflation overshot expectations and was higher than GDP growth for the first time since 1992. Business investment as a percentage of GDP in 2005 was the lowest for 40 years.

The British economy has grown by 24% since 1997, against 17.5% for the euro zone; but in two of the past three quarters, the euro zone has grown faster than Britain; so has Germany. Compared to the other English-speaking countries, British growth has been even more dismal. The New Zealand economy is up by around 30%, Canada has grown by 31%, Australia by 32% and Ireland by 70%. It is not an accident that, since 1997, each one of these countries has cut its tax burden.

One of the most striking results of the huge increase in tax-and-spend has been the public sector recruitment binge of the past few years, which was further highlighted by new figures last week from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Those regions with the largest percentage growth in public employment experienced the lowest percentage growth in private employment – and vice versa – demonstrating that state jobs are crowding out private jobs.

Between 2000 and 2005, public sector employment rose by 556,000, an increase of 10.5%, according to the official statistics from the ONS, which drastically under-estimate the actual importance of the public sector by excluding consultants, GPs and employees of Network Rail. Over the same period, private sector employment rose by 625,000, an increase of only 2.8%. In reality, a significant minority of these new, supposedly private sector jobs, also depend on government spending for their survival.

Most worrying of all ,London – Britain’s economic powerhouse – saw private sector jobs increasing only slightly every quarter, up by just 20,000 since the first quarter of 2002, a very weak performance, against a rise of 31,000 in the public sector. Given that London is home to most of Britain’s high value-added financial services, this bodes ill for Britain’s future prosperity. Private-sector jobs are even in decline in some regions. In the West Midlands, they declined by 5,500 in the most recent quarter; in the East of England, they have fallen for three quarters in a row. Even in the South West, they fell by 2,000 in the most recent quarter.

In fact, private sector job creation would have been even weaker (especially in London) had net inward migration to the UK not surged. It hit a record high in 2004 of 223,000 people (0.37% of the UK population). The net inflow in 2005 was almost certainly even higher, led mostly by large numbers of workers from Eastern Europe taking jobs that the British will not do. In their absence, many vacancies would have remained unfilled and the job figures would have looked even grimmer.

[Sergeant Apone]

IPT was actually introduced by the Tories and, yes, it was just a blatant attempt to raise tax revenues with no real justification.

[Jabberwocky]

The constant whining, especially around the north and midlands.

[Mordac]

>Socialists, please explain the reasoning why insurance should be taxed other than as an easy stealth tax on responsible people?

Wasn't it (IPT) introduced to close a loophole (insurance permiums weren't subject to VAT or something like that) which meant a lot of nasty people weren't paying their fair share* ?

*defined as "as much as we can get out of you"

[DodgyAgent]

AtW

Big one this:

Giving AtW a permit to live here

[hyperD]

Have I missed ANY MORE TAXES that all pay for same things?

Land tax.
Proposed "roof" tax by Prescott.
.
.
.

Came across this from UK Parliament Official Website...

Mr. George Osborne: To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer how much the Department spent on lawyers in each year since 1997, broken down by (a) number of actions, (b) number of settlements, (c) number of court cases and (d) the costs of each settlement. [206449]

Mr. Timms: HM Treasury paid the following sums to the Treasury Solicitor (in the case of 2003–04 to the Treasury Solicitor and, in relation to one case, a private sector firm) for work billed by litigation teams for the years in question:

1997–98 £116,527.96
1998–99 £87,489.15
1999–00 £82,305.13
2000–01 £36,142.09
2001–02 £89,137.45
2002–03 £636,091.44
2003–04 £720,018.58

Anyone notice something wrong with this?

[DimPrawn]

I thought that's what NI (tax) is for?

Oh no, I'm thinking of income tax.

No wait, it's inheritance tax, no stamp duty, no hang on maybe it's paid by fuel duty, or is duty on drink, no it's VAT I'm sure now, no corporation tax pays for all that, no, I'm getting confused it's airport tax, no it's road tax, or maybe landfill tax, or come to think of it council tax, no it's the tax on cigarettes, or maybe tax on pensions or windfall taxes on oil and gas, no that's what the 3G license taxes were for......

Have I missed ANY MORE TAXES that all pay for same things?

[BoredBloke]

Or could it be an indication how desperate for cash the government are that they tax something which everybody who drives has to have by law.

Out of interest, do you know how much each trust spent on hospital beds last year?

[mcquiggd]

Nope, its to pay for recruiting more consultants for the department tasked with reducing headcount in the Civil Service.

Doh!

[Jabberwocky]

It's to raise tax revenue to fund the hospitals, the schools, the emergency services. A very good cause and thanks for contributing.

[DimPrawn]

Just renewed my car insurance over the phone.

Now there is a central database containing the insurance details of every motorist which is accessable by government and police organisations.

And they have the cheek to add on 5% inurance tax to the policy.

What the **** is insurance tax supposed to achieve?

Discourage people from taking out too much insurance?

Socialists, please explain the reasoning why insurance should be taxed other than as an easy stealth tax on responsible people?

[Lucifer Box]

Now you know why from 1st January the police are now allowed to arrest anybody, anytime, even when no offence has been committed, as long as it is considered "necessary" - got to get that DNA database complete somehow.