Coffee Space

Taxes

A statement most can agree with: Taxation if theft. The statement is essentially “we can spend your money better than you can”. One can argue that it is a necessary evil for operating a cohesive society capable of protecting its common interests, domestically and abroad.

That said, it should be as minimal as possible. The state can we extremely wasteful, and in the UK we saw a failed NHS upgrade project cost £10 billion, with nothing to show for it. These kinds of failures happen extremely regularly. Worse still, many projects are simply extremely mismanaged, with public infrastructure upgrade/maintenance often running over time and budget.

During the election campaign, Labour was unable to explain where it would be raising money through taxes to pay for their wonderful plans. They had access to all of the numbers, and yet completely failed to explain how they would tackle issues.

Labour have shouted that they discovered £22 billion in unfunded spending, yet the numbers were always available to them. This is on top of their pledges to spend more in social schemes, despite the UK being financially crippled.

How do Labour plan to meet their tax gap?

They plan to increase capital gains tax, which has been critical in offsetting high risk investment. If you were to fund 10 start-ups for example, you may expect 90% failure. That 10% success accounts for the failure, and adds enough profit to allow for future investment. Labour want to reduce these margins, where high risk investments become less favourable.

They plan to cripple pensioners, typically well looked after by the Conservatives, by limiting winter fuel payments - a large cost since the Ukraine-Russia war. They will likely break the so-called triple-lock, but this has been broken for quite a while with inflation and cost-of-living issues anyway. Due to COVID, quite a few people started their retirement earlier and there is quite a gap to fill, not including the massive reduction in economic output during this time.

They plan to ban zero-hour contracts, which have been quite a valuable tool. Likely part of the motivation will be to reduce unemployment figures - but this will likely backfire. I understand that lawyers are working on this problem as I type, as this affects a significant number of industries. They will likely be looking to find a gap in part-time contracts.

They plan to close tax avoidance loop-holes, which on the surface looks good - but this is likely just a shifting of who they are available to. Both parties for example were scrambling for support from property developers, and Labour has promised to build 1.5 million homes in 5 years - an insane target that cannot be reached. They have also ensured they won’t be built in their favourite areas such as London.

They plan to tax private schools more heavily, which will likely heavily burden state schools which are under extreme pressure, like all public infrastructure/resources. I will discuss this later. Apparently one work-around for now will be to offset infrastructure development of private schools against tax, but this will be closed up and they can’t do this forever.

Thy plan to increase inheritance tax, which was one of the last ways that the middle-class could allow their children to get onto the property ladder. Your wealth is taxed multiple times as you earn it, and again when you die. The clever people, typically upper-class, will ensure that large assets are “off their estate” a reasonable amount of time before dying, such that the tax-man cannot get at it. Increasing inheritance tax will be a raid on the middle-class.

They plan to increase council tax, which is already an insane position given large service cuts, due to local government debt. We will likely see several more councils go bankrupt within the next few years. I know that my local government is a ticking time-bomb, with reduced spending an increased debt. It is soon becoming the situation where they will start reducing staff members, and at some point they will struggle to justify a council tax at all.

Immigration

The Labour government will allow 100,000+ immigrants that illegally entered into the UK to claim for asylum, and it will be granted. They intend to scatter these people across the Country, with local council tax being increased to pay for it. The government will force councils to provide homes for these people, when there are already very long waiting lists, 2,000+ long in my area. Labour are accused of putting illegal migrants ahead of British citizens, which fundamentally true.

I have many issues with this:

1. Illegal entry into the UK should never be rewarded. Illegal anything should never be rewarded. I agree with UK MP Nigel Farage in saying that illegal immigration will never be a route to asylum. These people have crossed several safe Countries (even France), to try their luck elsewhere. They have bypassed the legal asylum process, as they know they are unlikely to be successful, as they are not actually fleeing anything. Desperate people are not picky when they are fearful for their lives. Recently a family member was rushing to the scene of an accident in their vehicle and broke the law doing so. Despite the reason given, the police still punished the crime. In very few cases will passion be an acceptable reason for committing a crime. And yet. Here we are, discussing this on a scale I never saw possible.
2. Many, many, of these people are interested in what the UK can offer them, not what they can offer the UK. If they were skilled workers they would have utilized the legal route. Instead they paid tens of thousands of pounds to trafficking gangs and purposefully destroy their identifying documents to prevent deportation. The French Navy escort them into British waters despite us paying them to prevent this, and they phone Border Force and the RNLI to pick them up. I think we should use the ECHR against France and escort every single person back into French waters, where they will be obligated to pick them up.
3. There are now many “no-go” places in the UK, which is incorrectly reported by armchair journalists as a myth. Almost all of them are run by Muslims, and the police refuse to confront them when crimes are committed. The police are afraid because of the threat of violence from Muslims, the pressure from government to reduce arrests of Muslims, and a general left-wing pro-Palestine pressure (where they fail to realise that not every Muslim group likes each other). We literally saw in recent Muslim riots (in counter-protest to the so-called ‘far-right riots’) that police refused to attend, even saying that they would allow these communities to police themselves. I never thought I would hear the police tell violent Muslims to “put your weapons back in the Mosque”. The social cohesion of the UK has never been worse, and the government have no interest in fixing it. They will defend the rights of the foreign invaders over the tax paying indigenous British.
4. Integration of a large number of unskilled, low-education, barely English speaking people will lead to a slave class. These people will be taken advantage of, and a large percentage will end up involved with organised crime. I for one do not want to have any form of slavery in the UK.
5. In the UK we have lots of hidden prisons that do not appear on maps and cannot be photographed (you will be arrested). These are placed in remote areas, and I’m unsure of the legalities of discussing them. Some of the 100,000+ illegal immigrants turn out to have bad intentions - who would have thought. This would cause extreme public concern, so they hide these people away. Their crimes are long and vast, and represent a direct and significant danger to the public. These people represent a significant problem - they have no name, no origin, and they are intent on causing harm. It is unclear how they even hold a trial for an unnamed person, or what processes they undergo.

I suspect that given the recent riots, and how they suddenly stopped without any form of serious address, we will likely see more civil disobedience. The root issues are still there. The current prime minister, Keir Starmer, did nothing to address what are extremely valid concerns about public safety.

Finally

This is by no means extensive, but is so far playing out as predicted. I think we should be keeping a close eye on the Prime Minister Keir Starmer, as there are some very dictator-esque attributes to the man.

The next 5 years will be nothing, if but interesting. Hopefully my concerns are completely unfounded.