Proceedings of the Castle Aching Parish Council, 1905

[Ian Simpson]

Taxation's just an economic tool; sometimes it needs to go up a bit, sometimes it can come down a bit.  I'm sure most of the leadership contenders know this, but it seems only Sunak is willing to hint at it in the debates.

How did we get to such a ridiculous position? I've always thought New Labour made a strategic mistake in the 1990s and 2000s when the Blair / Brown governments preferred to fund public services through stealth taxes and dodgy public accounting instead of making a strong political case for a high tax, high welfare regime. It might have been electoral cowardice by the Millbank policy wonks, it might have been intellectual dishonesty by the politicians, it might have been a pragmatic response to the household-economy rhetoric of the Thatcher years; it was probably all of them. Since then, the Labour Party has always preferred telling us that other people should pay for our improved services. No wonder the comfortably-off now have a baseline belief that they (we) somehow deserve tax cuts, and that paying our taxes is a burden rather than an investment.

So when the Conservative Party (who are basically the weirdly dysfunctional family across the road that holds noisy arguments between itself over batsh:t stuff no one else cares about) tells us that we need tax cuts, Labour can't offer a coherent counter-argument to the economic stupidity.

[Regularity]

2 hours ago, wagonman said:

Do you actually know what Momentum's agenda is? The 2017 Manifesto seemed pretty popular.

But it wasn’t, 2 years later.

We have already discussed those elections.

Their agenda? Yes, to make the Labour Party more socialist, rather than social democratic. The turn off to me is the phrase “class warfare”. I don’t accept the premise as I find it too simplistic and too polarising. I am more concerned personally about excessive inherited wealth (let your kids make their own way in life, maybe freeing them from worrying about a roof over their head); even more concerned about inherited privilege, but most concerned about inherited connections to networks of people, which largely go hidden from the public eye, but lead to massive inequalities in the balance of power. Frame reading what they say, and seeing how they behave, and a degree of historical precedent, Momentum seem to want to remove the power for the existing elite, and take it for themselves. I don’t care what their espoused motives may be, it’s still replacing one oligarchy with another, rather than diffusing power and control into people’s lives.
Let me be clear, I have no issue with Momentum, but like it’s predecessor Millitant Tendancy, I would find it more honest if it created its own party rather than being part of the Labour Party. I feel the same way about the “ERG” with the Conservatives. In both cases, party members tend to be more extreme than the general public, or at least more polarised, and it is the party members who select candidates for elections in safe seats. Until we get PR in some format (and my preferred option here is to replace the second chamber with one based on PR, and give it fewer but clearer powers) then that won’t change.

Quote

The position now is such that anyone daring to say anything as self-evidently sensible as "progressive income tax is fair, that you only get the social services you pay for, and that one single loophole-exploiting billionaire costs this country more than all of the 'benefit scroungers' put together?"  is likely to be dismissed as a rabid Leftie. I very much doubt you will hear anything like that from the Labour Party; Greens, perhaps. See below on Overton Window...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

Thank you for that: also for reassuring me about the sanity of the Green Party!

[Regularity]

1 hour ago, Ian Simpson said:

Taxation's just an economic tool; sometimes it needs to go up a bit, sometimes it can come down a bit.  I'm sure most of the leadership contenders know this, but it seems only Sunak is willing to hint at it in the debates.

How did we get to such a ridiculous position? I've always thought New Labour made a strategic mistake in the 1990s and 2000s when the Blair / Brown governments preferred to fund public services through stealth taxes and dodgy public accounting instead of making a strong political case for a high tax, high welfare regime. It might have been electoral cowardice by the Millbank policy wonks, it might have been intellectual dishonesty by the politicians, it might have been a pragmatic response to the household-economy rhetoric of the Thatcher years; it was probably all of them. Since then, the Labour Party has always preferred telling us that other people should pay for our improved services. No wonder the comfortably-off now have a baseline belief that they (we) somehow deserve tax cuts, and that paying our taxes is a burden rather than an investment.

So when the Conservative Party (who are basically the weirdly dysfunctional family across the road that holds noisy arguments between itself over batsh:t stuff no one else cares about) tells us that we need tax cuts, Labour can't offer a coherent counter-argument to the economic stupidity.

I disagree.

Partly.

Taxation is also a social tool: it effectively serves two purposes.

One is to pay for things like defence of the nation - which is how it came into being. That is purely an economic tool, necessary because people don’t fight wars: governments do.

The other is to redistribute wealth via public services, paid for by progressive taxation, so that those with more to spare pay a greater share, so that the basics of a civilised society such as education, health, support in old age, are available to a decent level for everyone without having to worry about paying for it. Those with very high incomes or inherited wealth can get these things directly and privately - and still do (public schools, private healthcare and personal pension funds). By putting more into the system, though, it helps all of us. Whilst the process is economic, the function is social.
And it also a practical thing: if you are a multimillionaire businessman who employs thousands of people, you need them to be educated, healthy and not working until they drop so that your workforce is productive. Paying more in taxes (and also I business rates) is a way of supporting this.

The same argument can be put forward for transportation, power distribution, and anything else which benefits the whole of society.

 

The debate should be about how much we want out of the commonwealth of our nation, how much we are prepared to pay for it, and most difficultly, how we are going to pay for it?

 

Maggie managed to make the populace equate total taxation with income tax. Labour (under Michael Foot*) failed to fight that lie, and produced the longest suicide note in electoral history. She also picked up on certain resentments about control and intrusion into people’s lives (such as not being able to do much by way of home improvements in a council house) and used this promote personal ownership (by selling off the council-owned houses). By opposing this, Labour lost a lot of its traditional heartlands, such as Romford. A lot of the population outside of the coal mining districts didn’t like what the miners did in the 70s, either, and supported the government in the fight with Scargill. (Labour, under Neil Kinnock, shot itself in the foot by not demanding a national ballot in the NUM - admits this.). She tapped into three rich veins, each of which was powerful on its own to a fair sized chunk of the electorate, and then the Falkland’s “conflict” turned public opinion towards her. Yes, she was fairly resolute in the battle, but she was the primary cause of it by insisting that HMS Endurance be withdrawn, despite warnings from the FCO that the Argentinian junta would misinterpret this. But with the press bias in the UK, where foreign ownership and control is allowed, it was and is a hostile environment for anyone with a more balanced view, and downright dangerous for those further on the left.

 

* I had the great privilege of seeing him in full flow in the late 80s. An impressive orator. A towering intellect. A great person. He exuded charisma from every pore.  Just not the most appealing choice as a possible Prime Minister as far as the electorate were concerned, especially when you put him on TV.

 

Which is the main problem: Margaret Thatcher was brilliant at simplifying complicated things into short sentences: lower income tax is good for you; home ownership is a decent aspiration; [some] unions have become too powerful; no one invades British Territory without a fierce response. But these are complicated things, and people don’t want complicated. And with everything increasing in price, no one wants to hear about increased taxation.

 

It ain’t easy: but it would be nice is someone who supposedly leads “The Opposition” was actually trying to make the argument rather than relying on, “I’m not Boris Johnson”.

[Nearholmer]

Personally, I think the only way to win the long game is to say those things, plainly and clearly, speaking with people as if they are intelligent human beings, which underneath the layers of cr@p doled-out by newspapers and the wider right, the vast majority of people are. But, that is one heck of a difficult thing to do, almost a case of p1ssing against the wind, because any public figure who has the temerity to try it is instantly vilified, so I don’t hold out much hope of it happening, a further challenge being that politicians who are simultaneously charismatic, honest, and courageous are rare beasts indeed.

[Ian Simpson]

30 minutes ago, Regularity said:

I disagree.

Partly.

Taxation is also a social tool: it effectively serves two purposes.

One is to pay for things like defence of the nation - which is how it came into being. That is purely an economic tool, necessary because people don’t fight wars: governments do.

The other is to redistribute wealth via public services, paid for by progressive taxation, so that those with more to spare pay a greater share, so that the basics of a civilised society such as education, health, support in old age, are available to a decent level for everyone without having to worry about paying for it.  ...

Thanks, Reg. I think we probably are in agreement on this, it's just the sloppy language I used makes me look obsessed with the economy.  I do think equality and fairness are economic issues as well as political ones, but they aren't completely separate spheres and in a mixed economy there's got to be a lot of overlap. The theoretical argument that free markets always maximise social benefits looks like smoke-and-mirror rubbish, so I don't have any problems with democratic governments using economic tools to achieve politically desirable outcomes like greater equality. 

In fact they should be doing this. As an aside, Marx thought the tendency of free markets to concentrate wealth in fewer and fewer hands made the eventual collapse of capitalism inevitable, so there's a left-wing social policy perspective that argues the State has no choice but to keep redistributing some of the dosh to the rest of us to keep the show on the road. So there's an economic argument for redistribution as well as an ethical one. Oh for the days when well-read Conservatives knew their Marx (and well-read socialists their Hayek)...

[Regularity]

I agree with all of that, Kevin.

[Regularity]

1 minute ago, Ian Simpson said:

Thanks, Reg. I think we probably are in agreement on this

I agree.

I tend to be rather dismissive about “economics”, joking that “micro/behavioural” economics is basic psychology (I tried reading “Freakonomics”. I am not a violent person, but I wanted to commit murder - nothing in there which isn’t covered by the first term of a psychology undergraduate degree, and then we move to acknowledge that things are more complicated than that) and “macro economics” is untestable, so not a science and not even a theory, just some people observing changes in societies and trying to work out what went on, but there is more to it than that.

Mark was not so much a theorist as a syncretic, taking other people’s ideas and merging them into a big picture - for which I have the greatest respect - and I am reminded of Dr. Johnson, “Your work is both original and good. Unfortunately, the parts which are good are not original, and the parts which are original and not good.” Although “almost unreadable” might be a better phrase than “not good”…

 

But, if people would rather have bread and circuses than think for themselves and their enlightened long-term self-interest, then we’ll, we get tend to get that.

[Compound2632]

6 hours ago, Regularity said:

But, if people would rather have bread and circuses than think for themselves and their enlightened long-term self-interest, then we’ll, we get tend to get that.

 

Well, the bread situation isn't so good right now though circuses are in plentiful supply.

[Edwardian]

In other news .... my computer tells me it is World Emoji Day.

 

Is there one that is sticking its finger down its throat to induce vomiting?

[Hroth]

1 hour ago, Edwardian said:

In other news .... my computer tells me it is World Emoji Day.

 

Is there one that is sticking its finger down its throat to induce vomiting?

 

I haven't spotted any, but there is the "Gritted Teeth" one...  😬

 

(You need to train your computer not to show you pointless factoids...)

[alastairq]

didn't like it,  emojimoved

Edited July 17, 2022 by alastairq

[alastairq]

[Regularity]

🤮

[wagonman]

22 hours ago, Regularity said:

 

I tend to be rather dismissive about “economics”, joking that “micro/behavioural” economics is basic psychology (I tried reading “Freakonomics”. I am not a violent person, but I wanted to commit murder - nothing in there which isn’t covered by the first term of a psychology undergraduate degree, and then we move to acknowledge that things are more complicated than that) and “macro economics” is untestable, so not a science and not even a theory, just some people observing changes in societies and trying to work out what went on, but there is more to it than that.

 

 

Someone once observed that if a thousand economists were laid end to end, they wouldn't reach ... a conclusion.

 

[wagonman]

22 hours ago, Regularity said:

But, if people would rather have bread and circuses than think for themselves and their enlightened long-term self-interest, then we’ll, we get tend to get that.

 

Bread and circuses – or more accurately Empire, Royalty, the Flag, and hatred of foreigners – has been the Tory ploy to keep the proles on-side since at least the time of the 3rd Reform Act. Alas, it seems it still works, though now it's Brexit, 'illegal' migrants, and 'benefit scroungers'.

 

 

[Regularity]

27 minutes ago, wagonman said:

now it's Brexit, 'illegal' migrants, and 'benefit scroungers'

You can put that into one sentence: “East European migrants exploiting free movement to come here and use our hospitals”. See, I said the Tory policy/press was a master at making something complicated truthful easy and false.

[Hroth]

As they used to say in the tabloid press, whenever the temperature exceeded 70F

 

PHEW! WHAT A SCORCHER!!!

 

Its definitely one of those days today....

 

 

Keep cool folks!

 

 

[Compound2632]

70° F! 21°C! Hot?

 

 

https://www.reading.ac.uk/planet/climate-resources/climate-stripes

 

Each stripe represents a year, starting in 1850; if I have understood correctly, the colour indicates the difference between the mean global temperature for that year and the mean global temperature for the whole 20th century, ranging from 2°C colder (darkest blue) to 2°C hotter (darkest red).

 

In other news, I see that having any of the candidates for the leadership of the Conservative party debating in public has been deemed to cause such reputational damage to the party that they've been obliged to stop.

[Hroth]

12 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

70° F! 21°C! Hot?

 

I did say "used to"! 

 

Perhaps not 70F, but certainly high 70s-low 80s, and when they did run such headlines, we didn't have almost universal access to the internet for more precise data, so newspaper readers would readily accept what the Scum (other tabloids are available) printed.

 

I didn't watch the ITV "debate" of our prospective leaders, but it sounds like hair-pulling wasn't far off.  Sky was sensible to withdraw for now. I expect they didn't want to mop blood from the studio floor...

 

This evenings vote result should be interesting!

 

 

Edited July 18, 2022 by Hroth
Fiddling about

[Compound2632]

3 minutes ago, Hroth said:

Sky was sensible to withdraw for now.

 

Let's be clear on this: Sky did not withdraw, the candidates did (or at least two of them). 

[alastairq]

11 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

Let's be clear on this: Sky did not withdraw, the candidates did (or at least two of them). 

 

Are we there yet?

Are we there yet?

Are we there yet?.......

[Regularity]

43 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

Let's be clear on this: Sky did not withdraw, the candidates did (or at least two of them). 

Does that mean these two candidates have self-disqualified themselves?

 

For the absence of doubt, I know that the answer to that question is no.

 

Boris showed his disdain for the public by lying to cover up his tracks, and for his colleagues by expecting them to do it for him. He was so shambolic at this, that he was bound to get caught out.

Sunak and Truss show their disdain for the democratic process by refusing to engage with it.

 

Disgusting.

[Hroth]

48 minutes ago, Regularity said:

Sunak and Truss show their disdain for the democratic process by refusing to engage with it.

 

The TV debates are not really part of the democratic process. The electorate have no say on who will be eliminated from the race today* and, unless they are members of the Conservative Party**, won't have a choice of the final two.

 

Given the reported posturing, I can see why Sunak might want to distance himself (statesmanlike, etc?). I can imagine that Truss might also want to absent herself if comments were getting too harsh.  It wouldn't be much of a debate with the other three, so I can see why it was cancelled.

 

As a member of the general public***, I don't get a say until there's a general election and quite frankly I'm finding it difficult to identify a party who will receive my vote when it occurs.

 

 

* At the moment, this whole circus is rather like a game of Musical Chairs. Quick! Stop the music!

 

** My mother once was a Member of the Conservative Party, but that was only because the local party organised terrific dances.  Imagine a situation today where a vote of the membership was swayed by the fancies of the social members. Back then the concerns of the grass root membership wasn't even considered...

 

*** My previous wording made it sound as if I were entitled to vote on the Boris Replacement come August. Sorry!

Edited July 18, 2022 by Hroth
Clarification

[Regularity]

18 minutes ago, Hroth said:

The TV debates are not really part of the democratic process. The electorate have no say on who will be eliminated from the race today* and, unless they are members of the Conservative Party**, won't have a choice of the final two.

True, but it’s still a disdain for their own process.

 

Sunak has too much sticking to him, and Truss can’t even trot out her (presumably?) rehearsed ad-libs without sounding like a robot. Neither of them have done well out of this. As a “thought experiment” it would interesting to see who the membership would vote for out of PM and TT: the former appeals to the party faithful (slowly dying off) and the latter represents the best chance they have of winning the next GE. The Wolf of Badenoch should, I think, go back to ranting in the sixth form common room.

[Dunsignalling]

1 hour ago, Regularity said:

Does that mean these two candidates have self-disqualified themselves?

 

For the absence of doubt, I know that the answer to that question is no.

 

Boris showed his disdain for the public by lying to cover up his tracks, and for his colleagues by expecting them to do it for him. He was so shambolic at this, that he was bound to get caught out.

Sunak and Truss show their disdain for the democratic process by refusing to engage with it.

 

Disgusting.

It's entirely pointless watching these debates unless one is entitled to vote in the so-called election.

 

The rest of us will find out the effects of whoever the blue-rinse mafia lumber us with all too soon.

 

The only up-side is that whoever it turns out to be will have to go some to be even half-as-shameless a shyster as Boris.

 

John

Edited July 18, 2022 by Dunsignalling