Stormzy(Thats the only one I know)has more culture weight than love island contestants tbh. Although like you said didn't work at all for Corbyn.
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Keir Starmer Labour Leader
- Thread starter Damien
- Start date
Why would he come after the wealth of the majority?
He needs to use my branding and tax the "ultra wealthy". Then talk about oligarchs, oil money, foreigners who own property. As long as the electorate think rich foreigners are being taxed they'll be all for it.
In the small print he could tax 2-5% of any assets over £2 million not including the family home.
The majority if the electorate do not have levels of wealth which should be taxed. It is about having some conviction and ideas.
No, it's about being cleverer and putting ideas forward in a way that will gain support and votes. So everyone repeating 'wealth tax' won't gain votes, it will lose them, as too many will see it as the politics of envy and against aspiration. Call it 'unearned income' and you're starting to get there. Go a bit deeper and explain that those with assets should be taxed because they have gained disproportionally from years of quantitative easing, whilst others were paying the price of austerity through years of the banking crisis and covid, and that's even better. Needs a cleverer marketing brain than mine to put that well, but it should be possible.
@Buster15 made a point a while ago about how Thatcher was good at communicating, and promptly got drowned out by childish 'yah boo you're a Thatcherite' stuff, but his point was actually a good one, the left are seriously shit at understanding how most people think and how to get through to them, and until they at least acknowledge that and think about it we're fecked.
edit: although you're right about conviction and ideas too, I might have gone off on one!
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That sounds very difficult to administer though
Wouldnt that require all shares in businesses (including non listed companies), other financial investments (I guess bitcoin through to pensions) , art, land, commercial property etc etc to be valued to prove it is / isnt over a £2m limit...
That sounds practically impossible - even without the inevitable appeals against valuations and of course what happens if said asset is fairly illiquid asset and somebody does not have the cash to pay the tax?
would be a nightmare to administer and as I say i doubt there is enough people qualified to put these values in place just sitting round waiting for HMRC to get them to do it
CGT should be at the same level as income tax. Would solve many issues at a stroke.
It's not that hard. you can get a valuation for your property online in seconds, i'm sure it should be easy enough to build a similar service for land. shares and financial investsments could be assessed by their value on a single day of the year, (maybe go with the lowest valuation within the last tax year). Liquidity is a tougher one to crack. Maybe force people to liquify assets to pay their wealth tax? That would stop the hording of wealth in non liquid assets. I wonder what impact it'd have on the stock market though if everyone was always liquifiying a little bit of their shares to pay a wealth tax? Maybe they could be exempt and instead have a tax when stocks are traded?
We have stamp duty and capital gains tax already. A good starting point would be to equalise CGT and income tax, given the main beneficiaries of CGT being lower are wealthier folk with investments.
Raising the threshold to allow most to benefit and then setting a higher rate would be an easy sell you'd think.
In reality I'm sure the right would just once again claim the wealthy would remove their investments and feck off.
We can't tax the rich fairly because they don't like it so we have to tax you the general public who have no choice. It's amazing that argument works.
so we are outsourcing the application of potentially 100k+ tax to zoopla.... not gonna fly in court
assessing the value of non stock market listed assets on a particular day - yeah good luck
valuing art... yachts... honestly its not practical in any way
I think this is a fair analysis.
Johnson’s tax raid on workers should be a gift to Labour
If Keir Starmer fails to put forward a credible alternative, Labour risks letting a scandal-ridden government off the hook
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/10/johnson-tax-workers-labour-starmer-tories
I agree with his comments on tax and national insurance, although he fails to point out Labour has had plenty of time to prepare their response to Tory plans. They failed dismally on that.
I'm giving Starmer until the conference before I come out totally against him, not long now.
I've tried to be patient. Started out optimistic and supporting him.
But he has lied to get into the position of leader with his 10 broken pledges and can't be trusted I'm afraid. His primary goal is to purge the party, not oppose this despicable Tory government.
We outsourced prisons, track and trace, Olympic security, large aspects of healthcare...
Where there is a will there is a way. Govt could hire loads of surveyors.
So labours strategy of doing nothing is working?
I think you will find there is already a shortage... let alone the specialists required to value businesses, art and other assets ... plus the lawyers when people challenge valuations
Even if you wanted to hire a bunch of people and train them being realistic its probably not something that could be practically achieved in a government term
At least until the next poll.
BBC are saying Starmer's strategy to pay for social care is through taxing landlords.
Does Starmer not realise the poorest, along with young adults, the vulnerable, and students are most likely to be renters?
Quite simply the extra tax levy he's proposing will be added to the rent by the landlords. A similar happened when the legislation came out a few years back which stopped agents charging renters for their works. The estate agents charged the landlords for their services and those fees were simply collected through uplift in rent by the landlords.
Isn't Zoopla just extrapolating values from registered sales data from the land registry? You would assume government can easily do the same.
If polls are to be believed. Within the margin of error . No
The more expensive a house is the less comparable things there are... zoopla was 30% out when I sold my house last year for example...
And leta say I own a number of properties... but I own them through a Ltd company.... commercial mortgages, management fees expenses wages... none of the individual properties would be over 2m the property portfolio maybe... the value of the company (presuming a half competent accountant) less than 2m and something that will take weeks of audit to determine...
Valuing my company shares (non listed company)... watches.... rental properties (Ltd company)... the trusts I have set up... art...my investments abroad... honestly you are gonna be spending a lot to come up with a figure and if I don't agree with the value your gonna be spending a lot on lawyers
So yeah I genuinley don't think it's as straight forward as that... especially valuing non stock market listed companies... I mean we have brought companies out and that takes specialists a long time and a lot of money to determine valuations.
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Problem with Zoopla is that it's wildly inaccurate in areas with a low number of sales over the year. It's more accurate in places with high property sales but still not good enough for use in something like council tax banding.
Yes, Zoopla can often be widely off the mark, but I was responding to the idea that it would be difficult for the government to replicate what Zoopla does. It wouldn't; it is fairly straightforward use of the data the government already controls.
I am sure it would be a nightmare trying to uncover hidden wealth. But I think there could easily be agreed methodologies for agreeing values of property. The idea of a wealth tax is getting more and more currency in different countries, so I do think ways to make it workable will be found.
I don’t believe that is true at all. Rent has already been pushed as high as it can go by landlords squeezing profits. There’s just not the disposable income in the rental class to squeeze it any further.
More likely is that buy to let becomes less feasible for some and the housing market cools off.
The rental market got hit in London during Covid as people moved further out to have more space, so has slack to rise. Buy to let margins are already wafer thin after the stripping away of tax reliefs, so you can guarantee landlords will pass on as much of the tax hike as they can.
But it’s demand that dictates prices, not what Landlords want.
The rental market too a hit in London due to Brexit as much as Covid and that’s not going to be solved any time soon. Demand dropped and landlords were forced to drop prices in response, they didn’t just say “actually we need this much so that’s what the prices is going to be”.
As I said, it’s more likely to see a dip in the housing market as buy to let becomes unfeasible. Hopefully that gives new buyers a chance.
A shift from B2L to new buyers could only be a massive positive.
The rental market in the North is very strong.
Disappointed but not surprised.
Also whatever happened to the report of bullying of black MP's like Butler & Abbott? No doubt it's not a priority.
Forde is apparently meeting with Starmer and the rest of the NEC next week. Presumably where he'll be told the summary of what his report needs to find.
No doubt approved by various focus groups beforehand.
He really is a liar. Slippery snake. Exactly the type of politician that turn voters away from politics.
I see they shoehorned quite a lot into the proposal...
https://www.labourgnd.uk/conference-motion-2021
Plus the old corbyn line of universal free broadband for all
He really is a Tory.
Wow, socialists believing in cancelling international debt? This is truly unprecedented.
Yeah, but what about Starmer?
I've just read it. The sooner the people that proposed that are out of the Labour party the better. I hope the Greens are ready for them.
But is shoehorning it along with free broadband and new trade union laws really necessary in a green new deal or are they just playing politics trying to commit the party to these policies by pretending they need to be linked to environmental reforms
https://www.independent.co.uk/clima...erence-green-climate-change-b1921617.html?amp
I like how centrists took over a left wing party, and are now going "the sooner all these leftists get out of my party the better" when the leftists try to regain some control over it.
Yep. Soon they'll be able to vote for Tory A (in blue) or Tory B (in red).