Couldn't give the slightest brick about the Trans issue personally. But yeah he needs to win over all the people so maybe he has to pretend to care. I don't get why it's so major in people's minds.
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Politics, politics, politics (so long and thanks for all the fish)
- Thread starter SpurMeUp
- Start date
Couldn't give the slightest brick about the Trans issue personally. But yeah he needs to win over all the people so maybe he has to pretend to care. I don't get why it's so major in people's minds.
Robspur12
Johnny Morrison
So here we are. The danger of the internet laid bare in one post. Basically someone can just post any allegation on the internet whether verified or not and/or with no context attached. And if it is said enough times, even if untrue, the echo chamber starts to believe it and amplify the message. Sadly it is easier for people to take these statements as truths rather than to actually seek out the truth for themselves. No wonder the country is so polarised. There are some serious issues that the country faces and Starmer definitely got things wrong but tbh when it’s this easy to spread untruths no one can ever succeed as PM.
Baleforce
Joe Kinnear
unlike you to bring that to the conversation, you are obsessed
and the irony
99.9% of the people in this country have never been affected by immigration or transexuals
yet they are all some can ever think of...
Jurgen the German
George Hunt
Fairness and safety should be an issue for most people I would like to think.
Baleforce
Joe Kinnear
uninformed ignorant bigotry
If he can get some decent growth then it's amazing how much else will be forgiven/ignored. Its really the key to everything, when its not there people start looking round for things to moan at.
Its similar when teams are on a losing streak and suddenly that player who was benched a few months ago doesn't seem so bad after all, then momentum picks up and everyone starts whining about a worldie being benched and the cycle starts again.
Jurgen the German
George Hunt
I'm a lover of sport. Fairness and genuine competition matter to me. They're not the only things I care about, but I'm not going to apologise for holding a different view from you or anyone else.
As for the claim that 99.9% of people haven't been affected by immigration: are you sure about that? Acknowledging that immigration can create challenges isn't the same as demonising immigrants. Those are two very different positions.
Once again, you've jumped straight to the most extreme interpretation of what was said. At this point, a small part of me is starting to wonder whether you're actually a bot programmed to turn every discussion into a Guardian comments section.
Baleforce
Joe Kinnear
nah
you are a fudging bigot
I used to like you, many many years ago, but, you are a clam, blocked
Bedfordspurs
Bert Smith
I see Tony Blair vibes with him
Jurgen the German
George Hunt
Sadly, your response feels fairly typical of the ultra-politically-correct approach to debate: rather than engaging with the argument itself, the instinct seems to be to dismiss the person making it.
Not everyone who disagrees with you is a bigot, just as not everyone who agrees with you is enlightened. Sometimes people simply arrive at different conclusions.
The irony is that genuine debate requires a willingness to hear views you don't like. If the response to disagreement is to label, shame, or shout people down, it's less "marketplace of ideas" and more "Mean Girls with a postgraduate degree."
Your examples mostly show that a wealth tax would need sensible rules, not that it is unworkable. Every tax has edge cases: income tax, capital gains tax, inheritance tax and corporation tax all have valuation, liquidity and enforcement issues. The existence of complexity is not the same as the policy being impossible.Plenty of people criticise the IMF and other institutions for all kinds of reasons, you don't have to do much research to find comments about it.
I mean if you own a business worth £15m then you would pay £300K per year, what happens if you don't make a profit or don't have £300K in liquid money to pay it. Do they sell part of the business? Insurance companies don't value companies all the time, they provide liability cover etc based on some company information but they don't value all of them (I'm sure they do value some). Are the government going to pay for every company to be valued and then administer the whole system? What about all other assets, do the government pay for them all to be valued, how often are they revalued and who manages all of that?
Why listen to me - you can read it for yourself here including this quote from your friends at the IMF?
UK wealth tax: high risk and anti-growth
Claims of £24bn from a UK wealth tax ignore delays, capital flight (£200–£500bn) risks to growth and employment. Data, country evidence & better reforms.taxpolicy.org.uk
If someone owns a £15m business, the obvious answer is not ‘the business must be sold.’ A well-designed wealth tax could allow deferral, installments, or special treatment for genuine trading businesses, especially where the owner is asset-rich but cash-poor. That is a design choice, not a fatal flaw.
The valuation point is overstated too. Businesses, property and other assets are valued all the time for lending, insurance, probate, accounts, transactions and tax. The state would not need a perfect valuation of every asset every day; it would need a workable system, just like every other tax does.
As for who administers it, the answer is: the tax authority, as it does with other taxes. It would use thresholds, declarations, audits, reporting rules and anti-avoidance measures. You don’t reject a tax because it needs administration — administration is part of how taxes work.
And on the IMF quote, that does not mean ‘wealth tax can never work.’ It means the IMF generally prefers better capital gains and inheritance tax design over a broad wealth tax. That is an argument about what they think is the better policy mix, not proof that a wealth tax is impossible.
So the real issue is not whether a wealth tax can be perfectly neat — it can’t. The real issue is whether the benefits of taxing extreme wealth outweigh the practical costs. Saying ‘it’s complicated’ is not the same as proving ‘it can’t be done.’