This is the most accurate description of what is going to happen in the local elections. Councils will be stuffed with these racist morons who couldn’t run a bath. The poor running of current Councils they govern wasn’t enough so thickos want them to run more. They won’t have a clue, services will be decimated and they will blame someone else but it will all good for optics. What an absolute shite state of affairs.
Westminster Politics 2024-2029
- Thread starter Pexbo
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Is the Benzos after we’ve had the coke and hookers? Because that all seems perfectly logical to me
This is what the Elite think of the working class yet gormless morons keep voting for them.
Got to be one of the best community notes ever. 
In terms of damage limitation it might be a win if Reform show themselves as unfit at the council level. If it's mass incompetence then it will filter through to their national image.
But they have already shown mass incompetence in the Councils they have ran. This will just be the same on an industrial scale. Maybe that is what it takes for people to get the message.
Theres a lot more that goes into the tax gap than just corporations and businesses. By your own source corporations account for £5.5b, less than benefit fraud. Criminal activity even less so.
What im suggesting that maybe not all of those people would be homeless and starving if the benefits stopped. Welfare needs to be a last resort and safety net, because whether you agree with that sentiment or not there isnt the money to keep the current level of handouts up.
There is a sizeable tax gap because of the cash economy, HMRC using 1980s technology, different government departments not working together/sharing information, the cost of pursuing compliance and some inefficiencies with how HMRC is run.
I briefly worked in HMRC many years ago and have a few friends who work there. From what I know, I suspect the published estimated tax gap figure is way, way less than the real amount. It also doesn't include tax lost to "legal" loopholes.
I hate to say it but the only plausible long term solution is a cashless, fully digital monetary system which the state has full access to and oversight of. Which obviously comes with it's own risks...
I briefly worked in HMRC many years ago and have a few friends who work there. From what I know, I suspect the published estimated tax gap figure is way, way less than the real amount. It also doesn't include tax lost to "legal" loopholes.
I hate to say it but the only plausible long term solution is a cashless, fully digital monetary system which the state has full access to and oversight of. Which obviously comes with it's own risks...
Corporations also only get taxed on profits and at 19% or something daft, whereas I have an effective tax rate of 30-odd% and I don't get to write off all my losses and expenses first. Perhaps your £5.5bn could become a lot more if businesses were being taxed properly on profits (perhaps even with a progressive rate like you or I would be!).
Don't get me wrong, all the "fixed taxes" on business are also too high, with the increased NI contributions of Reeves a particular highlight of folly, but if you genuinely believe that massive companies are paying their fair share and couldn't support a much higher tax burden then I've a bridge to sell you.
Cash tends to help individuals and smaller businesses though over bigger ones. Closing that gap wouldn't actually help the economy most likely, it would just make some twerp's spreadsheet go green which is of course what we all live for.
Where in the source does it say that? In the "tax gap:detailed breakdown" section it estimates with medium confidence that the corporation tax gap is 18.6bn
Sorry I dont understand what you mean.
No, the money is definitely there. There's more money now than ever before. It's just concentrated in the hands of very few people because we've decided that the best form of society is one where a handful of people live like gods with access to more resources than they could possibly use in their lifetimes.
I don't mean this as a personal attack but I'm genuinely curious. With the state of the world as it currently is why do you spend your time on the internet arguing that people who already have very little should have even less?
I mean the official tax system is set up to take money from employees and small businesses because that's easier than going after extremely wealthy people or big corporations. Cash is a way for those sole traders and poorer folks to occasionally avoid a bit of tax and thereby make themselves less impoverished and consequently have more money to spend in the economy, which is actually good for rich folks, government tax take, and big businesses too.
Getting rid of cash and squeezing every last penny put of ordinary people and small business may be the wet dream of Rachel Reeves and rich tax dodgers but it would be even more terrible for the economy as a whole than not doing it most likely. They should be working on the "hard" things that go against individual corporate interests for the sake of improving the system as a whole, and consequently counterintuitively for those same corporate interests themselves.
Farage has done more than any politician in my lifetime to highlight racism to be fair to him.
For most working people tax is taken from their pay every month, they shouldn't have to pay more to balance the government's books whilst small businesses take cash in hand to pay less than their fair share. I get that there is incentive to, and it might feel justified for them, but it's not the right solution. The ones who lose out are not the corporations or wealthiest people, it's the employees on low and average wages who take the brunt. A fully digital, cashless society just levels the playing field.
I agree that the bigger problem is that ordinary people are feeling the squeeze. Whether a small business, sole trader or an employee. If the economy, living standards and tax system was fairer, there'd be less incentive for good people to try and evade tax.
It doesn't level the playing field, it just sits a bigger hippo on the end of the seesaw occupied by the rich and powerful. Realistically speaking rather than talking utopian scenarios.
Sorry, but no. You can't just dodge the topic with that ridiculous nonsense.
It levels the playing field for the hard-working, law abiding citizens - employees, and also many small businesses and sole traders - who pay their taxes in full, with Bob the Builder, Harriet the Hairdresser, and Karim the Kebab Shop Owner, who don't pay their taxes, think it's morally justified under the delusion that they are sticking it to big business opposed to stealing from their fellow citizens, so they can have an extra 7 days a year in Mallorca, or buy a second property to rent out to a wage slave.
Tax should not be optional, nor a moral choice for business owners to make based on their own conscience. Because, unfortunately, as you have demonstrated, a large % of the population can be selfish cnuts.
Thankfully, whether you like it not, a fully digital economy and cashless society is coming eventually.
The solution isn't for individuals to steal from the collective pot, it's for individuals to group together and push for a fairer economy.
You're delusional if you think that a tax system presided over by a government in the current global system will ever be fair. I'd even settle for fairer at this point because you hope but it never happens. I'm speaking as someone who is an employee and has been self employed. I used all the standard ways to reduce my tax bill when I was self employed (not dealing in cash at all) and I paid a lot less than I did as an employee, and tbh it felt like it was about the right amount of tax overall. On the other hand, as a percentage I paid a lot more out in tax than somebody like Google usually do. The whole system is unfair and enforcing it with an iron grip won't change that.
https://www.taxwatchuk.org/seven-large-tech-groups-estimated-to-have-dodged-2bn-in-uk-tax-in-2021/
^£6.5bn estimated benefit fraud Vs £2bn dodged on an already far too low tax bill by just 7 tech firms (5 years ago but I doubt it has changed all that much).
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Sounds like a nightmare. Dont see how it resolves tax evasion.
Do you mean be racist?
Because HMRC would have every transaction logged.
There may be small disputes about whether an expense is business or personal etc, but it would reduce 95% of evasion in an instance.
This wouldn't be the case though, people would start using alternative digital payments. If someone is willingly paying someone cash in hand to avoid tax, why would they not then start paying in some kind of privacy crypto, for example? It will just shift the onus into digital tax fraud.
OK, we're closer in opinion than your previous post would suggest.
Ultimately, I believe we will one day have a fair system. Probably not in my lifetime. But its in everyone's interests to do their bit to push society in that direction.
On a side note, theoretically I'd be all for tactical, collective non-compliance if it was done for a purpose/as a method of applying pressure to achieve a specific goal. If done collectively on a broad scale, similiar to a worker's strike, it would overwhelm HMRC and could be a very effective strategy. Im just not for individuals making up their own minds about how much they feel like paying. Im not talking about a few hundred quid a year, but when its 5, 10, 20k a year...especially when, as you say, there are legal tax breaks available. For the first time in my life I'm in the 40% tax bracket, but i now pay less tax as a % than ever before, as everything above 50k goes into a SIPP (a benefit that can only be enjoyed/maximised by people who have high incomes).
Yup. There's too many black markets that will need to find a way around it. Too many established alternative currencies for it to be much of an obstacle.
Buy a gift card, top up their account with a food delivery company. Buy supermarket saving stamps. Use euros or dollars, presumably you'll have currency conversion.
And the cost on the other side of the scale doesn't seem to have been considered at all
Agreed on the first point.
On the second, taking your example, if 100 people claim anxiety, and keys assume 70 genuinely do and 30 are not telling the truth, which is a much higher percentage than it's likely, I'd rather make sure that the 70 people who needed it were getting the support they need to be productive members of society. The alternative is, those 70 people would be getting targeted harshly for genuinely suffering with anxiety, if we just assume everyone claiming is likely exaggerating.
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Why are you ignoring the rest of the tax gap figures? Small businesses £28bn, Large businesses (corporates) £5–6bn, Individuals £8–9bn, Mid-sized businesses £4–5bn. Focusing only on corporates is selective.
The idea that cutting welfare wouldn’t materially harm people isn’t backed by evidence.
Government figures suggest welfare reduction would put 250k more into poverty.
https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk...fare-cuts-push-250000-into-poverty-2025-03-26
4.5M British children are already living in poverty.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/mar/27/children-poverty-government-benefit-welfare-cuts-uk
Nearly 400,000 people are homeless right now in the UK. Each homeless person costs circa £15k per year to the state due to services NHS etc.
https://england.shelter.org.uk/medi..._382000_people_are_homeless_in_england_today_
Healthy life expectancy is going down in the UK already, it is the poorest in society who are suffering the most.
https://www.health.org.uk/reports-a...xpectancy-trends-in-the-uk-a-watershed-moment
To brand it as handouts is the wrong approach. They’re there to prevent poverty and support people into work. Cutting them tends to increase homelessness and costs elsewhere anyway. Also, about half of benefit spending is pensions, not working-age claimants.
I think it's much more complex though with mental health, just to use your figure as a random starting point - let's say 30 people are simply lying, they are fine and deliberately gaming the system. Of the 70 left we will have a colossal range within that number of people with genuinely crippling anxiety all the way up to people who could work but have very mild or even temporary issues. The problem is the amount of people who are borderline and might simply need to get off social media, do some exercise etc. is likely quite high, that's not to say they don't need some help, but I'm not sure the answer is simply giving them some money. I'm not sure there really is a solution in honesty, even if you paid the world's best psychiatrists to assess every single person there would be no guarantee they would be 100% right, but certainly making benefits less financially enticing would cut some of the chancers off; for example do not send them money, buy them a weekly session with a therapist.
Good to see we've got passed whether putting money into an ISA is tax avoidance
Our poorly designed welfare system does very little to get people back into work, so yes they are handouts. I also think pensions need curbing too. Remove the triple lock and the unfunded defined benefit schemes and we'd be in a much better place.
Its becoming a very simple calculation in this country. There isnt enough coming in to support whats going out.
These debates around unemployment and benefits etc always go after the wrong causes and the wrong people. Too much is still discussed like it's the mid 2000s and "benefits street" type chat.
You'd get thousands of parents back into full-time work almost immediately If you funded nurseries and/or decent childcare.
You'd get thousands of disabled people back into work if hybrid working for office jobs was made a legal requirement. Again, I've mentioned on here before about a disabled person I know who worked remotely for years because she struggled to travel. She's now on benefits because of a ludicrous return to full time office hours in her industry and she's finding it impossible to find work.
Actually fund proper mental health training so people who are suffering get the help they need but also meaning that the small % of people who take the piss can actually be found out.
This is the big one. Force big organisations into paying their staff a living wage. If you're working 40 hours a week at Tesco, you shouldn't be relying on universal credit to live.
Ultimately, stop allowing right wing oddballs (who have no experience of what this is actually like) dictate policy discussion. Like I've said before, them being critical of things like breakfast clubs which, as much as anything else allow parents to work earlier in the day.
You'd get thousands of parents back into full-time work almost immediately If you funded nurseries and/or decent childcare.
You'd get thousands of disabled people back into work if hybrid working for office jobs was made a legal requirement. Again, I've mentioned on here before about a disabled person I know who worked remotely for years because she struggled to travel. She's now on benefits because of a ludicrous return to full time office hours in her industry and she's finding it impossible to find work.
Actually fund proper mental health training so people who are suffering get the help they need but also meaning that the small % of people who take the piss can actually be found out.
This is the big one. Force big organisations into paying their staff a living wage. If you're working 40 hours a week at Tesco, you shouldn't be relying on universal credit to live.
Ultimately, stop allowing right wing oddballs (who have no experience of what this is actually like) dictate policy discussion. Like I've said before, them being critical of things like breakfast clubs which, as much as anything else allow parents to work earlier in the day.
Fixing what's coming in might be a better solution then.
We shouldnt have voted in an anti business, high tax government then.
Healthy life expectancy
Decline has been since the austerity. Recent decline can be down to covid and lack of a bounce back other countries have had. Germany, a model country for many has followed a similar trajectory to UK. France is an interesting case, similar size to the UK with one major city in Paris like London but has bounced back well in the 2010s and recently with covid.
We've been anti productivity and it shows.
Decline has been since the austerity. Recent decline can be down to covid and lack of a bounce back other countries have had. Germany, a model country for many has followed a similar trajectory to UK. France is an interesting case, similar size to the UK with one major city in Paris like London but has bounced back well in the 2010s and recently with covid.
We've been anti productivity and it shows.
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Or indeed the previous anti-business series of governments masquerading as pro-business governments. But here we are, we should try and tax corporate profits and the very wealthy so we can unfeck the last few decades of feckery.
That just shows a country's rank though, not life expectancy. France has more than double the smoking rate of the UK.Healthy life expectancy
Decline has been since the austerity. Recent decline can be down to covid and lack of a bounce back other countries have had. Germany, a model country for many has followed a similar trajectory to UK. France is an interesting case, similar size to the UK with one major city in Paris like London but has bounced back well in the 2010s and recently with covid.
We've been anti productivity and it shows.
I don’t get why this is being pushed as ‘new’ news, more so why some in the media don’t look beyond the headlines. Whitbread came out with statements in 2024 that it was planning to close all those restaurants as part of its five year plan then. They’re simply accelerating the plan to close them and expand on Premier Inn’s.