You are assuming they were all earning over £150k a year, the typical traders/brokers earn around £90k basic

 

Plus the ones that do earn over £150k a year know every trick in the book. My best mate works in the city and they are well known for paying people gifts of fine art, vintage wines, vintage cars etc as non taxable items offset against their salary so that their tax liability is reduced, they then sell the vintage car or the cellar of vintage wines for cash etc

 

So someone on £250k a year would get £130k basic and the rest in art, vintage car, vintage wine etc

So they wouldn't even be paying the 45% now?

 

You seem to think that this is an alternative to closing tax avoidance loopholes. It's not.

On the surface it would appeal to hard pressed families as a nice headline grabbing gimmick, if there was a poll for the abolition of unemployment benefits 60%+ would probably say yes, but like with scrapping unemployment benefits once you scratch beneath the surface and look at the consequences and after effects it suddenly loses its appeal

 

Scrap unemployment benefits crime would soar, the people who would love it to happen after seeing an episode of 'Benefits Street' would soon change their mind when their house is burgled or a knife is put at their throat outside a cashpoint

 

Similarly put top rate tax up to 50p many of the 60% who say yes will change their mind when their boss closes down the business that employs them and moves to a country with lower taxes leaving them with no job, or if they need heart surgery and the best heart surgeons have left the country

 

Raising the rate to 50p is an empty gesture that will bring in no extra money and instead would lead to a brain drain, look at France, will the last wealthy Frenchman to leave please turn out the lights

 

One minute, the claim is that all rich people will dodge the 50p tax using loopholes and they'll be able to carry on living here anyway, the next minute, you people are saying the 50p tax rate would lead to all rich people (supposed "wealth-creators") would flee the country. Make up your mind!

 

 

Plus the rate was 40% all the way through the last labour regime, until days before the 2010 general election, if it was good enough to be 40% then under Blair and Brown why is it not good enough to be 40% now?

 

Labour bought it in in 2010 because they knew that they were going to lose the general election so they set a trap for the tories to show that by cutting it they only care about millionaires etc, it was pure party politics and nothing more as opposed to any economic importance.

 

Labour are playing gesture politics again now by saying they will put it up to 50p, they are playing with peoples jobs just to try and prove a point that tories only care about the rich

 

Because the Labour government were too cowardly to do it. This is what I mean about the NewLabourites being the real happy-clappy fantasists, they live in a world where they seem to think it's possible for the rich to keep on acting like they do and gorging themselves, while the poor could somehow simultaneously get better off too. So much for "credibility"; atleast lefties admit that for the poor to get better off, someone's going to have to pay for it, namely the super-rich.

A rather delightful article from the (Tory) chief political commentator for the Daily Telegraph Peter Oborne backing the 50p rate *.*

Meanwhile, it seems a poll from ComRes has the first Conservative lead in 2 years.

 

Might be a rogue, but undeniably a VERY poor start to the year for Labour.

Before Craig starts screaming from the rooftops about how this proves him right - if it's coming out today, the fieldwork for that ComRes poll will have almost certainly been done before the 50p announcement, as telephone pollsters don't tend to work on Sundays and most people wouldn't have heard the announcement during the day on Saturday.

 

Obviously not great news, but ComRes tend to have the smallest Labour leads anyway. Best to wait and see if it's echoed in other polls over the next week - and to remember the basic rule of polling that notable poll results are almost always outliers.

 

EDIT: the YouGov poll out tonight has the Labour lead down to 2 (LAB 37 CON 35 UKIP 13 LD 9), which has Labour at the lower end of where they pick but also the highest Conservative vote in quite a long time, which implies it's more a resurgence in support for the Conservatives than Labour support depressing - unless that YouGov poll's crosstabs shows more DKs than normal.

ComRes is actually a 1% lead for Labour, but the 33% for Labour is it's lowest since mid-2010. But all the lost support has seemed to be white working-class voters to UKIP.

 

Meanwhile, 30% of those who say they currently won't vote Labour say they'd be more likely to if Ed Balls was sacked #newballsplease

The ComRes poll's out - it's not a Tory lead, it's a Labour lead of 1 (LAB 33, CON 32, UKIP 14, LD 9). That's totally unprecedented since Ed Miliband became leader - he's NEVER been below 35, for the basic reason that it would imply only a ~3 point gain from the Lib Dems - and I'm inclined to say it's a big rogue for that reason. I could accept the theory that the prebriefing about Balls committing to a surplus by 2020 might have dented Labour's support a bit (maybe a point or two), but awareness of the news on a basic speech is rarely ever so huge that it would lead to a five/six point fall overnight (it comes up as a four point fall for ComRes, but they poll monthly, and Labour's lead has been trending 1-2 points bigger for most of January than it was for most of December - it was roughly 4 points for most of December and has been roughly 6 points for most of this month)

Even I'm not going to claim it's the surplus thing which was buried in the news, it's more likely the horrible way they've handled the 50p tax announcement. As always, the tone and how you deliver a policy matter almost as much as the policy itself, and over the past few days, we've seen Labour be too scared to defend the policy and look very weak by getting bashed around by the hated fatcats. Ed Balls's carcrash performance on one of the politics shows yesterday, with it's overly apologetic and defensive tone, would've made an extremely bad impression ("oh, we love business really! it's just temporary! we don't want to do it!") That's why it's essential Miliband publicly stands up to them and calls them out.

 

Plus, let's face it, any weekend where Ed Balls is constantly plastered over the TV is bad news for Labour, no matter what he says. (People may think Ed Miliband is a joke, but hardly anyone genuinely hates him, whereas Balls genuinely inspires loathing in people)

I'm fairly certain Ed Balls is Alex Salmond's IDOL right now.

Meanwhile, 30% of those who say they currently won't vote Labour say they'd be more likely to if Ed Balls was sacked #newballsplease

Nope. The question was 'I would be more likely to vote for Labour if Ed Balls were replaced as Shadow Chancellor'. 30% overall agreed, 50% disagreed - it wasn't 30% of those who won't vote Labour would be more likely to if he were sacked.

 

'I'd be more likely to' questions are one of my least favoured if they're not done properly anyway - because if you don't have control answers doing it properly, you have Conservatives who'd never dream of voting Labour saying they'd be more likely to if he went, and Labourites who'd always vote Labour saying they'd be less likely to if he went, and then you're getting figures that are pretty much meaningless for telling you whether or not that action would make a difference. At that point you then have to start diving into crossbreaks to get hints, but because you're overanalysing the opinions of statistically insignificant crossbreaks (i.e. polls of 300 Labour people that aren't weighted to be demographically representative, rather than the 1000 overall that are weighted and that make the figure statistically significant) you're then making a lot of extrapolations that may not genuinely be the case.

 

YouGov do questions like that well - they tend to offer the answers more likely/less likely/I'd vote x regardless/I wouldn't vote x regardless.

ComRes is actually a 1% lead for Labour, but the 33% for Labour is it's lowest since mid-2010. But all the lost support has seemed to be white working-class voters to UKIP.

 

Meanwhile, 30% of those who say they currently won't vote Labour say they'd be more likely to if Ed Balls was sacked #newballsplease

 

 

Miliband should grow a pair and move Balls before the election. He's supposedly said that he's safe until the election but wouldn't say he'd be Chancellor if they won.

If there were an obvious alternative I think Balls would be gone. Awful public image aside (and I wouldn't worry because there's still two Ed Balls Days before the election :D) he's still the obvious choice out of the whole Shadow Cabinet.

 

To use a football analogy, it's the equivalent of West Ham fans wanting Sam Allardyce sacked - if he weren't already in the position he'd be the name at the top of anyone's wish list, so who else are you going to find?

Don't forget at least one more Fabulous Day *.*

 

If there were an obvious alternative I think Balls would be gone. Awful public image aside (and I wouldn't worry because there's still two Ed Balls Days before the election :D) he's still the obvious choice out of the whole Shadow Cabinet.

 

To use a football analogy, it's the equivalent of West Ham fans wanting Sam Allardyce sacked - if he weren't already in the position he'd be the name at the top of anyone's wish list, so who else are you going to find?

 

I think Andy Burnham would be perfect. He has the type of "image" which people actually want from politicians imo -- not just vacuous charisma or suaveness like Blair had, but more authenticity, speaking like a humanbeing would speak rather than in ProfessionalPolitician soundbites, and giving the impression he actually has a vague idea of what life is like for normal people.

 

Hell, even Yvette Cooper would be a marginal improvement over Balls - even though (presumably) she'd still have much the same toxic New Labour politics, and she is very robotic, she atleast isn't so excruciatingly annoying that you want to throw something at the TV whenever she's on. Balls just encapsulates all the qualities people detest in politicians - refusing to give straight answers to questions, smugness and arrogance, constantly giving the impression he wants to score points for his "team" and for himself rather than actually being concerned about people.

I think Andy Burnham would be perfect. He has the type of "image" which people actually want from politicians imo -- not just vacuous charisma or suaveness like Blair had, but more authenticity, speaking like a humanbeing would speak rather than in ProfessionalPolitician soundbites, and giving the impression he actually has a vague idea of what life is like for normal people.

 

Hell, even Yvette Cooper would be a marginal improvement over Balls - even though (presumably) she'd still have much the same toxic New Labour politics, and she is very robotic, she atleast isn't so excruciatingly annoying that you want to throw something at the TV whenever she's on. Balls just encapsulates all the qualities people detest in politicians - refusing to give straight answers to questions, smugness and arrogance, constantly giving the impression he wants to score points for his "team" and for himself rather than actually being concerned about people.

Burnham's certainly more favourable towards our election chances but you seen to be forgetting that, assuming that Labour are the largest party after 2015, they'll actually have a Treasury to run as well. I'd rather have the more experienced economist given Andy's hardly a paragon of left-wing ideals either.

Burnham's certainly more favourable towards our election chances but you seen to be forgetting that, assuming that Labour are the largest party after 2015, they'll actually have a Treasury to run as well. I'd rather have the more experienced economist given Andy's hardly a paragon of left-wing ideals either.

 

But let's be honest, having Ed Balls is a massive obstacle to Labour ever getting in position to run the Treasury. (Plus there's been plenty of chancellors who weren't trained economists)

 

I actually thought Ed Balls was a good choice when he was first picked, but he really has shown himself to be a truly abysmal politician.

Edited January 28, 201411 yr by Danny

But let's be honest, having Ed Balls is a massive obstacle to Labour ever getting in position to run the Treasury. (Plus there's been plenty of chancellors who weren't trained economists)

 

I actually thought Ed Balls was a good choice when he was first picked, but he really has shown himself to be a truly abysmal politician.

He was always the obvious choice, and he remains so. I know that there's going to be increased scrutiny on him closer to the election, which almost certainly a bad thing, but it's worth remembering that Osborne was completely mauled last time in the Chancellors' Debate thing and isn't exactly popular himself.

Before Craig starts screaming from the rooftops about how this proves him right - if it's coming out today, the fieldwork for that ComRes poll will have almost certainly been done before the 50p announcement, as telephone pollsters don't tend to work on Sundays and most people wouldn't have heard the announcement during the day on Saturday.

 

Obviously not great news, but ComRes tend to have the smallest Labour leads anyway. Best to wait and see if it's echoed in other polls over the next week - and to remember the basic rule of polling that notable poll results are almost always outliers.

 

EDIT: the YouGov poll out tonight has the Labour lead down to 2 (LAB 37 CON 35 UKIP 13 LD 9), which has Labour at the lower end of where they pick but also the highest Conservative vote in quite a long time, which implies it's more a resurgence in support for the Conservatives than Labour support depressing - unless that YouGov poll's crosstabs shows more DKs than normal.

 

The trend is downwards as more and more people feel the economic recovery around them and in their wallets, so with the rate of growth it is inevitable that we will take the lead soon, and that we will keep that lead, with no bad economic news expected this side of May 2015

I think Andy Burnham would be perfect. He has the type of "image" which people actually want from politicians imo -- not just vacuous charisma or suaveness like Blair had, but more authenticity, speaking like a humanbeing would speak rather than in ProfessionalPolitician soundbites, and giving the impression he actually has a vague idea of what life is like for normal people.

 

Hell, even Yvette Cooper would be a marginal improvement over Balls - even though (presumably) she'd still have much the same toxic New Labour politics, and she is very robotic, she atleast isn't so excruciatingly annoying that you want to throw something at the TV whenever she's on. Balls just encapsulates all the qualities people detest in politicians - refusing to give straight answers to questions, smugness and arrogance, constantly giving the impression he wants to score points for his "team" and for himself rather than actually being concerned about people.

 

Even though she is a bit of a cynical opportunist I think Rachel Reeves would be a good appointment, she has started to say the right things on welfare and puts up a good fight in debates, she is one of the few bright lights in the stinking cesspit of the shadow cabinet

I can't believe that last post wasn't attempting to be funny.