Snap General Election called

[Son of Mathonwy]

Farage is combining left and right wing policies, I don’t think that label is very helpful.

Labour should focus on competence. Start building the economy and have something concrete to point to. Perhaps put rejoining the EU on the table and watch the Conservatives and Reform melt down.

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On competence, I think they may be doing the best they can.

Is that praise or faint praise based on the competency available? (though you also say a catastrophic 10 months, so I suppose I can guess).

Whats your view on 'more progressive taxation' ...raising thresholds, raising %ages or both?

Big issue for me...nobpdy has anything like a plan. Reform have a whinge list and nothing else; Lib Dems...no idea what they actually stand for--- and yet both have done very well in these votes.

I'm not really trying to praise or faint praise them. I'm taking competent to mean able to run their departments, enact policies etc without too many cockups or resignations, which they seem to be doing, so on that basis they seem to be broadly competent. Also, I'm not sure competence is something you can decide to do more of. Given that most of them haven't been in government before, they are meeting the bar for 'competence'.

What I'm not considering to be part of 'competence' are the big decisions about what direction to be taking government, the economy in, the left/right, progressive/regressive, equality/inequality choices. Obviously I think they're a disaster there.

More progressive taxation. There are lots of things that can be done here. The easy ones are equalising the tax treatment of different things eg taxing earned and unearned income the same, so taxing dividends and capital gains at the same rates as income tax. Then there's charging national insurance on things that don't attract it currently - unearned income. Then there's fixing national insurance so that it's not regressive at higher incomes, ie the top band should be at the top rate. Personally I'd simplify the system by removing NI completely and simply applying income tax (at an increased rate) on all income, earned and unearned. Ideally I'd also reduce the regressive VAT and increase income tax to make up for it.

As for tax levels (after all those changes), no doubt they would need some adjustment. I'd want something like the bottom 50% of the population paying less tax and the top 30% paying more. The idea is to genuinely reduce inequality, ie redistribute wealth.

Agreed, I don't see much of a plan.

[Son of Mathonwy]

This was always going to be a protest vote, so good for Greens, Libs and Reform. The danger is this developing narrative that Refoem are the opposition now.

I do t think a move to the left will save Labour. Not all left policies are vote winners. Farage is using the uncertainty about what reform is to pick and choose. Can Labour do the same and be left on economics and right on social matters? Will that keep core Labour voters, ie working class and left leaning professionals on track? I don’t think the latter would be happy and might look to green instead.

Their best tack is to keep to the centre and let the Tories continue to drift. Be competent and start challenging reforms policies. Now reform have so many councils there will be plenty of ammunition available to point out their flaws.

Reform are already talking about a UK DOGE effect. Let’s see how well that goes down when local services collapse. I don’t think sacking DEI officers will be that noticeable, but widespread slash and burn will.

This has been a gift to Reform because a lot of the votes have been in Reform territory, so they look stronger than they are. However, they're still polling just ahead of Labour and so far ahead of the (possibly dying) Tory party that they can reasonably call themselves the opposition.

Not all left policies are vote winners but policies that make most people's lives easier (ie reducing inequality) should be. This is the way to defuse Reform's support, by fixing people's lives so they don't have anything to blame on migrants (or net zero!??). But talking up immigration as a purely negative thing (and conflating legal and illegal migration) - as Starmer did even today - is just saying Farage is right, vote for him. Similarly, walking away from net zero. No one who really thinks immigration or net zero are the big problems will ever vote for Labour.

I'd say the Labour are centre-right, not centre - they're only just left of where Sunak's Tories were. But whatever we call it, if they stay there they'll lose half of their votes to the Greens, LibDems and (as the Democrats found) the stay-at-homes. Voters need a reason to vote for a party and they aren't being given one.

God help disabled people in any of those under any of those Reform councils as they look to make cuts. Hopefully this will be noticed in general but most of the newspapers will spin it as a good thing or the fault of the national government. The shame for Labour is that they've lost their chance to significantly increase central funding for local government. If they were to do it now (in a massive u-turn. . . which won't happen) Reform would take all the credit.

[Banquo]

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On competence, I think they may be doing the best they can.

Is that praise or faint praise based on the competency available? (though you also say a catastrophic 10 months, so I suppose I can guess).

Whats your view on 'more progressive taxation' ...raising thresholds, raising %ages or both?

Big issue for me...nobpdy has anything like a plan. Reform have a whinge list and nothing else; Lib Dems...no idea what they actually stand for--- and yet both have done very well in these votes.

I'm not really trying to praise or faint praise them. I'm taking competent to mean able to run their departments, enact policies etc without too many cockups or resignations, which they seem to be doing, so on that basis they seem to be broadly competent. Also, I'm not sure competence is something you can decide to do more of. Given that most of them haven't been in government before, they are meeting the bar for 'competence'.

What I'm not considering to be part of 'competence' are the big decisions about what direction to be taking government, the economy in, the left/right, progressive/regressive, equality/inequality choices. Obviously I think they're a disaster there.

More progressive taxation. There are lots of things that can be done here. The easy ones are equalising the tax treatment of different things eg taxing earned and unearned income the same, so taxing dividends and capital gains at the same rates as income tax. Then there's charging national insurance on things that don't attract it currently - unearned income. Then there's fixing national insurance so that it's not regressive at higher incomes, ie the top band should be at the top rate. Personally I'd simplify the system by removing NI completely and simply applying income tax (at an increased rate) on all income, earned and unearned. Ideally I'd also reduce the regressive VAT and increase income tax to make up for it.

As for tax levels (after all those changes), no doubt they would need some adjustment. I'd want something like the bottom 50% of the population paying less tax and the top 30% paying more. The idea is to genuinely reduce inequality, ie redistribute wealth.

Agreed, I don't see much of a plan.

So they are delivering bad policies competently
On taxes- have you or someone else (not expecting you to tbf) run the numbers on your proposals?

What’s certain is that we are pretty badly broken by any measure.