Remember there is no state pension pot, paying in entitles you to a pension on retirement but there is no money in the system which is “yours”.
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Absolutely. The thing about the UK is that governments generally, and Tory governments in particular won’t increase taxes to fund what people want funded because when it comes down to it, many people aren’t prepared to pay for through taxation what they actually want, and the rich, generally, don’t really want to play for any of it. At the other end of the spectrum are many of the Scandinavian countries, where taxation is much higher than in the UK, but then pensions and other social provisions are much more generous. When it comes to attitudes to taxation levels, you literally get what you pay for
Except that in the UK we don’t - we have historically high levels of taxation at the moment and public services that are going down the pan.
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To draw the thread away from pensions and back to ‘the end of the Tories’, I agree with some earlier posts that there could well be a resurgence of sorry for the Tories at the next general election.
To prevent this, the parties who oppose Tory policies need to agree to cooperate, and - crucially - the Labour party needs to stop looking alternately left and right, fix its gaze on a vision of Great Britain for the future and decide and promote policies that will achieve that vision.
Labour Party being rebranded as ‘New Labour 2’.
An interesting view from Sophie Ridge, I thought.
https://twitter.com/SophyRidgeSky/status/1715450649603699060?t=CQi7_Ynma2-zZW9u9zDEOA&s=19
@billy it’s not the fault of the person that paid full NI and tax as required and in accordance with promises, if government sp*nked it up the wall.
Luckily there is auto enrolment and many tax breaks for pensions and savings now, that today’s pensioners and still quite some years of future pensioners did not have access to whilst at lower salaries paying higher NI and taxes when they were earning, than has been the case more recently. So they did contribute.
There also wasn’t the sophistication back then that newer workers have - who knew Government promises wouldn’t be kept?
Yes, absolutely, and are perfectly entitled to draw a pension now.
However all too many people think that somehow they have accumulated funds to which they have a right - whereas the sad reality is that it is all just a Ponzi scheme, their contributions have long gone and if the government decided to freeze pensions tomorrow there is little anyone can do about it.
The problem is that we have ever more pensioners who need pensions to be paid by those in work, as well as a functioning healthcare and elderly care system. The Ponzi scheme needs new blood, which is why we need immigration. The Germans, at least, understood this which is one of the reasons that they accepted so many refugees.
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Absolutely @billy. The UK has no choice now but to accept immigration more massively if the country is to continue with anything like the same offerings to its population.
The problem is that with the owners of assets basically using the UK as a hotel and the grip they have ever tightening on the country - which the Tories play ever more nakedly to and Labour will have the devil of a job creating checks and balances to - the immigration upcoming will keep opportunities and wages for most workers depressed. Whereas at least in Europe workers had some protection this seems gone in the UK and opportunities to do better harder to find as the owners of assets needed hold tightly to them and at most might rent them out at high rates
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Yes, we do have historically high levels of taxation. But, that’s not been done to provide for the general population, as most would agree, but is as a direct consequence of the cost of Brexit, the pandemic, the Lettuce Liz experiment, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the knock on effects of austerity (and probably at least a few other Tory made economic disasters I haven’t thought about). And the events that can’t really be blamed on this Tory government were made much worse by the aforementioned events and Tory incompetence. The current high levels of direct taxation fall mainly on those who can least afford it, and yet this Tory governments fantastic, great idea is to abolish inheritance tax, and reduce stamp duty, which I’m sure that people struggling to feed their selves and thier children would applaud.
Yes the people have spoken who have no idea thick as shit, Torys out to make way for labour who promise the earth. They cannot fix things and blame the torys for the debt that they made. Think for once over so many years its ether labour or conservatives and not one of them resolve the problem. They take the piss and rob us blind and we vote them in.
Is there an answer to a problem that no body can resolve while taking money from the working class and put it in there own pockets for fuck sake wake up.
The answer is Proportional Representation- so you don’t get such violent swings of direction.
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Exactly, PR can offer a less combative approach and encourage longer term thinking, rather than the UK’s short term approach to everything, such as the Tories’ wrecking ball approach to HS2, intended to ensure that a government of a different flavour can’t reinstate it.
You forget Sunak’s latest wheeze of suggesting that the 40% threshold is raised giving higher rate payers an effective tax cut.
It probably won’t happen - for one thing it directly opposes current Tory thinking of leaving the thresholds static and allowing wage inflation to bring in about £50billion more tax.
Although I favour PR overall it is not the panacea some think that it is.
Across Europe PR systems have still brought in right wing governments, and they give a voice to smaller more extreme parties when FPTP would have kept them out of power. Need I mention Germany in the 1930’s?
True, in the UK, the Liberal Democrats would have benefitted - in 2010 they’d have had around 149 seats in a true representative system rather than the 57 they actually gained. Even in 2015 they would have have had 51 seats, not 8.
That said if we’d had PR in 2010 the 2015 election would have looked completely different. We’d almost certainly had a Lib/Lab coalition government in 2010 and not gone down the route of Brexit at all.
However PR as I noted also gives a voice to smaller parties that you might want kept out of government - UKIP would have had 20 seats in 2010 but picked up 82 seats in 2015.
Again one can argue that had 2010 been held under PR, the 2015 would have been held in a significantly different political landscape but UKIP were a persistent malign presence among our contingent of MEPs
Finally - unless PR applied separately to each nation the SNP would have suffered badly at Westminster given that it has no presence outside Scotland - it’s share of the national vote is very small.
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The big problem for the Tories is when you look at why these elections took place. One groper forced out and the other incumbent flouncing off because she didn’t get the honour she thought she deserved. All that after the tractor porn scandal that led to last year’s by-election. They’ve become a rotten party and plenty of members, never mind voters, are disgusted by them.
Hope the heads are OK this morning John and Vicki 
Bon dimanch 
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I don’t have a problem with smaller parties having a voice, if that means their policies are out in the open and they have to compromise with other parties in order to be included in government, even if individually they represent views that I completely disagree with.
What we have now is “stealth extremism”, where the loony fringe infiltrate the two big parties (and at the moment mainly the Tories) because that’s the only way they can influence policy.
Brexit is a direct result of this - the “European Research Group” ought to have all been UKIP MPs - instead they formed a powerful enough faction within the Conservative party that David Cameron (wrongly) felt the need to try and head them off with the EU referendum.
20 UKIPPers (U-Kippers?) 
in a broader coalition are not going to have a huge impact and would at least be out where we can see them and would have to account for themselves to the electorate. Priti Patel and Jacob Rees-Mordor and friends can currently shelter under the Tory umbrella and benefit from votes that come from Tory supporters rather than those who support them personally or their specific views.
PR is not a perfect electoral system, nothing is, but it does provide a more nuanced form of representation than FPTP, which always favours the two big parties.
I totally agree.
Yes, I agree.
However there was a long period in the UK where there were really only two parties and FPTP became entrenched.
Yes, that is a bit unfair to the Liberals - although there were points that they only got a couple of percent of the popular vote by the 70’s they were more consistently at about 10% yet never got more than a handful of MPs.
I can’t see either Labour or the Tories committing to PR - Labour is on course for a clear victory at the next GE and whenever one of the main parties is in power FPTP has “worked” for them - why “fix” a system that is apparently not broken.
Whenever they are in opposition and might see the value of PR, they are not in a position to bring about change.
Me too. And the present system effectively disenfranchises supporters of larger 3rd parties, ie LibDems because their votes are totally wiped out in certain constituencies.