UK in/out referendum on the EU (Brexit vs Bremain)

Trump wants to sell off the NHS

{{ And our PM just stood there beside him and never said a word to contradict him either

Though in typical Trump fashion he is now completely contradicting himself instead! Here's what he said at the press conference-

Press conference Trump- "“When you’re dealing on trade, everything is on the table. So NHS or anything else. A lot more than that,”

Trump in a TV interview for tomorrows GMTV- ""Somebody asked me a question today and I said everything's up for negotiation because everything is, but I don't see that being... that's something that I would not consider part of trade. That's not trade,"

As usual with this President feel free to pick which Trump you are inclined to believe! }}

Thanks to the brexitloons and the collaboration of farage the UK, or whats left of it, will be Trump's bargain bucket.

I had a bit of a cringe when I saw May just standing there looking like a tame poodle, does anyone remember the film Love Actually when Hugh Grant did the complete opposite?  that's how deluded we are, how naïve and ridiculous and cringeworthy that film scene all looks today.      embarrassing. its like brexiters think Britain is like that film but the sickening reality is that brexit has given us May looking like a turkey waiting to be plucked and dunked in chlorine.   That's what the Tory government has done to us.

I think the NHS thing is a fundamental lack of understanding of the NHS. I imagine he made the original comment without full information on what it meant and then rephrase his answer because I am pretty sure he is talking about big pharma selling stuff to the NHS rather than American companies buying it up.

Yeah, he's not one for precision when opening his mouth.

{{ If he now doesn't know what the NHS is then something is very wrong with his memory- he has talked on the subject before at length when not President- he was still espousing the virtues of the NHS in Scotland as an example as late as the first presidential debate. He has talked of the merits of it on chat shows and in interviews, he has had family friends treated on it whilst staying in Scotland.

I dont buy for a second he doesn't know what he means- the privatisation of the NHS is most definitely on the cards in any UK-US trade deal conducted by the Tories- they've been trying to do this for decades but never found a way round public refusal to allow it before - now they have their perfect excuse- we dont want to do it but we have to do it for the good of the country- exactly the same thing they said to justify austerity which was just an excuse masking a decades long Tory wish-list of services to cut.

What I do buy is the Trump was politically stupid enough to think he could say the NHS was on the table and it not be a problem, and haiv9ng realised now how strong the backlash was he has withdrawn the words- but I dont for a minute believe he has withdrawn the thinking. Or the Tories. }}

{{ Trump said a corker today on is visit to Ireland- on the highly contentious issue of the requirement for a border if there were the sort of hard Brexit Trump keeps recommending, a border if it is created that will almost certainly lead to sectarian violence and bloodshed, he said this-

"And also for you, with your wall, your border. We have a border situation in the United States and you have one over here, but I hear it's going to work out very well."

At which point the Irish taoiseach (PM) had to point out that in fact they were opposed to the very idea of a wall and that was exactly the sort of thing they were trying not to do.

The President of the United States of America everyone! I find it hard to believe he was not briefed on such a crucial thing as the border (hell it was a US President, Clinton, who helped broker the Good Friday Agreement) which means Trump had forgotten the briefing by the time of the meeting, if he ever took it in at all. }}

He probably had it confused with the Israeli/Palestinian wall.

 lets hope he doesn't confuse a Big Red Button for the remote on his tv.

{{ The continuation of history- UK style!

1500's King dies there are several contenders for the throne, the decision of who to replace them with is made by a small bunch of rich upper class types while the plebs await to find out which toff has been selected to rule over them.

2019 PM stabbed in back by her own party and forced out, there several contenders for PM, the decision of who to replace them with is made by a small number of upper class types while the plebs await to find out which toff has been selected to rule over them.

More things change more they stay same! }}

Bluebottle wrote:Australia did just re-elect a disastrous governments, with a PM who only got the role through a spiteful political coup. Giving the English a run for their money.

Expect Australia to continue steaming down the enviromentally disastrous, immigration skeptic, technologically delusional political route it has been on for a while. A country that desperately needed political change, however small.

https://freedom.press/news/outrageous-raids-journalists-australia-and-elsewhere-threaten-press-freedom/

{{ Yeah very troubling this, I mentioned it on the other thread and hoping the Ozhobbits will chip in on a local perspective on it- but I fear they may have been silenced! }}

Not a pretty picture - note the article reported from around the world, not just Australia.

Pettytyrant101 wrote:{{ The continuation of history- UK style!

1500's King dies there are several contenders for the throne, the decision of who to replace them with is made by a small bunch of rich upper class types while the plebs await to find out which toff has been selected to rule over them.

2019 PM stabbed in back by her own party and forced out, there several contenders for PM, the decision of who to replace them with is made by a small number of upper class types while the plebs await to find out which toff has been selected to rule over them.

More things change more they stay same! }}

only in the 1500s the plebs were dangerous and would happily chop a few heads off, so we are in a worse situation these days. The 80s were the last time the plebs in the UK really kicked up a stink.

{{{ Well Boris is certainty showing his true Tory colours.
Remember that 350 million for the NHS pledge if we just left the EU?

Well turns out Boris has other ideas for its use, namely a massive tax cut for everyone earning over £50,000 a year. That coincidentally of course includes Boris and all his family and chums and all his business mates.
Not that I suppose it matters much as if Boris gets in he will have sold off the NHS anyway to US pharma companies. }}

quite astounding arrogance and if anyone wants to now what a country would be like under Johnson, that's it.

Yeah, it's amazing how fast populist folk heroes can turn on you once there's profit to be made. Remember Monty Python's Dennis Moore?

Pettytyrant101 wrote:{{{ Well Boris is certainty showing his true Tory colours.
Remember that 350 million for the NHS pledge if we just left the EU?

Well turns out Boris has other ideas for its use, namely a massive tax cut for everyone earning over £50,000 a year. That coincidentally of course includes Boris and all his family and chums and all his business mates.
Not that I suppose it matters much as if Boris gets in he will have sold off the NHS anyway to US pharma companies. }}

There is an argument that the tax rate should be flat for everyone. If I were to earn £60k per year why should I have to pay more than other do for services that, arguably, I will have less need of?

Having said that, I dont think he should be reducing the rate nor shouldn't be moved higher. Corporate taxes are the ones that should be looked at with loopholes shut off so that they are ALL paying their fair share.

It's really one of those unanswerable questions what a fair tax rate should be. Cutting everyone's taxes by 10% means the rich gain more money than the poor, but everyone is getting the same 10%, right?

You might argue that businesses should pay the same tax rate as people (cuts down on shady dealing) but then say it's businesses who employ people (and businesses aren't people) so they should pay zero taxes.

I don't think the equilibrium of what makes most people happy will settle down to any fixed answer.

Exactly. As a general rule people who earn more do for a reason but regardless of what they have done to get there they are penalised for it.

And companies I think should pay for the privilege of earning the money. It is the business that earns the money and should therefore be the legal entity that pays back for the luxury of being able to earn money.

So long as people are clear about why they are doing it then fine... what I dont want to hear is bullshit about trickle down economics because that doesn't work.

As a general rule people who earn more do for a reason- Lance

{{ Thats where I'm not so sure. I dont see that a care worker doing 12 hour shifts in a home with dementia patients is working less hard than someone paid to attend a few board meetings a month (the list of former top politicians who do this when they leave office- get hired by multinationals as 'advisors' and get paid a mint for a few appearances, or even just use of their name, is shocking).
People get paid more for all sorts of reasons- but one of the major ones is that governments need to appease the middle classes, usually at the expense of the working class. As middle classes make up the bulk of the active electorate, and the working class make a small percent of it compared to how many are eligible to vote.
90% for example of the courses, refresher courses, and 'teaching' material for care work is useless, obsolete, unwanted, and gets in the way of doing the actual job- but it keeps a bunch of middle class educated types in jobs on 24-30 grand a year coming up with them- its usefulness to the job, its effect on actual care of residents is zero, in fact Id argue it was in the negative and has a detrimental effect on workers and residents, but that's not why it exists anyway- it exists to create high paid work for the middle classes. And worse the people doing the real job of care get paid less than half per year than the people paid to tell them how to do their job are. Even though most of them have never done a care job in their life.
The burden falls on the workers-- they have to do these courses in their own time unpaid they have to get taken off the floor in their job to attend them, meaning they are caring for no-one whilst doing so, and to the worker its useless qualifications because they equal no change in job or pay even once achieved, and more will just come along anyway because those middle class job need to exist.
Its a stitch up. }}

I said general rule for a reason. Most of the types you mention are exceptions to the general rule.

The vast majority of people I know that have reasonably high paid job (top 10-5%) spend 2-3 hours commuting for a 35 hour conteacted week that is often 45+ hours with no extra pay given, managing multi million pound budgets or hundreds of clients who are trying then serve the general community in one way or another whole managing huge stakeholder groups from I.T. to regulatory to customer facing divisions.

I pick my sector (Finance of course, I dont know anything about any other clandestine things) because it is one of the vilified industries. There are people there who can go to jail for making the wrong decision, can mismanage huge amounts of money or cause significant regulatory or reputational damage (for example the financial crash, PPI, LIBOR etc) to the company or entire industry that last decades.

Why do they have to pay more?

If you want to get any kind of idea of fairness (whatever that means) you need to look at net earnings after taxes. Taken on their own, gross earnings and tax rates are almost meaningless.

Most of the types you mention are exceptions to the general rule.- Lance

{{ I dont think so- there exists thousands upon thousands of middle class jobs whose only purpose is to exist to give employment to the middle classes- the entire tier of middle management is useless- they neither provide the jobs or investment for others, nor do they produce anything or do any work, they just create work for others that's tangential to the actual job, and that's their justification for existing.
Whether its care work, NHS, anything council related and these days even most private businesses there exists this entire, useless tier of people who produce reports, staff evaluations, staff questionnaires, health and safety courses etc etc etc- and you could scrap the whole lot of them, it would probably improve the actual job for everyone else, you could use their wages to increase wages of the actual people doing the work and no one would miss them.
They exists solely because having an educated angry bored unemployed middle class is dangerous for a government who wants to stay in power as middle class voters make up the bulk of the voters in terms of who actually turns out.
The poor have never started a revolution- its always the middle classes who do then they enlist the poor to do the actual dirty work with promises of equality and freedom (never met of course). But the poor are never a threat to governments, the middle classes are, hence the plethora of utterly useless but high paying middle class jobs that have been created in the last thirty years.
It was bad enough in the late 70's when Douglas Adams could use the idea for a joke in Hitchikers about a planet that got rid of this useless section of society by sending them off to colonise another world whilst everyone else stayed happily at home. And its got 100 times worse since he wrote that). }}

Well, having worked in the private sector for a long time I can tell you that wasting money is not something that goes down well and I have seen many cost cutting exercises that have stripped out entire sections at all layers of business. People here dont have jobs that dont add value (there are always exceptions, but not the rule).

I cannot comment on the public sector too much other than I know that there is a huge amount of waste in lots if areas, not just in the people employed there. That is politics at play, not economics.