UK British News Megathread - aka CWCissey's news thread

f4t2h7gc · Oct 30, 2024

I don't know what all of you are complaining about. I just watched BBC News and got a glowing review of the first female budget, plus an interview with three 25-30 year olds who represent all working people.

Morethanabitfoolish · Oct 30, 2024

QE65 said:
I don't know what all of you are complaining about. I just watched BBC News and got a glowing review of the first female budget, plus an interview with three 25-30 year olds who represent all working people.

BBC? Ethnic minority, woman and wild card unless they combined the first two in one interviewee.
Ironically starting to backfire when they do it with bad news because the groups they pander to are starting to see it too.

Also link?

EddyRooney · Oct 30, 2024

Amin Yasister said:
Interested that one says their mortgage repayment has increased by 30%, whilst another states theirs has increased by 60%.

How is this possible? I know mortgage interest rates increased a few %, but not 30 to 60 %.

Say your mortgage was for £150k over a 25 year period at a 2% fix for 2 years. The repayments would be about £630
If you then remortgage because the fixed term rate had expired and you didn't pay off much of the principal ( about £9k ) and you can only find a new fixed rate of 6% ( this is a possible sitution in the real world in the last few years ) then...
£141k over 23 years at 6% would mean payments of about £940.
(£940-£630)/£630 x 100% = 49%
Thus the required monthly repayment has gone up by about 50%

However, say you managed to find a 4.5% rate instead -
£141k over 23 years at 4.5% would mean repayments of about £820.
((£820-£630)/£630) x 100% = 30%
Thus the required monthly repayment has gone up by about 30%

The amount of increase depends largely on the amount of the loan and the change in the interest rate.

Whoopsie Daisy · Oct 31, 2024

Overly Serious said:
How so, if I may ask? I take it they still haven't done anything to sort out the Gordian Knot that is IR35!

Minimum wage increase+NI increase means more hit to the profit of big companies.

You can leverage a position by removing yourself from the books* and take away the pain of the NI increase, with the added bonus of setting new hours and focus job role specific to where the company is now hurting.

* Some companies pay contractors from a different budget than wages, allowing clever companies to juggle departmental budgets. They can pay you more while paying out less.

teriyakiburns · Oct 31, 2024

Bog-standard Poster said:
You can leverage a position by removing yourself from the books* and take away the pain of the NI increase, with the added bonus of setting new hours and focus job role specific to where the company is now hurting.

Unless they've blanket declared all their contractors inside ir35, which means they assess and deduct your ni and income tax. The budget appears to extend that to all off-books employees, with the requirement to assess PAYE regardless of ir35 status. I'm still looking into it.

isalaide · Oct 31, 2024

I'm pretty satisfied with it, overall. It would be considerably better if the tax thresholds had been unfrozen in this upcoming fiscal year, or at least the lowest one had. People on lower incomes do need to be taxed less. But the NMW uplift is overdue and welcome.

The raid on employers' NICs is massive, but my sympathy for 'business owners' and 'entrepreneurs' who are crying that their entire breakeven model is dependent on staff that they cannot afford to pay is, well, nil. The cost of staff is one of the two or three most crucial business expenses. A business plan that involves people working for free isn't a fucking business plan unless you own a dirty high street nail shop staffed exclusively by trafficked Vietnamese people.

"It'ssss a tax on busssssinessss" there's a word for a business that can't make money, and it's 'hobby'. If you can't figure out how to make your business make enough money to stay open, this isn't some sign of persecution. It's how the fucking market works. Give up and get a job. If I couldn't make money doing what I do, I would give up and earn a fucking wage as an employee. The government is not obliged to fund "my dream of owning a full organic crystal healing launderette". Most businesses fail. There is a lack of grasp on reality by many people currently claiming to be microenterprises and SMEs currently. The goal is to make fucking money.

I particularly do not love childcare providers screaming that the minimum wage is going up and how can they possibly afford to pay their staff even the minimum wage. I have some strong feelings about how we should value the work of bringing up most of the nation's infants and toddlers, and the idea that twelve pound odds is "too much" for this definitely tips me into the angry sperg zone.

The need for and cost of childcare in the UK is a death spiral for those on average salaries, and no government is willing to grab the tiger's tail about it. Women can't afford to quit work and raise their own kids, and they can't earn enough, in large part, to cover the cost of the childcare either. Nothing about this arrangement is sustainable, and we are very close to the moment when the music stops. I absolutely understand why women now in their early twenties are looking at how the numbers can't be made to add up, and deciding just not to have kids. It is the rational, responsible, accountable choice. It is also from a societal and demographic perspective, a bomb waiting to go off. If this is important to a nation, a nation has to do something (or some things) big enough to change that equation. I do not see any of that happening.

If our lives drastically upended tomorrow and we had no real assets and no income, I can't feed my five weans on the money to feed two of them. And that scenario happens to mothers every day up and down this country, where jobs are lost or their man ups and runs away and the CMA doesn't get him for child support for eighteen months, and through absolutely no fault of anyone who experiences the consequences, weans go hungry. I don't like that and I do not have to like it and I do not support it as a policy. The cutoff for the age of the 'invisible' weans is now a 2018 birth. You didn't have a fucking crystal ball six years ago to know that your man would die or go bankrupt or run away with a whore. You had weans reasonably expecting to be able to look after them. It is monstrously unfair to be penalising families for their inability to tell the fucking future so that in six years time they'd need universal credit. Shit happens. The whole point of the fucking welfare safety net is that when shit happens the government will protect you at least from catastrophe. These weans don't deserve to be hungry.

Now that the 100% IHT relief on family businesses worth over a million has been abolished, I will possibly need to pay that tax both coming and going, so to speak, unless I do some urgent tax planning, and I am extremely relaxed about that. If you are inheriting a fucking business worth a million quid, you can afford to pay some more fucking tax. You can certainly afford it much more than some poor cunt in a call centre struggling to make 27 grand a year. They can't afford more tax. You just got a medium sized lottery win. Pay up.

"muh farrrrmers" bleats the Beeb. The farmers in this country will never be financially secure until people in this country are prepared to pay enough for food to secure a decent living income for the producers. That will never happen because the wages here are held down so fucking far that most families could genuinely not afford to eat enough if we paid what the food actually costs to make. This is not a new problem. It was Thatcher's principal reason for committing to the EEC: food security by close trade links with countries where the land available for farming is actually decently productive. There are also only about 500 odd farms that will actually be affected by this, whereas the number of people handing on a non-farming business to sproglets who would be caught by it is far more considerable.

20% is no higher than the VAT rate. You can definitely afford to pay some VAT on your free fucking inheritance of over a million quid. Oh no, woe is you, you will only inherit 800 grand. That is life changing money for most people in this country, and if it's not life changing money for you, you're already doing fucking alright mate.

Other people's taxes paid my school meals and my clothing grant and my NHS surgeries and all that shit. I now pay taxes so poor kids who need that stuff now can get it. This is fair. It is my turn to pay for things I can afford for those who can't afford them. This is how a social contract works. I am enormously tired of my peers who by any definition are wealthy complaining they don't get things "for free" when they have no concept of what not getting the very essentials of life is like. The thing that keeps the poor in this city from going a mission to slit all our throats is the vague semblance of life they are given via redistributive taxation. If you don't like "charity", you better fucking hope the neds don't snap to the concept of justice instead.

I think there was probably more head room around the top rate of CGT, particularly if it was specifically targeted at homes that don't attract primary residence relief, but it has been many years since I was a baby economist so the Treasury will know better than me. The idea that buying up what we used to think of as shitey wee starter homes, wee shitey 1 bed flats that gave you some kind of adult independence with a partner and a toe on the housing ladder, taking them off the market and becoming a slum landlord, is something to be encouraged is fucking bullshit. Everyone's wanky uncle is a "property developer"; no he's not, he's engaged in slum landlording and he's hoarding the wee shitty places to live that are crucial for young people to actually leave the parental home and start living. Fuck these people. Make their "business" too expensive and difficult and make them dump their "properties" on the market.

My first home wasn't as nice as the one my parents in law paid for for us as students. But it was mine. It was the first time in my life I had a roof that no one could kick me out from. That meant fucking everything to me. People deserve for that life goal, a place that's yours that you can count on and rely on, to be a reasonably achievable goal. The young people actually need some kind of future to reasonably work towards.

I was happy to see the money going in to fund more SEN provision, but I don't think it is enough. The unmet SEN need in the UK is devastating mainstream education.

I don't agree with the two child cap, and I think it demonstrably contributes to child poverty, but it was never getting lifted in this budget and I suspect it will not be lifted in the next ten years.

I sperg here because this weekend I have to socialise with people who will do nothing but whine about having to pay tax they can well afford to pay, and I want to get through the weekend without shoving someone's head up a roast chicken's arse during dinner.

Amin Yasister · Oct 31, 2024

EddyRooney said:
Say your mortgage was for £150k over a 25 year period at a 2% fix for 2 years. The repayments would be about £630
If you then remortgage because the fixed term rate had expired and you didn't pay off much of the principal ( about £9k ) and you can only find a new fixed rate of 6% ( this is a possible sitution in the real world in the last few years ) then...
£141k over 23 years at 6% would mean payments of about £940.
(£940-£630)/£630 x 100% = 49%
Thus the required monthly repayment has gone up by about 50%

However, say you managed to find a 4.5% rate instead -
£141k over 23 years at 4.5% would mean repayments of about £820.
((£820-£630)/£630) x 100% = 30%
Thus the required monthly repayment has gone up by about 30%

The amount of increase depends largely on the amount of the loan and the change in the interest rate.

Great, but none of them stated that the increase was because they had remortgaged.

No different from me saying my car loan repayment has increased by 60%, but without me saying that I purchased a new car so increased my loan.

isalaide said:
The need for and cost of childcare in the UK is a death spiral for those on average salaries, and no government is willing to grab the tiger's tail about it. Women can't afford to quit work and raise their own kids, and they can't earn enough, in large part, to cover the cost of the childcare either.

From my relatives that were born in the 1950's and 1960's, this was never an issue.

Why?

Divorce being morally and legally easier?
Materialism?
Keeping up with the Jones's?
Immigration?
Tte Welfare State?

Happy days compared to now, or just rose tinted spectacles?

Rusty Metal Skull Gun · Oct 31, 2024

isalaide said:
But the NMW uplift is overdue and welcome.

We have high immigration because there's a large number of native people unwilling or unable to get a job. Increasing the minimum wage will make this worse.

isalaide said:
The raid on employers' NICs is massive, but my sympathy for 'business owners' and 'entrepreneurs' who are crying that their entire breakeven model is dependent on staff that they cannot afford to pay is, well, nil.

Yeah, this was the point when I reached for the rubbish bin. Increasing employers' NICs acts as a dampener on wages in the medium term, because both wages and NICs come out of the same staffing budget. Duh.

isalaide said:
I have some strong feelings about how we should value the work of bringing up most of the nation's infants and toddlers, and the idea that twelve pound odds is "too much" for this definitely tips me into the angry sperg zone.

The problem with childcare is the silly government-set staff-to-child ratio, which is far lower than most other countries. So yes, per child twelve pounds is too much for this work.

Geoff Capes Vapes Apes · Oct 31, 2024

isalaide said:
I sperg here because this weekend I have to socialise with people who will do nothing but whine about having to pay tax they can well afford to pay, and I want to get through the weekend without shoving someone's head up a roast chicken's arse during dinner.

Congratulations, you are a parasite!

Spud · Oct 31, 2024

They've made a big hubbub about this being the first woman to do the budget and it's shit. What did Labour mean by this?

Inquisitor_BadAss · Oct 31, 2024

Spud said:
They've made a big hubbub about this being the first woman to do the budget and it's shit. What did Labour mean by this?

They missed out on first female PM by about 50 years so they need a win.

Hard Toothbrush · Oct 31, 2024

Null said:
So much of this video is him showing how hard he's working by driving from what is the equivalent distance of Atlanta to DC. Oh, woe is him! What a terrifying trek! Only the finest YouTubers can do such an amazing journey in the name of interviewing locals about their local tribunals!

To be fair he did have to drive through Bri*ain.

EddyRooney · Oct 31, 2024

Amin Yasister said:
Great, but none of them stated that the increase was because they had remortgaged.

No different from me saying my car loan repayment has increased by 60%, but without me saying that I purchased a new car so increased my loan.

I'm not sure in the example I gave above the people have "remortgaged" as the man in the street would colloquially say it.
A lot of the time when people "remortgage" they borrow more money - i.e. an increase added to the principal.
The example I gave was more likely what happened in the BBC's examples.
A lot of people take out a "fixed term" mortgage. What this means is the bank or building society offer a mortgage when for a set period of time, they offer a set interest rate. This is in theory advantageous to both parties at it offers certainty - both sides know how much is being repaid per month for a set period of time. You can also have a variable rate mortgage - this is when the bank normally agrees to charge interest at the Bank of England rate plus a certain percentage - this is not so certain as the rate changes according to how the Bank of England changes the base rate, depending on macro economic factors.
However, with the "fixed term", when this set period of time expires, most of these mortgages then charge interest to the bank or building society's default rate. Often this will be 2 or 3% more than the percentage charged for the fixed period ( and we saw what this does to monthly repayments ! ) So normally people hunt around for another fixed term offer. This, as I understand it, could possibly be considered remortgaging, but as the principal hasn't changed, I'd term it re-negotiating. The problem is, as we have seen in recent history, when the Bank of England changes the base rate in this period. If it goes up considerably, then people can't afford the resulting jump in monthly repayments as the various mortgage providers will only offer fixed terms at much higher rates.
Two years ago, you could get a 5 year fixed rate at 2%, now the average is 4.85%.

So to use your analogy, the car loan repayment will have gone up, but not because of buying a new car or increasing the value of the loan, but because the interest on the loan has gone up.
I think the issue here is a lot of people feel hard done by if their payments go up due to rate changes, but can understand when they do due to borrowing more ( often to move up the property ladder or to buy a flasher car ).

Otterly · Oct 31, 2024

isalaide said:
These weans don't deserve to be hungry.

I agree. But all governments, red and blue, dictate policy to punish parents, and they don’t give a shit about kids.
I will stick to my guns that the 20% agricultural tax stuff is bad. Most farmers are land rich but cash poor and this will break many, meaning land is absorbed into massive farms. That’s a damage to their families but also to the remaining farmers who will have to compete against bigger farms. It means fewer smaller outfits which are usually more able to specialise and have more organic/ecologically beneficial practices. And it means that land will be up for sale, and as we have seen with the net zero stuff in the Netherlands that means it getting concreted over and refugee barracks built on it in the name of net zero insanity.

Amin Yasister said:
From my relatives that were born in the 1950's and 1960's, this was never an issue.

Why?

Divorce being morally and legally easier?
Materialism?
Keeping up with the Jones's?
Immigration?
Tte Welfare State?

Happy days compared to now, or just rose tinted spectacles?

Two things:
1. The cost of, and societal ‘need’ for goods and lifestyle is completely different.
2. Women don’t work then like they worked now.
Actually three things,
3. currency devaluation and wage devaluation.
They worked, but it was part time usually. My parents were born just post war, and we had mum at home up until we were all school age, then she got a part time job which turned into a full time one once we were 13 or so. We did not have much money at all, and we had times where we were somewhat on edge being able to pay bills, but by and large we were fed, and clothed, albeit in hand me downs.
Housing was affordable on one man’s wage. but at one point in the 70s inflation made mortgage rates soar and things were pretty tough. I think that young ‘uns now don’t get how materially poor most working class people were though. It’s a strange paradox; the bigger things, like houses were more affordable but consumer goods were vastly more expensive. A good sewing machine for example in the 60s would set you back 4-500 quid which was a colossal amount of money. Now you can buy a cheap one for sixty quid at Aldi, but it’ll be shit. And even if you spend 5k on one, it’ll not have the build quality of that 1960s Swiss made machine. We’ve created a world where the glossy stuff on top like clothes and goods are pushed while the meat underneath - housing and land, is out of reach. Bread and circuses I suppose

Wages decoupled from real value in the early 70s, and getting off the gold standard was the start of a long decline. Our manufacturing base was run into the ground, and we went from industrial powerhouse to service economy. Mortgages driven by scarcity of property and population increase became what two working people could pay each month rather than what they were worth based on materials,

A lot has changed. Society has lost all cohesion, and most of that change is entirely negative. Things were better before

EddyRooney · Oct 31, 2024

Otterly said:
I will stick to my guns that the 20% agricultural tax stuff is bad. Most farmers are land rich but cash poor and this will break many, meaning land is absorbed into massive farms. That’s a damage to their families but also to the remaining farmers who will have to compete against bigger farms. It means fewer smaller outfits which are usually more able to specialise and have more organic/ecologically beneficial practices. And it means that land will be up for sale, and as we have seen with the net zero stuff in the Netherlands that means it getting concreted over and refugee barracks built on it in the name of net zero insanity.

In all honesty I saw this quite cynically. I just thought it was a way to force farmers to sell up their land to cover the costs. Sell to who ? Property developers. It's a good point you make about refugee barracks and one I hadn't considered. That just makes it even worse in my opinion.
I think a lot of the things being introduced in this budget will have secondary consequences. This is Labour's insidious agenda. It's not always obvious what the motive is initially.

Coccxys · Oct 31, 2024

EddyRooney said:
I just thought it was a way to force farmers to sell up their land to cover the costs. Sell to who ? Property developers.

This is exactly what it is. Pave over all the greenbelt for "affordable" housing that is substandard and falls over after 15 years but at least the builders got their due. No new infrastructure though, there's no money in new schools, GPs, or dentists, just new houses.

Then of course they import the 3rd world faster than we can build and buy up all the housing stock with tax payer money so the squeeze only gets worse.

Otterly · Oct 31, 2024

EddyRooney said:
just thought it was a way to force farmers to sell up their land to cover the costs.

It is. Just look at that Welsh farce where they want 20% or whatever of farmland turned into forest. When we can’t even be self sufficient in food and most of Welsh farmland is hill anyway. It’s destroying our food security, and our ecology.

Coccxys · Oct 31, 2024

It's because lefties and green types think all farmers do is destroy the countryside and decimate the ecosystesm. In reality farmers have been custodians of the countryside for generations and a lot of what we have is thanks to their efforts.

They unironically think building megacity bughives, eating the bugs, and abandoning the bits outside of the cities will somehow fix everything rather than causing even more problems.

Inquisitor_BadAss · Oct 31, 2024

Coccxys said:
It's because lefties and green types think all farmers do is destroy the countryside and decimate the ecosystesm. In reality farmers have been custodians of the countryside for generations and a lot of what we have is thanks to their efforts.

They unironically think building megacity bughives, eating the bugs, and abandoning the bits outside of the cities will somehow fix everything rather than causing even more problems.

I've always what the land and wildlife would look like if we just let nature do it it's thing with the farm land. While 10's of millions would die and depending on who you ask here that could be seen as a good or bad thing would the UK be almost exclusively grassland at that point?
It would probably take centuries for the forests to make any comeback if they even could since we have nothing keeping the deer and now accidentally reintroduced boar population in check.
Currently we have an experiment going on with a very small population of European Bison which seems to be going well. The issue is at what point do we start deliberately reintroduction of mid and large sized predators like lynx and wolves to complete the cycle. Farmers have said time and again they worry about live stock but without adequate fencing or tracking there probably wouldn't be a lot to stop a lynx snacking on a lamb or two.

teriyakiburns · Oct 31, 2024

Otterly said:
It is. Just look at that Welsh farce where they want 20% or whatever of farmland turned into forest. When we can’t even be self sufficient in food and most of Welsh farmland is hill anyway. It’s destroying our food security, and our ecology.

The government has a long history of utterly fucking up agriculture for vastly retarded reasons. In the 50s and 60s, they spent a fortune and a decade gripping and draining the yorkshire moors to try and make the more productive for agriculture (Against the advise of hill farmers, who knew what was coming) and ended up draining out hundreds of square miles of peat bog, which is now covered in tinder-dry heather and catches on fire every year. Sheep were happy enough prancing around the bogs (and are in fact necessary for a healthy peat bog), but the government of the day had a vision of endless flowing fields of wheat and barley. City slickers can't leave well enough alone and have to stick their noses in at every opportunity. Now you have the same sort of people actively opposing efforts to restore the old bogs because the heather looks pretty and because doing so would encourage more sheep grazing, which is bad for The Environment.

Inquisitor_BadAss said:
Farmers have said time and again they worry about live stock but without adequate fencing or tracking there probably wouldn't be a lot to stop a lynx snacking on a lamb or two.

City boys don't realise just how managed the English countryside is these days and think the concerns of farmers are just the whining of "rich landowners". They just want the big kitties wandering around so they can take selfies with them.

UK British News Megathread - aka CWCissey's news thread

f4t2h7gc

Shed and buried

Morethanabitfoolish

Sick of politics, time to join the anime posters.

EddyRooney

Whoopsie Daisy

Ask me about how teen boys deserve to be molested

teriyakiburns

If anyone tried stealing my pot, I'd wrestle them.

isalaide

has no gun and a bad lawyer

Amin Yasister

Rusty Metal Skull Gun

i vill not move out of ze vay

Geoff Capes Vapes Apes

Budgie Admirer

Spud

No more tears. It'll all be over soon.

Inquisitor_BadAss

Pardon my flatulence

Hard Toothbrush

The White Flame Dancing on the Graves of his Foes

EddyRooney

Otterly

Immerse your soul in love

EddyRooney

Coccxys

Otterly

Immerse your soul in love

Coccxys

Inquisitor_BadAss

Pardon my flatulence

teriyakiburns

If anyone tried stealing my pot, I'd wrestle them.