Here's what I would do:
* A flat tax of 15%
* Scrap VAT and other useless taxes to promote spending and stimulate the economy
* NI payments linked to NHS treatment - if you don't pay into NI then you won't get treated
* Look at capping the population down the line - we cannot keep adding people whilst infrastructure suffers and environmental degradation.
Here's what I would do:
(1) Gradually remove excess population numbers.
Encourage self deportation first through making it hard to abide by cultural/religious customs - ban halal, niqab, under-18 non-medical circumcision and penalise those who fly abroad to carry out such procedures with child abuse and deport them (this includes FGM), you'd charge the father and not the mother who'll keep parentage of the child, because the intent is she'll then fly/return to whatever country the husband was deported to. Once emigration of the self-deported has reached a ceiling, that's when you begin offering incentivised self-deportation via one-time payments of 21k GBP scaling up to 29k GBP with families (this would also fuck over the country said people are being deported to - R.I.P. Pakistani housing market lmao). I would hope to institute the self-deportation stuff within year one and introduce the paid incentive by the 2nd or 3rd year to save as much money as possible on the number of people taking these payments. I would hope to reduce the overall population by 1-4 million within a single term like this.
Pragmatically you cannot remove anyone or their children if they came here prior to the 90 or 80s unless they are residing here illegally. If they're fully UK citizens and haven't retained the citizenship of their old country of origin, then they're pretty much here to stay. If an import has arrived in the past 20-30 years and retained use of or tried to denounce their old citizenship, it can be ignored, but it might warrant compensating countries of origin to take their own people back which may be worth it in the long-term. I think the sum I conjured to do this a long time ago was 300 billion pounds, but that's assuming we paid every Muslim 28k to leave right this instant.
Removing these people will take burden off the NHS, lower the population and thus perceived housing demand (if not contribute to the supply also) thus decreasing house prices which does harm hopeful sellers but gives hope to potential buyers. Lowering house prices would also lead to decreased rents if it becomes more viable to pay off a mortgage over paying a pricier rent. I haven't even mentioned the decrease on the number of people claiming benefits, which is at least 80% of Somalis and over 50% of Bangladeshi women, and those are just the 2 I know. A lot of money also gets sent back home, so that ought to be taxed to the point the purpose of working here to do specifically that shouldn't even be a thing rather than a source of revenue. Prohibitively expensive, like, 100% of what you send back has to also be paid to the British government. £1 home = £! to the gov. 200% if you really want to discourage it.
(2) Decrease corporate taxes.
Population shrinkage would mean a smaller consumer market, meaning fewer buyers potentially leading to a shrinkage of revenues/growth for companies and such. This might end up translating to an increase in the prices of everyday products. To mitigate this possibility, and without introducing price caps, you could shrink the corporate and business taxes to offset these losses. The offset could help keep prices stable, or if reducing these taxes covers the loss of consumers and then some, maybe even see price decreases. A lower corporate tax rate could help to keep up the UK competitive compared to the neighbouring corporate tax rate of 19-25% seen across the rest of Europe. The only reason we didn't do this already is because Truss got couped and Europeans would get upset.
Alternatively you could reduce or scrap VAT, but in lieu of tariffs (which VAT basically is, just on both domestic and foreign goods), this allows foreign companies to undercut domestic ones via cheap overseas production and cheap international shipping.. Domestic goods could undercut others but at the moment British produce loses to European produce signifying an imbalance in advantage between the markets. The VAT could be scrapped for domestic products but remain in place for certain products/goods from overseas, incentivising domestic over foreign. It could be lowered still in that event, or exceptionally not apply to goods which cannot be produced with ease domestically such as electronics.
Corporation Tax: £97.7 billion in 2024/25.
VAT: £178.5 billion in net revenue for the year ending March 2025.
Total UK revenue
: £1,141.2 billion
VAT nets the gov more to spend with comparatively. You could cut VAT and raise corporate tax to compensate but it might just result in the same difference. Only cut once spending is reduced, don't increase spending to meet revenues. Just would need to make sure you're not borrowing to cover costs you're still forced to make in the hope increased spending = more tax revenue, which isn't a sure thing.
The hope would be that the spending reduces so much after applying certain fixes that scrapping VAT can be a given. For now, I'd rather it be in place than outright abolished lest other taxes get implemented just to cover spending costs. God forbid we get something like a property tax that applies regardless of income, learning the Americans have that gives me nightmares.
Cutting the sugar tax could probably be done without much of a hit.
(3) Cut
all pointless spending, and reduce spending where appropriate with decreased burden.
Foreign is gone, but that's only 1.1% of our spending. 24% of government spending, which is larger than our social security spending (old people + working age & children) at 22%. Health is at 18%. We have an entire sector of spending that is so nebulous it can only be categorised as "other" and it needs to be audited. We have "foreign aid" which is completely separate the "Conflict, Stability and Security Fund" which is to the tune of 1 billion a year and goes into reducing risk in nations in which the UK has "special interests". Gone. Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government - a 2001 Labour creation with a budget to the tune of 28 billion pounds. Half the responsibilities are vague and nebulous ("Building cohesion") and can be reduced in half if not abolished outright. Culture, media, and sport - 1.5 billion. Gone. Energy Security and Net Zero - 1.4 billion. Green energy endeavours have been a black hole for a country with no sun. Gone. Environment, Food and Rural Affairs - 5 billion. On what? Waste water is contaminated and rubbish rivers are Indian-tier - what are you doing? Scotland 40 billion. They collect 90 billion in tax. We do not need to subsidise them. Gone. Wales 17 billion. Little low actually, increase it by 40 billion pounds that was suddenly freed up.
NHS spending, social spending, police spending, public transport spending, etcetera - these will all decline if/when fewer people are putting stress on them. The only can is the potential loss of jobs as usage declines and the budget simply cannot keep paying for so many public sector jobs. Though many of these jobs might be staffed by imports meaning the unemployment hit might not be as big as it could, especially with doctors and nurses and carers who simply exist because the immigrant burden on the NHS necessitates their hiring.
The hope would be with decreased inflation, spending power returns to something decent. I wouldn't scrap or reduce taxes until I was absolutely sure the budget was in surplus or balanced at a minimum first to cover the costs. Debt and borrowing is anathema and it's given too much leeway for "spend first, budget later" just to secure votes. The total debt of the UK is £2.9 trillion, which could be paid off in 29 years with annual payments of 100 billion + 18 billion for the interest we already pay. Annual UK revenue is 1.15 trillion, so 100 billion payments are doable.
I would also expect there to be a lot of mass unemployment from cutting a lot of civil service jobs. My hope would be a decrease in the labour force will still be on par or below the number of jobs available in the private sector, meaning job providers might be forced to be competitive over wages in order to attract workers. Alternatively the mass exodus of Paki/Indian cornershops and takeaways will leave a gap in the market for locals to fill. Debt to GDP percentage will also definitely go over 100% because the GDP will fall as spending decreases, which is one of the big reasons we have a mass import of people to begin with. Taxes can start to be cut once there's a surplus, but debt repayment has to be a significant part of the budget because it must fall.
TLDR: Encourage
them to leave, pay them if you have to -> adjust the budget to be in constant balance with spending, with a smaller "public" there ought to be less public spending but other concerns regarding tax payers and possible unemployment -> debt repayment must become a mandatory and not insubstantial part of the budget, with cutting taxes only being considered once in a surplus
with a significant chunk of the budget dedicated to paying off our debt.
Taxes are a difficult area. We're technically paying the littlest in taxes relative any point in history but they're still a burden, primarily due to inflation reducing the actual worth of the money we keep. I imagine a lot of chagrin with paying taxes is knowing what it gets spent on (shit, foreigners, and so on) so imagine for many the string would hurt a lot less knowing it wasn't be used to subsidise Abdul
and the prospect of paying off a mortgage before the age of 50 has become a lot more likely.
I think some consideration should be made to imitate China with shamelessly benefiting our own domestic industries, farmers, and businesses over foreign ones but that's a different conversation.
How has a quarter of this thread fell for Russian psyops? The only good Russian is a dead Russian.
Blaming Russia for the boat crossing was basically the impetus for me to ignore anything involving them. If Russia is responsible for the migrants - a lie - but then they're accused of being responsible for other shit, why would I believe that if I know you've already lied before? When they're mentioned to be behind something it's just white noise to me now. This isn't the cold war where the threat of Russian nukes kept us compliant, it's obvious they're being used as scapegoat because the actual people to point fingers at would be too awkward to deal with. Blaming Russia means they can, in effect, do fuck all and be justified in doing it.
