[Tubby Isaacs]

Progressive old Jez there, chucking around tax payers money to people who don't need it. If poverty isn't inevitable now, as of course it isn't, it certainly wasn't inevitable in 2017 when Jez ran for government on cutting benefits below George Osborne to pay for abolishing student fees- that progressivism again. The 2 child cap already existed, so sounds like it was staying. As I said before, if far more people claim pension credit now so they get the winter fuel allowance, that's a lot of the poorest people being better off.

As ever, no budget for buying back all these utilities. If we save 2% a year from abolishing profits , that's less than the cost of borrowing, so not actually raising any extra money for a long time. The trouble with mail is "

"Wealth tax" (something he failed twice to run on)- can he tell us how much that would raise? How do you value eg shares in unquoted private companies? What about wealth abroad? How do you value that? Taxes on UK land are better and impossible to avoid. Jez did have that in 2017, but they retreated from it because the Tories hit them with "garden tax". So this "simple solution" is something he didn't run on. Worth saying at the same time that Reeves is not ruling out rises to capital gains tax and inheritance tax. If these happened, then they'd certainly be progressive.

I think the fiscal rule is too tight, and should be more space for borrowing for investment. But that's not the same thing as borrowing for day to day services, and Reeves is right to be wary of that.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

a) I'm Labour to the core.
b) I'm a pensioner.
c) I was getting winter fuel allowance.
d) I absolutely didn't need it, but I saw people who did.
e) I agree with removing it as a blanket benefit.
f) Give mine to the people who need it, a loss for Crisis at Christmas but I've got broad shoulders and will donate anyway...

[Abernathy]

Just read this interesting take on my Facebook feed :

Winter fuel payments were a Labour idea. They were introduced by Tony Blair at a time when many UK pensioners were likely to be in poverty - in both real and absolute terms.
Nearly three decades on, around a quarter of British pensioners are now in the millionaire bracket thank to decades of taxpayer subsidy to support wealth accumulation in the form of home ownership and healthy private pension funds.

Further help came from the measures to fight pensioner poverty introduced by Labour after 1997, and credit where it’s due - the Conservative governments that followed.

Pensioners are now the least likely demographic to be in poverty. The media meme of a freezing old lady under a blanket is not an accurate representation of the typical British pensioner in 2024.

As the triple lock continues to increase our state pension to levels enjoyed in other OECD countries, it makes sense for specific measures introduced by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to fight pensioner poverty, including free television licences and winter fuel payments — to become means-tested, or stopped altogether.

I’m sitting on a train right now, literally surrounded by well-dressed, healthy looking pensioners having a jolly day out using their senior citizens rail cards.

They don’t need additional support, and neither do I.

It’s time to shift the political focus in favour of younger people, including young families, who have been truly shafted in recent times. Politics is about choices, particularly when our economy and public services are on their knees after 14 years of Tory incompetence - Keir Starmer has made the right choice.
That’s the message that the government needs to be putting across.

[Andy McDandy]

Jez's idea of a wealth tax is basically a bunch of people going door to door in posh streets asking "How much have you got? Hand it over."

[Crabcakes]

On the one hand, I am 100% convinced that doomsayers who claim any form of wealth tax will by default scare off investors, businesses and entrepreneurs are talking out of their arses.

On the other, I am 100% convinced a Corbyn-designed wealth tax would rinse everyone designated as ‘well off’ by an absurdly simplistic and context-free ruleset and scare off whole swathes of society.

Like the ‘free broadband’ wheeze being a well intended idea but one that just wasn’t really needed, would have knackered a load of businesses and bogged down infrastructure upgrade with public sector red tape.

It’s never the principle. It’s who you trust to do the planning and execution. And old allotment boy couldn’t plan his way out of a gazebo.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Jez's idea of a wealth tax is basically a bunch of people going door to door in posh streets asking "How much have you got? Hand it over."

It's not even that. It's that he reads in the paper that somebody's wealth is x, and HMRC send them a bill asking for 1% of it.

[Tubby Isaacs]

On the one hand, I am 100% convinced that doomsayers who claim any form of wealth tax will by default scare off investors, businesses and entrepreneurs are talking out of their arses.

On the other, I am 100% convinced a Corbyn-designed wealth tax would rinse everyone designated as ‘well off’ by an absurdly simplistic and context-free ruleset and scare off whole swathes of society.

Like the ‘free broadband’ wheeze being a well intended idea but one that just wasn’t really needed, would have knackered a load of businesses and bogged down infrastructure upgrade with public sector red tape.

It’s never the principle. It’s who you trust to do the planning and execution. And old allotment boy couldn’t plan his way out of a gazebo.

The free broadband was classic. They made reasonable points about how eg South Korea had much better broadband, then proposed a solution nothing like what South Korea does, and which (by a happy coincidence) tied in with what he'd have said 40 years ago. Nationalise it and it'll be free, definitely, because no dividends. He could have given everybody claming a qualifying benefit a voucher to spend on broadband, or even just increased benefits, which would have solved the problem that he identified far more quickly than nationalising.

As I understand wealth taxes, you don't even have to leave to avoid a big chunk of them. If you own a shedload of foreign assets, you can just transfer ownership abroad somehow (not even to a tax haven, anywhere without a wealth tax will do, which is nearly everywhere). Of course, you can't shift land abroad, so that would be liable. So why not just tax land more?

[Abernathy]

Saint Jezza's latest bit of Facebook philosophy :

If the country's finances are so bad, then why are we still spending £50 billion a year on the military?
If there's no money left, why are we spending £12,000 a minute on nuclear weapons?
If we can afford to bomb people, why can't we afford to feed people?

[Yug]

Setting aside the utter ridiculousness of leaving the country totally undefended, has the economic superbrain considered the effect on the economy of over a third of a million people suddenly being thrown on the dole? Plus the civil servants who support the military? Plus the civilian companies who supply the military?

If we're going to go down that road we might as well let the Tories back in and tell them to do whatever they want. The end result will be about the same.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Defence cuts in the current environment, brave call. About all we're missing is "Don't poke the Russian bear".

World's oldest teenager.

[Abernathy]

Corbyn has been trotting (pun intended) out precisely this sort of claptrap for the past 40 years. Yet when he had a real and tangible route - as leader of the Labour Party - to being able to effect the sort of changes that he keeps banging on about, he proved comprehensively incapable of doing so (and never mind the fucking "mainstream media").

He has virtually no credibility whatsoever. Must be some right gullible twats in Islington North.

[Tubby Isaacs]

And those silly "£x per minute" things never end well for the Left. The Right is always going to win that. "We're spending £y on the NHS/asylum seekers/ benefits". That's why any adult does % of GDP or £x per capita per year.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Corbyn has been trotting (pun intended) out precisely this sort of claptrap for the past 40 years. Yet when he had a real and tangible route - as leader of the Labour Party - to being able to effect the sort of changes that he keeps banging on about, he proved comprehensively incapable of doing so (and never mind the fucking "mainstream media").

He has virtually no credibility whatsoever. Must be some right gullible twats in Islington North.

Labour should have run Paul Mason against him. You needed somebody with profile, and Mason would have done hustings and stuck it to him on his weakest points.

He's no doubt built up a decent following from his constituency work. I'm not impressed by stuff like campaigning against depots on the basis of bullshit, nor against rationalising hospitals in Inner London, but lots are. And in fairness, I hear he's good on stuff I would be impressed by.

I think though that lots of constituencies would like the idea of a bloke who sticks it to the "neoliberal parties". If you can get North Herefordshire to vote Green, Islington North voting for Jez isn't much of a surprise.

[Tubby Isaacs]

At the risk of boring everybody with my hobby horse, it was the Brown Government (who'd funded the NHS properly, whatever else their faults) who proposed that savings could be made to the cost of the NHS in London by centralising various services in different places. This makes sense to me- not just the cost, but the chance for medical staff to improve as they pool expertise and see more cases. Obviously, if the area is too big, it's less satisfactory. See the kicking Labour got for sending services from Kidderminster to Worcester. But opposing this stuff in central London is the sort of thing Lib Dems do in by-elections.

If the NHS in London were funded from the Mayor's budget, I think there'd be much more rationalisation (as I call it). It's different if money comes from central government (or doesn't). People just see the nuisance of having to travel further for treatment. The Mayor could say, yeah, we've done that, but it's helped us to higher a load more cops or whatever.

[Bones McCoy]

At the risk of boring everybody with my hobby horse, it was the Brown Government (who'd funded the NHS properly, whatever else their faults) who proposed that savings could be made to the cost of the NHS in London by centralising various services in different places. This makes sense to me- not just the cost, but the chance for medical staff to improve as they pool expertise and see more cases. Obviously, if the area is too big, it's less satisfactory. See the kicking Labour got for sending services from Kidderminster to Worcester. But opposing this stuff in central London is the sort of thing Lib Dems do in by-elections.

If the NHS in London were funded from the Mayor's budget, I think there'd be much more rationalisation (as I call it). It's different if money comes from central government (or doesn't). People just see the nuisance of having to travel further for treatment. The Mayor could say, yeah, we've done that, but it's helped us to higher a load more cops or whatever.

Major's reforms, which broke NHS England into trusts make this extremely difficult.

Here in Scotland we have Health Protection Scotland and Health Facilities Scotland.
Collections of 20-30 people including various specialists, some highly rated on a global basis.

The equivalent job at a 3 hospital trust in England is either a seriously over-stretched jack of all trades.
Or in many cases the function has slipped into procurement as the services are now outsourced.

This was why NHS Wales and Scotland organised their own Covid committee, after failing to get a straight answer to.
"Can NHS England provide any scientists to this committee?"

NHS England does retain a few centralised functions, the best known being NICE (Clinical excellence).
Beyond that, and a few other exceptions, your only stab at centralisation lies in the Civil Service.

There is a compelling case to centralise the management of facilities and protection (prevention) issues.
The prevailing structure makes it extremely unlikely.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Didn't trusts replace health authorities? Was it easier to rationalise across these?

This is the story I was thinking of.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has denied the government plans the mass closure of district general hospitals.
He was challenged on plans for reform of the NHS in London put forward by new Health Minister Sir Ara Darzi, a practising surgeon.

Sir Ara Darzi proposes 150 new polyclinics - super GP surgeries - in the capital, alongside more specialist hospital units.

Critics believe this would put traditional hospitals under threat.
Although Sir Ara's report focuses solely on London, he has also been placed in charge of a fundamental review of the NHS across England

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6288366.stm

I see now that the controversy wasn't just about rationalising, but about polyclinics. In fairness to Jez, maybe he was opposing these as much as hospital centralisation.