The shame of Austerity Britain

I don’t think we would need to pay 33% tax - a much smaller increase would make a big difference. There must be a scale somewhere which tells you how much each extra penny tax raises.
There are lots of reasons people are being paid low wages but at the moment many jobs are now paying thousands less than they were a few years ago - 5-6k in many cases. Rents have not gone down and neither have many other things.
Maybe the people who do not wish to pay more tax could explain why they think that and what they consider would be a viable alternative. Most people are paying less tax now than for many years - one reason being the rise in the personal allowance.

In the 40/50 s people who were buying their houses paid an extra tax - scheduleA -I can remember my father filling in the form for it.

Beau. Labour are not anti semitic - they ARE anti Israel - which is a different thing. And among people of my aquaintance he is seen as the better option than we have now.

... but it is still less than people in a similar position in countries like Norway and Sweden are happy to pay for decent services.

Nan99 there are quite a number of party stalwarts on Gransnet. What are they doing to encourage their party's to bite the bullet and admit that good services cost money and that the only way to do this is by increasing taxation. Instead either ducking the issue or obsessively chasing low taxation and to hell with those suffer.

What is the option to the present government as they all seem the same.

MOnica. It depends where you are coming from. We pay corporation tax and personal tax. VAT. Council tax. Road tax etc. But we are not rich. Work all hours. We have in the past had 3 jobs between us when the kids were young. I feel worn out and it’s other people’s turn to pay more tax! My husband is past retirement age and works all hours. We support our adult children as much as we can.

Trust me, I am still working full time and I do not want tax at 33p in the pound.
Think of others who work like me and are now only starting to have a decent salary to do the things in life I want to do
I gave my son and daughter a good start but worked and went without.
If p/p does not mind paying that's ok, but I would strongly object.

Beau - So Rees Mogg? First decent politician! Really! Hypocrisy over the abortion pill, hypocrisy over Russia and hypocrisy over Brexit. How – just how can you say he is decent? The man is a hypocritical parody of a politician.

but lets all beecstatic at funding a royal family to the tune of 300 million + a year ..then the extra 30 million for security for THAT wedding that apparently most weren't interested in and didn't watch ...according to the official figures today !

Labour have no chance of winning an election as things stand - amongst most of my aquantance they are now seen as the anti-Semitic party of benefit claimants and immigrants. I voted Labour until 1997 - never again because Blair opened the floodgates which have never been closed, leaving us like an overpopulated third world country - that's the only part of bring British I'm 'ashamed' of. The Conservatives as they are now are too left wing for my liking as well.

M0nica – I certainly DID NOT vote for this government. I am more than willing to pay higher taxes – indeed I think it is my duty, but so many people don’t, and whether you like it or not those small groups and individuals could do a lot to alleviate things if they paid more taxes, or in some cases paid any at all! I try very hard to ‘do something about it’, but it is very difficult with people like Marieeliz burying their head in the sand with an I’m alright Jack attitude!

Speaking of which – Marieeliz – you really, and I mean really need to step out of your gilded cage/blinkered box and look at the world. It has changed immeasurably, some people, quite a lot actually, cannot afford the necessary fuel or equipment to cook, which is why so many rely on rubbish fast food. Those that use foodbanks are often working people who are just crippled by low pay, high rents, uncertain hours of work. I have known several young, hardworking couples who have been completely demoralised and crippled by trying to apply for top up benefit to supplement their low wages. One was made homeless due to ‘mistakes’ by the benefits agencies, who never apologise and are never wrong! My own brother, who is terminally ill and has to rely now on an invalid buggy, and gets worse and worse each day had to fight tooth and nail to keep his PIP payment. He has worked all his life! They were determined to take it before his 65th birthday, as if he still had it then it would be with him for the year or two he may have left. I can remember my own mother crying through lack of money and hiding from bailiffs. We struggled ourselves in the 80s crash and nearly lost our house. It doesn’t mean I think people today are milking it! It many ways I think it is worse. The country isn’t ‘poor’, but the wealth is now distributed in a very skewed way! It is certainly not trickling down.

Lyndie if you are happy with poor services and more food banks that is your choice, but I think the majority are not. Go back to my link about Sweden and Norway, both of which have the quality of public services we can only dream and you will see that they pay considerably more tax than we do.

It is a choice; pay for what we want - or do without. We cannot have our cake and eat it.

I heard on Sunday that we'd sent aid to a poorer country to the tune of 80 million. The leader of that country then spent 30 million buying a football team. That just galls me.

i agree with your posts M0nica

I am not prepared to pay more tax. We are taxed at every turn. It’s not just on our pay. We do need a wealth tax or a higher minimum wage. What we need is to make the pie bigger by more exports and the rich sharing more with the people that help them get wealthy. It’s a myth we are not building homes. Where I am we have four new estates going up of hundred if not thousands of houses and if you travel the country it’s the same everywhere. To compare our economy with countries of around 5 million isnt the same. We must now have nearer 70 million. We need more small businesses exporting. Starting a business is often costly and regulated to the lowest common denominator. We need fantastic education for our kids. I could go on.

Where is Labour in all this? Why aren't they speaking up about this and saying loudly and clearly what they would do to alleviate this poverty?

I think that Labour's attempts to oppose this are getting missed in the ongoing furore about Brexit. My local Labour MP has been very active in parliament in opposition to austerity but the messages just seem to get lost.

P.S. I'd willingly pay more taxes to help alleviate poverty and homelessness.

eee, Marieeliz We lived in a cardboard box in the 50s and we only went to school one day a wwek because there was only one pair of shoes in the family which we had to share...

In the 50s our economy was recovering from fighting a war that had bankrupted the country. Haven't you noticed that the world has moved on from then and that, as we are constantly being reminded, the UK is one of the world's richest economies. It is disgraceful, and completely unnecessary, that a large section of our population is experiencing poverty such as that described by other posters. And that the gap between the rich and the poor is steadily widening.

All for the sake of a an economic theory which is becoming more and more discredited.

I agree with almost everything written in this thread. It is surely the mark of a civilised society that we care for the most vulnerable and those in poverty - it does seem to be an ideologically driven policy to cut welfare and 'reform' it. It was not perfect in the past, no policy will ever be perfect, but it did aim to help the poorest, and that includes children. I just heard on the radio an interview with a mother who has to choose between food for herself and food for her children, and cannot always afford electricity to enable her to wash her children's clothes. A teacher said this mother was typical of the families in the deprived area where they lived. In this case it was Weston Super Mare, but will be duplicated in many other places. And we see so many homeless people on our streets, as well as food banks in our super markets. We are indeed a rich country! Surely we are getting our priorities wrong - the gap between rich and poor is widening. Where is Labour in all this? Why aren't they speaking up about this and saying loudly and clearly what they would do to alleviate this poverty? A whole generation of children growing up in poverty will be affected all their lives by this deprivation. Not just Labour of course - surely the Tories care (at least in theory) about poverty? Lib Dems? Maybe they should all consult the Child Poverty Action Group and Shelter.

How are things to be paid for if not from taxes?
If we could expand the number of people paying tax things would be a bit better but so many people working full time do not earn enough to pay tax and indeed are in deficit and need payments from the tax system. I feel so sorry for those people working hard and not really getting anywhere.
If we cannot get it right with paying better wages and therefore reducing the amount of benefits people need to claim for how we are to solve the problem? It is all very well saying that the NHS should be more like the French system but how would the people needing benefits pay for the top up insurance policies? It is age based rather than health based - the insurance companies are not allowed to ask about medical history although of course they gradually get an idea over the years by the bills they are paying - but what happens to the people with no insurance?

I feel the foodbank scenario is a way of left wing people trying to make out that this country is poor! I wait for the brick bats. In the 50's we were "poor" I saw my Mum cry for lack of money. We still ate though and cooked from scratch food being re hashed daily. Not saying it was right. It did it no harm though. Sorry but I think this is all a left wing rant.

I agree with everything MOnica says. Good services need higher taxation and we are all responsible if we keep voting for any party that offers to keep income tax at the current (or lower) rate.
In France the middle income (roughly £25,000 to £60,000 pa) tax is 30%. The health system is excellent and the French are prepared to demand a a good return for their money.

I was on benefits for a while in the 1970's and I would have loved to have access to a food bank as I regularly went without food so that my daughter could eat, as did a couple of other single mums I knew at the time. I donate food in Waitrose every week for that very reason.

Funerals barring poorest families! Yet still people either ignore the possibility of new world order or claim "crazies, tin foil hats". We've been watching all this unfold since the millennium.

but they shouldn't be needed in a prosperous country...... Exactly. Every time I donate to the food banks, I feel so resentful against the "powers that be" who are pushing us into this situation.

What disgraceful penny pinching. Not even allowing families to have the ashes? Surely this can’t be happening.

Poorest families 'being barred from funerals of relatives' because they can't afford to pay for them
Council tells loved ones they are not allowed to attend or have ashes if they cannot pay for a service.
Some of the UK’s poorest people are being barred from attending the funerals of loved ones as part of council cost-cutting, it has been claimed.
www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/funerals-barred-paupers-poorest-families-bracknell-forest-council-a8371496.html