Keir Starmer

That’s because they earn a huge share of all income. If capital gains and inheritances were taxed like wages, they’d pay more.

That’s a myth, not a stat. It’s never been 20:1 — the real ratio was about 4:1 in the 1990s and is about 3:1 today, projected to be 2:1 by 2050.

That figure is for all disability claimants, not just new ones. The rise reflects awareness and diagnosis, not fraud.

The rest was even more misleading and not worth a rebuttal.

 

I fully agree, but these 3 things also apply to benefit claims,

not declaring true profits on business to make a claim on the benefits system

Taking cash for jobs and not declaring it etc

So it isn't necessarily just big corporations as has been mentioned before - this also could come back to if a more fair system was in place would it stop this behaviour to a degree?

Big corporations will undoubtedly have 100s/1000s of staff that pay into the system that dont have the ability to syphon things off

 

What % of the population do you think pensioners would have to represent for that to be true?

 

To be fair back in the good old days of the 19th century that percentage might have been close to accurate..

If you ignore the fact that pensions didn't exist back then

 

I don't dislike you YT, but on these sorts of things you come across as being some sort of judge and jury on these sorts of issues if someone has a differing opinion to your own - don't believe everything you read on AI

Your ideology at times is very strange - but each to their own

What you are really failing to see in your flowery world is that middle england - and I'm not talking multi millionaires here - has a big fat X on their back - the big hitters can go and live where they want

There was nothing misleading on the latter points as you suggest - you have your opinions I have mine - life is full of contradictions and I'm sure you have some capitalist stances that you might not be aware of !

 

It's interesting that you responded saying "they could also apply to benefit claimants."

I purposefully didn't state who I was referring to and kept it open to interpretation. Yet your perception was to defend the rich at the expense of the poorer or that i was doing the opposite. Anyway...

I very much agree that taking cash in trades and the like are negatives and essentially evade tax. Hopefully HMRC's push to live reporting and cash being more limited over time will eradicate this. But when you consider so many trades will ask for cash. That avoids vat, corporation tax, income tax, NIC's. Yet no doubt "the working man" would bemoan into their Daily Mail about the unfairness and use some form of whataboutery.

There is plentiful tax avoidance and evasion in higher realms of earners. I've said multiple times that in my working career I was approached on numerous instances by "advisors" trying to save me tax. Offering to assist in creating vehicles to create losses, offset losses, be paid in the form of loans. I didn't entertain such ideas. But no doubt many others did. And for paying a sizeable chunk of money that could have been tax to advisors instead, they benefitted themselves and hindered the treasury.

Large businesses have saved billions a year by offshoring operations in other tax jurisdictions and creating over inflated administrative costs to apportion back to the UK and mitigate taxable profits. I think the likes of Apple and Amazon were huge culprits.

There were the likes of Vodafone who had dinner with HMRC and handshook on saving around £6bn of tax.

There are many many more examples. But collectively, if we clamped down on avoidance and people truly paid a fair due share, we would claw most back from large corporations and the top 1%.

The top 1% have schemes to avoid tax in this jurisdiction. As a result, in percentage terms, they pay a much lower rate of tax than those in the normal tax band do. You can disagree by all means... but that doesn't remotely seem fair to me.

 

I get that your a real starmer minion who can do nothing wrong. Your reply that it's all the Tories fault and labour could do nothing to stop any of this even though in there election pledge was to stop the people smugglers over 30k migrants have crossed in 2025 alone. Costing the tax payer billion to house these people in hotels. While the country's ****** and working peopleand business owner are getting taxed more and more.

We should be taking a proportion of GENUINE asylum seekers wether from Palestine, Ukraine or wherever. And migration should be controlled but it's out of control at the minute and working people paying taxes are sick of it.

 

I am not an economist by trade, but I've often been interested in the Ted Talks and stuff written by Joseph Stiglitz. Depending on your political persuation he is consudered arguably to be one of the world's eminent economists.He was on tv some years ago talking about how to generate growth in the economy. He said "if you gagave a working family a $100 extra a week they would spend it and as such boost growth. If you fage a billionaire a $100 million in a tax cut he wouldn't because his primary goal is about wealth accumulation. and unearned income.

 

they have made it worse so far. You. don’t turn this absolute disaster round. When you have no guiding principles and just chase votes it soon shows people aren’t daft. There’s no road back for Starmer. There could be for a Labour Party that wants to be more progressive. If will need to learn to play nice though with The Greens and others.

 

That was the way the thread went from a previous reply, but fair enough it wasn't from yours and I've not read enough of your previous comments (As I haven't with most) to form a full opinion of where you stand. But, that said, I do think the benefits side is a hugely abused part of the system and as recent goings off in the commons proves, is very difficult to go after - as there is ultimately alot of genuine claims that get dumped on. On the flip side the millionaires/big institutions can afford the best of the best tax advice and can move about accordingly - with money comes power - This is why middle England is going to be the fall guy in all of this as it is an easy target

 

It really isn’t and unless they do something major to redress the inequalities in wealth distribution it’s what people are going to remember when casting their votes in 4 yrs time

 

When are they going to start?

 

Middle England aren't the 1% though are they? Middle England are more likely now to vote Lib Dem, be happier paying tax and want reform of social care. And to rejoin the EU... which in itself would generate growth and open up better more transitory labour markets and embed enhanced trading.

There will be abuse in all sectors. But my point remains. If you clamped down on evasion and got your actual fair portion of tax from all cohorts. The top 1% and big business would be the ones most would be clawed back from. Add that into the treasury coffers and the shambles this government picked up would be much easier to deal with.

 

Well the point is I have security on my home I don't leave my door open and wouldn't let anyone in I didn't know. Same goes for border security australia deal with boat crossings very different to the UK and have options avaliable if people want to come and work and contribute to the country.

You mentioned millionaires in a post regarding illegal migrants. So far this government has took pensioners winter fuel, upped tax on small businesses, gone back on waspi, inflation is sky high, I can see why working people are fed up with spunking billions each year in taxes. And not sure if your millionaire and billionaires should pay more tax towards this.

 

So how do you propose it is stopped instantly?

 

What you will do by going after big business - as the government has found out with multi-millionaires - is they just go elsewhere

Middle england is the bigger demographic and not as powerful as the corporations / big hitters - so it is far easier to go after them

 

It's irrelevant who they vote for and what they want, as we have Labour for just under 4 more years.

 

Is that true though? If we taxed Vodafone would they stop selling in the UK? If Amazon was forced to pay a fair share of tax would they shut up shop and say **** it to their billions of UK profits?

 

But the only way to establish a genuine asylum seeker is to process them. The only way for them to apply is to arrive here by whatever means they can and request asylum. Around 1/3 of applications from small boats are rejected and these people are deported.

The focus on asylum seekers is missing the point. Its reducing net migration that is key and most of those are arriving legally into this country for work. It actually reduced from 900k in 2023 to 400k last year so steps are being taken. The government has actually worked really hard on that but all people ever want to talk about is asylum seekers, small boats and hotels, detracting from the real immigration issue

 

What actually happens is they threaten to go elsewhere but actually don't, not to a large degree anyway.

It's interesting that inspite of the Mail et al suggesting investment and wealth is being taken from the UK, the FTSE is at it's highest level ever. Yes, some of the tax dodgers will go offshore. But not many.

The argument of trickle down is busted. The tories tried it for most of their 14 years at the expense of public investment and we generated the square root of f*** all growth in that time.

I don't know if you saw the other day that execs of the biggest firms had the highest annual pay rises of any group. In excess of 7%. They'll also want massive bonuses given general stock market performance of which they've played minimal to zero part in. That just widens the gap more. And benefits the economy nominally if they use schemes to avoid.