My date of birth would point to me being a boomer.
I’d be really intrigued to know what economic “privilages” I’ve been so lucky to have
There’s a danger you are in receipt of a ‘gilded’ DB pension, and then voted to stop anyone else getting one, you selfish thing!
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Pensions, as outlined above.
Houses prices.
Student fees/grants (if you went to uni).
Just for a start
As it happens, I get a very prestigious and generous Army pension of £138 a month after tax.
The guilt I experience from this has led me to donate it to a young persons gaming club
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Reeves has got to go, if she backs this. Green investment my arse.
I am worried by the next general election, the UK will be going the same way as what is happening in the USA right now, with more Reform MPs getting elected.
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My fear is that Labour’s every move is going to be about trying to balance it with public opinion and we end up with 4 years of nothing truly getting done and Reform getting into government regardless.
I know right now it’s about treading water in the Tories’ mess, but there will become a point where Labour aren’t running a rescue operation on the country and they have options.
I am not at all trusting that Starmer will show the bravery necessary in those moments, just based on recent decisions by his government. I guess we can at least hope that he will be brave.
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I feel as though all the developments are simply reinforcing the pre-election feeling that there is no plan, no guiding principle. Labour are simply sleepwalking to the same fate as previous governments have, just blindly following public opinion as you have said.
They’re just abandoning popular policy proposals to pander to the right-wing press as you are saying, and abandoning any pretence of an interest in long-term governance, apart from making a show of it like the Heathrow expansion.
The problem with that is, once you look behind the illusion, there’s one important question: where’s the strategic vision/plan for the country? Instead of considering the very real benefits of the axed phases of HS2, with genuine long-term growth prospects from that and the added benefit of spreading that growth around the country, they waste political and financial capital on more (literal) pie-in-the-sky nonsense centred around London, for which even the most optimistic independent analyses just centre around wishy-washy nonsense about infrastructure unlocking possibilities.
It’s not just bravery, it’s just being clueless. It’s like ten Hag. No matter how strong a face or how much pandering you do, if you don’t have a plan anyway, you’re screwed. It’s not pragmatism, it’s not “making the hard decisions”, it’s just more pretending to do so while avoiding the real hard decisions.
A friend of mine said in 2017, that electing Macron doesn’t save France, it just makes Le Pen 2027 an inevitable reality. I can’t say they were right, but I definitely can’t say they were wrong. Same goes with Scholz and the AfD disaster looming. Starmer can either choose to be milquetoast and a one-term prime minister, or actually carry out the spirit of what he said, and tackle the hard problems no matter how unpopular they may be.
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Starmer is a power-hungry coward. That was blatantly obvious before the election. But people here were arguing that he would somehow swing to being more progressive once in power. Well he got a massive majority and the opposite has happened
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No. Not quite. Boomers were the generation after the war. The clue is in the name. They were the result of the post war baby boom.
(Edit: Apologies - This was dealt with)
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No that was Boris. I honestly havent figured out what Starmer is yet, and thats the problem.
He’s been dealt a shit hand, all the various government departments throwing other plans and problems into the mix on stuff and they’re lurching all over the place trying to address it all.
It feels like they’re missing someone to take hold of it all, calm everyone down and plot a direction through it. That should be Starmers job by the way.
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I think the issue here is that without the ability to raise taxes and without the ability to borrow, Labour are desperately compelled to go for anything they think can to stimulate the economy.
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I’d say most definitely a coward. Power-hungry? I don’t know about that. It doesn’t feel like it’s the case, because if he really was power-hungry he would probably go all-in on populism right now. It’s the in-thing.
I think he’s simply lost because he absolutely does not seem to have any conviction in any principles.
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Dont know but agree on lost, or at least buried too deep in it all to be able to step back and be objective.
One thing is for certain, for me at least. They are shit scared of taking on the overly wealthy and right wing press through taxation. They’ve become utterly paralysed by the manifesto red lines and are literally stuck in the mud over it.
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They have had exactly the same ability to consider the likely outcomes as everyone else. Other generations seemed to have managed to on the whole not vote for policies and parties that would make everything worse.
The Boomers seem to view everything through the sepia tinted nostalgia of a Britain they never lived in, and a World War they never fought.
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I think there is a lot of truth in that, but I’d suggest it’s also a bit pointless taking on the super rich through taxation. There is not very much income to be brought in through this means. All the wealth they would be trying to claw back is sitting in hedge funds and offshore accounts where we can’t get to it.
And the right wing press and influence sphere (I think we have to include social media in that too) are going to be a problem to any progressive politician or party. The form the opinions and voting intentions of the older people in the case of newspapers, and younger people in the case of social media. It’s going to be near impossible to do anything that moves against the interests of the super rich.
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Has any previous government ever floated the concept of tapering corporation tax in a similar way to income tax?
There was always a small companies rate until the mid 2010s. I think that was reintroduce couple of years ago.
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Was thinking more along the lines of higher the turnover or gross profit, higher the rate of corporation tax.
Maybe its already working that way, my only experience is paying the basic 20% rate?
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