I have to agree with the FT's editorial this morning that says:
Theresa May's government has made a bad mistake. Philip Hammond, chancellor, has dropped an increase in national insurance contributions for the self-employed, as proposed in the Spring Budget. This is a case of short-term expediency trumping long-term sensible policy.
They're right. And they're also right to ask:
If the Conservative party cannot stomach a modest taxation change such as this, how will it cope with the other policy challenges of the coming years? Demographic facts mean that on health, housing and education, spending demands are only going to increase. There is little fat left to cut.
To add to the list of crises we face, the inability of the government to govern is one of perhaps the greatest concern.
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They are still the only credible government available, unless you live in Scotland.
Credible, that is, for special values of credulity with an extra helping of malice and disaster. But they really are the only available government, and we’ll probably have them until 2025.
This back pedalling will almost certainly now result in the Government focusing even more closely on those that claim to be self-employed in an attempt to recategorise them as employees. Something the Government will claim doesn’t break their manifesto promise.
An obvious target will be the army of people working for companies such as Uber, but I wouldn’t be particularly surprised if they are even more interested in all those contractors using their own Limited companies, people that have been targetted for many years.
The cost of complying with all the additional legislation that will now come along and/or being recategorised as an employee will greatly outweigh the small increase in National Insurance that had been proposed.
For many people this will be a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire.
It has never bothered any Government (Labour, Conservative or Coalition) whether people being taxed as employees actually have access to any of the rights related to employment, so people can expect nothing other than a tax bill as part of this process.
They could start by looking at Government and Public Sector. The demand for a reduction in numbers of people employed has led to exactly this form of “self employment” by sectors such as NHS England.
They don’t do FixIt it’s more like BreakIt first, aka ‘Brexit’. The Right’s politicians cede control to their backers to gain office, and fiscal policy for the common good goes out of the window. Their philosophy – there is more to be gained through negative actions (populism) than evidence based policy.
1. Chomsky;
“The standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital.”
2. Leonard Cohen 🙂
“Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied” etc, great lyrics
3. Owen Jones (today);
“Britain is in chaos”
4. An investment manager I know, through a love of rugby;
“I love crises, I make money from people acting hastily”
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UikhLJNLFK4
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lin-a2lTelg
3. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/14/britain-tories-union-scotland-brexit
You could call this issue The Attlee Problem or the Stanley Baldwin Problem as a matter of choice. Both faced serious and hard decisions. Both tried to address them inevitably being unpopular and facing a hostile media. Both lost power. The situation now is particularly bad and the question is what crunch is going to come.
Tory strategy: keep Dacre/Daily Mail on side, pander to the electoral base that can be bothered to turn out @ elections, stay in power & stuff the rest of the pop. Everything flows from the above. In terms of policy changes – it will all be ad hoc & the EU exit used a cover (= blame the EU for all bad things). I predict significant civil unrest.
In my view they are not even trying. But with hardly any opposition, why would you?
Given the mind boggling complexity of the Brexit negotiations are these the people whom you would want in charge?
No!
I think the word coming out of Brussels about a year ago was that the EU teams were rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of taking on the Brits in the event of a Brexit, because they knew (having worked alongside them) that they were hopeless. ‘Can’t play chess…and can’t play poker’!
As a now retired local government worker it breaks my heart what is happening now. The approach of Thatcher in the eighties was to promulgate the idea of compulsory competitive tendering in the expectation that public sector work would be transferred to the private sector and provide better value for money. This has not worked as it has not provided the ‘value for money’ expected as private sector contractors withdrew from contracts deemed unprofitable and lead to increased costs.Indeed studies from the USA show that value for money is not guaranteed through privatization. So the new attack on public sector provision is through starvation of adequate resources, which would enable them to function efficiently, in order to ‘persuade’ the general public that the only alternative is through private sector provision.
It is pure greed driven by their inability to think of any real entrepreneurial activity