From my Twitter account this morning:
Do I need to say more?
Despite all that is going on in the world, Labour thinks that sweet shops are the big issue that it needs to tackle, and that this issue was worth a Christmas press release.
Talk about distraction activity.
I despair.
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There’s also a report in the Guardian about Labour outsourcing asylum claims. Read properly it seems Labour is considering processing asylum claims in a third country, the difference being that successful claimants will then be given the right to stay in the UK. If they can do that why do they need a 3rd country? Why not process people close to where they start their journey? Unless it’s because this sounds like the Rwanda plan, and so will sit better with the voters
I have not got the energy fior that today
I may do it tomorrow though
Why not process them here is the real question?
Again tackling the symptom not the cause
A better idea of course and in the same way that Richard you bring a practising accountants experience to tax may I bring my Local Government experience to play and say why not make the owners not the tenants liable for the Council Tax which would save no end of trouble.
It would
But let’s not pretend that it would not be passed on, because it would be
If the charge were to be passed on, then the landlord has a problem with a non-payer, rather than government coffers. John Boxall’s suggestion about changing the rules of liability is an excellent one.
I agree with that
If, of course, you can find the landlord.
There has to be an automatic right to attach a charge to the property in the event of non-payment if this is to work.
Billing authorities already have that right (to put charging orders on properties for non payment of council tax or business rates where the owner is liable).
Is it an automatic charge though?
What’s wrong with them?
Honestly……………………………………?
I have two grandsons in their 20s. Both are angry about tax avoidance, money laundering and other doubtful aspects of our country. They are adamant that the large number of “sweet shops” are not to sell sweets but to launder money and avoid tax on a massive scale. They like the idea of a “crackdown” on their activities.
Well, if that was really the issue I’d start with the rash of barbers shops in East Anglia right now, most never seeming to do much business, but seemingly very well equipped and taking the place of hand car washes, maybe.
Add to the barbers shops and car washes, a rash of Albanian restaurants – also empty – in Leeds
I have never heard of an Albanian restaurant
Yes, it’s a real problem – in some areas.
JohnP’s grandsons have it right, it seems.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/04/us-sweet-shops-rip-off-customers-business-rates-owners
Starmer dressing up like Boris Johnson now!
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/keir-starmer-military-photo-estonia-b2468597.html
Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson are spinning in their graves.
This smacks of Labour getting their excuses in early… “We’d really like to properly fund the NHS but, y’know, sweet shops…”
Good grief! With all that’s wrong with the world and in need of hopeful attention from politicians with vision and principles, here’s Sir Useless Woodentop hard at work trying to win the Irrelevance Derby!!
It’s what I call “a strawberry ice cream” moment, taken from that wonderful passage in “The Caine Mutiny”, where Captain Queeg wants to know why the strawberry ice-cream ran out.
So he gets the ice-cream container filled with sand, as has his crew solemnly queue up to have portions of sand/ice-cream doled out, to test the capacity of the container and see if someone
cheated – all while his command of his crew is going to hell in a handcart!!
Starmer deserves to be mocked out of Leadership of his Faux-Labour Party. What’s he going to be like as PM? A nitpicking authoritarian, subjecting the country to subjugation by endless boring bureaucratic “strawberry ice-cream” Questionnaires, form-filling and irrelevant Fiscal Tests and Rules = boxes nicely and neatly ticked, while the real economy slides off into oblivion.
What a woeful prospect! Fron which, may God, or fate, preserve us!
He’s just as incompetent as Johnson but far less amusing.
A much better recruiting sergeant for Scottish Independence.
It is said that parties do not generally win elections, the governing party loses them.This is clearly Starmer’s Labour tactic. I think Karl Popper’s theory that “”Democracy happens to be the best type of political system because it goes a long way towards providing a nonviolent, institutionalized and regular way to get rid of bad and rulers—namely by voting them out of office”” https://iep.utm.edu/popp-pol/ is starting to look very strained by the drift to increasingly bad, and worse amoral, rulers worldwide particularly in both the USA and Europe. Their offering of bread and circuses to the largely uninformed largest minority of its citizens with scapegoating and dehumanising of the poorest and most vulnerable both here and abroad seems to be worryingly effective.
“Talk about distraction activity.”
I agree, given that the policies it offers are, at very best, vaccuous, if not damaging for the country.
Thus something on corner shops/sweet shops will get some headlines and distract journos from asking the hard policy questions to which the party in question has no answers – just “The Sound of Silence”.
I predict more of the same nonsense — “lollipop ladies (do they still exist?) with helmets and flashing lights?”