edwin_m
Veteran Member
I don't have much time for the Tories but I do think Gordon Brown made a big mistake with tax credits. Why should the taxpayer be subsidising employers who are paying their people too little to live on? If there are companies that only survive by paying these wages, do we really want them in the UK? Osborne tried to cut back on this, along with raising the minimum wage, but being Osborne I suspect he was motivated by the good of the Tory party rather than the good of the country and I'm thinking his numbers probably didn't add up for many of the people who would have been affected.
I'd also suggest we should crack down hard on companies that use staff who claim to be self-employed, and on multinationals that export their profits to wherever it is most "tax-efficient" to declare them. I also think that austerity has been too much and too fast, knocking the stuffing out of the economy by cutting back on things like benefit payments which tend to be spent quickly in deprived areas, and decimating social care and other local support services so that the people concerned have to be looked after more expensively by the NHS. The result has been that austerity has done very little to reduce the budget deficit as was promised.
All this (and other things over many decades) has totally alienated a substantial part of the population from the people that are supposed to be running the country. I see the Brexit vote as an outlet for that frustration, driven by certain influential people wrongly blaming the EU and immigration for troubles that have mainly originated in Westminster. This will clobber the economy further, particularly the people who are suffering most today and who voted most strongly for it, and remove one of the safeguards that prevents the cabal who have taken over at Westminster from doing whatever they want.
I'd also suggest we should crack down hard on companies that use staff who claim to be self-employed, and on multinationals that export their profits to wherever it is most "tax-efficient" to declare them. I also think that austerity has been too much and too fast, knocking the stuffing out of the economy by cutting back on things like benefit payments which tend to be spent quickly in deprived areas, and decimating social care and other local support services so that the people concerned have to be looked after more expensively by the NHS. The result has been that austerity has done very little to reduce the budget deficit as was promised.
All this (and other things over many decades) has totally alienated a substantial part of the population from the people that are supposed to be running the country. I see the Brexit vote as an outlet for that frustration, driven by certain influential people wrongly blaming the EU and immigration for troubles that have mainly originated in Westminster. This will clobber the economy further, particularly the people who are suffering most today and who voted most strongly for it, and remove one of the safeguards that prevents the cabal who have taken over at Westminster from doing whatever they want.