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Rupert Lowe's vision. Summary for those who CBA to read it all - be like Trump. "What Reeves should announce today, but obviously won’t. Everything costs more. Food, rent, mortgages, insurance, childcare, energy, basic goods, services, the weekly shop, a pint. Britain is getting poorer, faster. People feel it, and they’re right. Inflation has eaten us alive. Wages wiped out. Savings eroded. Families poorer. Britain weaker. We are getting ripped off. Why? Because Britain is addicted to the size of its own state. Here’s what Reeves should say. Tax cuts. Lots of tax cuts. - Raise the personal allowance dramatically - let people keep the first £20,000 they earn, minimum. No tax. It will cost, but the savings it will produce from encouraging people back into work will be vast, - Slash Income Tax/National Insurance, especially on middle-earners who’ve been squeezed the hardest. This is uncomplicated, Rachel. REWARD HARD WORK. - Remove the stealth taxes they all pretend don’t exist - fiscal drag and frozen thresholds which quietly rob the British people every year. - Give overseas skilled British workers vast tax benefits to relocate their tax revenue and skills back to Britain. Bring them home. - Cut back VAT, reduce fuel duty, cut alcohol duty, none of this sugar tax bullshit. - Stamp duty, gone for British families. Let’s get the property market moving. - Licence fee, scrapped. On the bonfire. Day one. More cash in the pocket for families. Unleash British business - Cut Corporation Tax to the lowest rate in Europe. Undercut them. Compete. Win. - Push back dividend thresholds and taxes. If people are successful, ENCOURAGE IT. - Abolish Business Rates for small firms. Bring our high streets back. Turkish barber/vape shop fraud crackdown too - let's root out the criminals. - Slash Employers’ National Insurance - the single biggest reason small firms won’t hire more staff. OBVIOUSLY. We need to get that right down. Non-negotiable. - Supercharge deregulation, especially for small businesses. A redtape bonfire visible from space. Let it burn. - End the HR-ification of Britain. Bosses should be able to sack people, and they’ll end up actually hiring more because of that. - Scrap IR35, immediately. Leave people to interface between themselves. - Double the VAT threshold, possibly more. Overnight, vast growth will be unleashed from businesses hovering just under £90k. The figures show it already! - Super-deductions for investment, including capital allowances and R&D incentives. Encourage people to invest and they will! - Get police policing, and restoring some confidence for investment. Make Britain safer, and that will make Britain richer. A brutal restructuring of the welfare state. And I mean brutal. - No benefits for foreign nationals. If you arrive here, you contribute. If you’re here and you don’t? You leave. Billions saved, with one stroke. - Mandatory work requirements for all those able to work. If you want support from taxpayers, you must give something back. A fair time to search for a job, but then you’re put to work. Picking litter or whatever else. - Full disability fraud crackdown using data-matching and HMRC-style enforcement. Weed out the piss-takers. - A cap on total household benefit claims - it should never pay more to stay home than to work. Never. Drive for self-sufficiency. - Domestic energy production on a huge scale, like we’ve never seen before. Drive that cost of energy down. Fracking. North Sea extraction. New nuclear. Gas storage. Cheap dependable energy = lower prices for everything. It’s that simple. - Food security, with domestic output boosted and less reliance on foreign supply chains. - Support British farming. Scrap the family farming tax. Use the public sector’s purchasing power to BUY BRITISH from our farmers. End dependency. Boost farming apprenticeships. - A national infrastructure plan focused on logistics, ports, roads, and freight efficiency. The cheaper it is to produce and transport things, the lower prices fall. Places like Great Yarmouth with our fantastic port will boom. Stop building roads in Guyana, and use that money in Britain. A robust plan to deal with the cancer of inflation. - Immediate ban on money-printing (QE) without explicit Parliamentary approval. No more splurges by the Bank of England and that toad Bailey. - Slash public spending - genuine far-reaching cuts. Nobody is safe. All departments. - Foreign aid. Gone. Entirely. Billions saved overnight. - Freeze all non-essential recruitment across the entire public sector (excluding front-line staff). A workforce pause, until inflation is under control. Then follows strict limits. - A structured debt-repayment schedule, legally binding, to get those vast billion debt-interest payments falling. If you want some awful perspective - we now spend more on debt interest than on defence. No serious country on earth behaves like this. Britain does. It’s like some third world African tinpot dictatorship approach to economic affairs. - We need to cut the debt, not just the deficit. - Public sector pension liability - all off balance sheet. Needs a total overhaul as state employees are radically cut. Stop importing poverty, crime and sex pests. - Shut down all illegal migration with mass deportations, rapid removals, third-country processing, and no exceptions. Billions saved on abolishing asylum and related costs. - Cut legal migration to net-negative, especially low-wage migration that undercuts British workers. - Remove those who are a drain. If they’re claiming benefits, living in social housing, unable to speak English, refusing to contribute? Thanks, but your presence is no longer required. Bye. - Deport foreign sex pests and criminals. Make our towns safe again. Watch how investment flows back into our dying high streets. We must urgently cut back the bankrupt British state. Growth only comes from the following things. A smaller state. Lower taxes. More people working. Fewer people scrounging. Cheaper energy. Stronger borders. Mass deportations. Actual production. That is it. Reeves sadly does not have the balls to do what is necessary. Britain needs an economic revolution".

Fox

The like minded people you associate with are not most people. Some people respect the need for a welfare state, and appreciate that not everyone who needs that welfare is a lazy scrounger. Are you seriously suggesting that disabled people who can't work, for example, shouldn't have kids?

Decent work done on immigration.

Yep. The difference is minimal.

Driving under 20 in a 20. Needless.

Half. Unusually benevolent of you mate.

Yep. A bit of a nothing budget. I thought pension contribution tax relief would be hit and I'm surprised that's stayed as it was. I was also expecting NI to extend to other incomes. The reduced cash ISA allowance kind of takes us back to ISA origins with a bigger allowance for stocks and shares. People who want to invest £20k at low risk can just whack their cash in a largely cash or bond based fund anyway so there'll be ways around it if people want to find them. Hopefully that'll settle the markets, and we see a rate drop to give us a much needed jolt.

Yep. Starmer is no lefty, and that's becoming clearer. He wants to be something to everyone, but he's the opposite.

Like revoked. It was for the pre edited version.

Yep!! I think that's the first on here that'll get universal support.

Yep. It's daft regardless of who proposed it. That it's labour is surprising and disappointing.

You agreed with a comment that someone was calling for change to help criminal lawyers. My point is that this doesn't help criminal lawyers.

Its where the investment goes. On one hand there's the judges to service the work. On the other there's the lawyers and the budget. I can say with certainty that there isn't a pool of either, and nobody wants to do legal aid crime. KC's are paid less than trainee solicitors in high street firms. Just chucking more money at the legal aid budget but at current rates won't get the work serviced.

Good. I saw the whining from someone in the media. We're in a world of expectation, rather than needs, and any form of welfare should be more about the latter.

? Where's the suggestion that criminal legal aid rates will increase? Without that, an increase of cases means more criminal legal aid lawyers are expected to work for terrible rates. I'm missing your point.

Criminal legal aid rates are shocking, despite the review. Counsel and Solicitors don't want to do the work, and understandably so. We'll eventually move to an employed public defender model is imagine, but under the current system more cases will mean more adjournments due to unrepresented defendants, and a lack of prosecutors.

Shackled by Still.

Aye. I was guilty! Contempt before investigation for sure. Fair play to the lad.

Yep. Decent players who were poorly coached and managed. Not sure what this new lad is saying or doing, but I like it.

Yep. His height and pace is great. Everything else isn't.

I think it's a bit of both. It's a pace and height decision.

Different issues entirely. Whatever Trial system we have, our sentencing approach needs overhaul.

Ha! The correct solution imo is to have a complete rethink of our sentence structure, and invest heavily into a rehabilitative justice system. Prison is of course necessary, but rarely helps rehabilitate and prevent repeat offending.

I'm not sure how. There's an abundance of jurors out there, and removing them from the equation still leaves a trial, which still requires a judge, a court room, an usher, prosecution and defence counsel, etc. There isn't that court space, those Judges or the budget in the system. I also doubt sufficient underpaid legal aid defence lawyers would be available, ditto prosecutors. That's all aside from stripping away the right to elect a jury trial in many cases, which is a massive part of our legal system. Terrible decision for me.