Coronavirus Pandemic

[Letters]

lso the way they calculate council tax is BS - we're paying way too much just because of a postcade and the fact that the older houses here with much bigger (though not more) bedrooms are worth over £1m which ours is nowhere near

This is the trouble with council tax (or any tax) being linked to property prices is that they have gone so high in some areas.
Our place is worth about half a million. I am fairly well paid but if I was starting out now there's no way I could afford it. The only reason we managed it is I bought my old place for about £120k and sold it for over £300k. That - and a bloody great mortgage - is how we made the leap.
There are plenty of people who are living in houses which are worth a lot but have either lived in them a long time - so they bought them when the prices were more sensible - or they have inherited. Living in an expensive house doesn't mean that you are cash rich or have a good job and can therefore afford high Council Tax.

IMO - although this is too simplistic, but would be a start - they should just take what they need in income tax and then leave me alone. People who earn more should pay more, I think that's fair although that needs to be balanced against incentives to progress. And I guess taxing things like second homes is fair. For most people though, I don't see why we should be taxed at every bleeding turn. Inheritance tax is a massive piss-take IMO. It's not likely to affect me, but in principle it seems wrong.

[Mac76]

This is the trouble with council tax (or any tax) being linked to property prices is that they have gone so high in some areas.
Our place is worth about half a million. I am fairly well paid but if I was starting out now there's no way I could afford it. The only reason we managed it is I bought my old place for about £120k and sold it for over £300k. That - and a bloody great mortgage - is how we made the leap.
There are plenty of people who are living in houses which are worth a lot but have either lived in them a long time - so they bought them when the prices were more sensible - or they have inherited. Living in an expensive house doesn't mean that you are cash rich or have a good job and can therefore afford high Council Tax.

IMO - although this is too simplistic, but would be a start - they should just take what they need in income tax and then leave me alone. People who earn more should pay more, I think that's fair although that needs to be balanced against incentives to progress. And I guess taxing things like second homes is fair. For most people though, I don't see why we should be taxed at every bleeding turn. Inheritance tax is a massive piss-take IMO. It's not likely to affect me, but in principle it seems wrong.

well let's face it, it was all a Tory plot to make Labour councils unpopular because they knew Tory ones would slash services etc and not give a f**k whereas Labour would feel they needed to maintain them, not least because those services would be more in demand in traditional lower-income Labour areas

[Niall_Quinn]

Inflation. That's how they'll steal from the poor to pay the bill for their Covid fiasco.

Tax allowance frozen until 2026. That's 5 YEARS of inflation. Millions of low earners will drift into the grasp of the tax vampire and everyone else will be robbed at an increasing level for the next 5 years. And people will blame the supermarkets and the oil companies, instead of the bastards who engineer all this. No income tax rise, yay! Well count your pennies now and see how many of those pennies you have left in 5 years. It's devilishly ingenious because they know inflation is bursting through the ramshackle monetary dam.

Corporation tax on small business rockets. I say small business because the multinationals don't pay tax at all, so couldn't give a fuck.

The low and middle income workers and small business - soaked. Tories don't change their spots.

[Niall_Quinn]

Here are the views of a child abuser from SAGE's psychological warfare unit, expressed today in the Guardian:

So, what are the benefits to getting primary schoolchildren to wear masks? For one, whatever little degree of transmission is occurring in these age groups could be limited. It could also help normalise the practice – young children wearing masks may make their families more likely to accept masks, said Susan Michie, a member of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behavioural Science, a Sage subcommittee.

You see what kind of people (can you even call them people) you are dealing with?

Or not dealing with, unfortunately.

[Letters]

Here are the views of a child abuser from SAGE's psychological warfare unit, expressed today in the Guardian:

You see what kind of people (can you even call them people) you are dealing with?

Or not dealing with, unfortunately.

This is a sort of phrase you use quite a lot. I remember you used it when talking about people who interviewed the USPS dude. The people you said were "trying to get him to change his story" because he'd alleged fraud. Except I listened to the whole recording and found that he didn't allege fraud. And the people he was talking to were perfectly polite and respectful throughout and certainly weren't trying to get him to change his story.
They read the affidavit back to him - not written by him, written by the ironically named Project Veritas - and he admitted that he couldn't stand by what that affidavit said. It grossly exaggerated anything he saw or heard, he admitted himself that he half heard a conversation and his "mind might have made up the rest". Direct quote. When they read the part of the affidavit which said that the men had, in a previous conversation, interrogated him the man actively objected to the use of that word. When the man revealed he was recording the conversation - something you claimed the man had done secretly - they said they were fine with him continuing to do so. They clearly didn't either stop him recording or demand he hand over or delete the recording, otherwise we wouldn't have heard it.

And it's these men about whom you previously said that if I listened to it I would "know what sort of people we were dealing with".
Well I did. And I heard a perfectly cordial conversation. You listened to the same thing and, through the lens of your paranoid world view where "they" (I think "they" are generally anyone with vague authority) are out to get you, you heard something completely different.

So who is right?

Well, the things you claimed about it - that the man alleged fraud, that the men he was talking to were trying to get him to change his story, that the man was recording it secretly - are all false. It's not my opinion they are false, it's all there in the recording. I went through it in some detail at the time and I gave all the verbatim quotes which demonstrated that. I've repeated a couple above. Your only response was to grumble about the fact I bothered to listen to the recording.

I have laboured the point about this incident a bit over the last few months. I'm not doing it to make you look silly, I'm doing it in the hope that maybe you'll try some introspection and consider that maybe you need to start looking at things a bit more objectively, stop thinking that everyone is out to get you. They really aren't and I don't think going through life thinking they are is doing you much good. Nowhere near as many people as you seem to believe have malicious intentions or ulterior motives.

[Letters]

Corporation tax on small business rockets. I say small business because the multinationals don't pay tax at all, so couldn't give a fuck.

https://www.simplybusiness.co.uk/kno...mall-business/

The rate of Corporation Tax paid on company profits will increase to 25 per cent – but with some crucial protections:

- the new rate won’t be introduced until April 2023
- small businesses with profits of £50,000 or less will continue to pay the current 19 per cent rate
- the rate will then be tapered up, depending on business profits – only business with profits of more than £250,000 will pay 25 per cent
- The Chancellor says that this means only 10 per cent of all companies will pay the 25 per cent rate.

The government has announced a £5 billion grant scheme for England to help high street businesses reopen after lockdown.

Around 700,000 businesses will be eligible for the grant, including shops, salons, gyms, and restaurants.

As non-essential retail opens earlier, grants to those businesses will be worth up to £6,000.

With hospitality opening later, individual businesses could receive as much as £18,000.

The government has introduced various grant schemes while restrictions have been ongoing. The headline Local Restrictions Support Grant was initially designed to support businesses suffering reduced demand or forced to close under the ‘tier’ system, but was subsequently updated to cover national restrictions too.

The Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS), or furlough, was the Chancellor’s headline scheme announced before the start of lockdown in March 2020.

Initially designed as a short-term measure to protect jobs and livelihoods, the government has announced that it’ll now run until 30 September 2021.

If you employ people that you’ve furloughed, note that the support will be tapered – you’ll need to contribute 10 per cent towards hours staff don’t work in July, increasing to 20 per cent in August and September.

Simply Business’s UK CEO, Alan Thomas, said: “We welcome the decision to extend the furlough scheme through to the end of September. With small businesses accounting for 48 per cent of all UK jobs, this is an essential lifeline for millions up and down the country, and is another show of support to the SMEs who will be key to our collective recovery.”

[Letters]

Went to a leaving do a year ago today.
Was the last social thing I went to before things were "normal". Think I went to church on the 8th and I think that was the last time we met as a whole church.
(We do still meet in person as churches are allowed but reduced numbers and social distancing and all that)

[Marc Overmars]

Yeah I had a mates 30th birthday do this time last year, the last time anything really felt normal and probably the last time my entire circle of friends were all in the same space together come to think of it. Feels like an age ago.

Roll on June 21st.

[Mac76]

are you really all going to rush out and go crazy on that day though?

i'll be hanging back and let eveyone else get it out of their system i think...

[Letters]

I probably won't, but I bet it'll be carnage on that day
Although, that day could well change. I kinda expect it to, but we'll see.