It's staggering to me that £46 billion goes to HM Revenue and Customs. So it costs £46 billion to administer £506 billion in tax revenue! That's almost 1/3 the budget of the entire NHS!
That doesn't seem like a good ROI at all. A product of an over-complicated tax system?
If you go back a year you can get some detail into what HM Revenue and Customs spends it's money on (90% of it is under the title 'social protection' which is child welfare and tax credits). The collection and enforcement looks like it costs 4 billion at most.
Tax credits deserve some scrutiny. A significant portion of tax revenue is effectively being paid as a subsidy to businesses allowing them to systematically underpay their staff.
I don't know what their actual budget looks like, but I do know that they're huge and have been making significant changes around digital transformation. That would result in high spending followed by later savings.
In spite of a mostly balanced budget, the growth of non-current liabilites is accelerating. I wonder if this just is due to an aging population and it's effect in pensions or if there are other factors.
UK state pensions obey the so-called 'Triple Lock' rule where they increase in payout yearly according to the greatest of:
1. the growth in national average earnings;
2. the growth in retail prices as measured by the Consumer Price Index;
3. 2.5 per cent.
This causes an additional increase in pension costs over time on top of the effect of the country's aging population and is a source of resentment among some young people.
In the short term maybe? A forward shift in age threshold is essentially a one-time reduction to expected future pension expenditures, whereas the triple lock and increasing post-retirement life expectancy are continuous increases.
Not sure if this is the cause, but non current liabilities are very sensitive to changes in discount rates used to calculate the present value of future expenditure. The Nuclear Decommissioning provision, for example includes costs projected until 2137. In the last accounts it went up 76bn just from changing the discount rate.
The UK has shifted many expenditures which used to happen up front (say, building a hospital) onto long term contracts with ongoing payments through the Private Finance Initiative. That could well be the cause.
That is a great idea. Understanding government expenditure on some level should be a fundamental part of a citizen's participation.
I don't yet fully understand how to read it. It's not really clear to me what the difference in income and expenditure is - the impression the diagram gives me is other that income is balanced by expenditure, or that there is a budget surplus maybe. I think I recall that there is a budget deficit that the government runs.
That doesn't mean it's understandable to the average person. SpaceX could send me detailed schematics of every rocket that launches and I wouldn't have a clue how it works.
I voted leave because I was dubious about the control the elected and unelected officials and secretaries in brussels had over British politics, and the rats nest of well paid jobs with crazy benefits waiting for british politicians in brussels when they retire from british politics, so long as they play nice with the EU and go along with the will of the government in Brussels.
The "NHS bus" is a talking point very aggressively focused on by the remain campaign because it's an easy thing to point at as disingenuous, But I feel like there's a lot more nuance to the choice to leave the EU than many "remainers" believe.
It's harmful to national discourse to narrow the argument for either side down to misinformation or this "they don't know what they're voting for" narrative (not saying you're asserting this, I've just seen it said a lot) because it chips away at the very concept of majority rule and proportional representation.
That's actually a good point and well said ... 3 years ago.
However, today you cannot make that argument with a straight face when Boris is a PM with a very weak democratic mandate, actively undermining the democratically elected Parliament, doubling down on the lies made by the campaigns, pushing for highly damaging (according to the Government own assessment) economic measure.
From the Cambridge Analytica scandal we know that the bus not only worked, but it is the tip of the iceberg of a propaganda machine without conterpart in the remain side.
I can't believe that on HN, Brexit is still seen as a "remainer" vs "leaver" problem. Brexit has exposed a much deeper rot and threat to democracy, not in the EU, but in the very heart of the UK institutions. Brexit is not a liberating process, it is a threat.
(Lets call him "Johnson". "Boris" is either patronising or affectionate, and neither is appropriate for a head of state.)
No Conservative government has served an entire term with an outright majority since Thatcher in the 1980s. Johnson is in a sense "unelected", but his premiership is no less legitimate than that of Cameron or Major.
Like it or not, Johnson was the "biggest" voice behind the successful Brexit campaign, and it is therefore appropriate that he is tasked with making Brexit happen, and taking responsibility for its success or failure.
Its completely fair to say that Brexit is an economically stupid and possibly xenophobic project, but its not fair to say that Brexit is a threat to democracy. Brexit is exactly what democracy looks like at its best: the people forcing the ruling classes to make decisions that are against the ruling class's own interests.
EDIT: Johnson is of course the head of government, not the head of state, since the UK is a monarchy.
There is nothing about Brexit that is against the ruling class's best interests. They're the only ones who are actually going to benefit from it in the form of huge profits from shorting the pound and selling off public services. It's all outlined in Rees-Mogg snr's handbook on how to make millions out of the misery of the working class.
Brexit is not a threat to democracy in the absolute sense.
It is a threat to democracy because, after 3 years, we now know that it is a power wrestling within the ruling class, for the exclusive benefit of the ruling class. All the good reasons you may have had before and right after the referendum are irrelevant now. What Brexit is and what it is used to do is clear for all to see, and it is not a democratic excercise.
To take a less loaded example: that's like sending money to a charity "Food for Africa Children" and realising 3 years after, your money is instead funnelled into buying a super yatcht for some billionaire somewhere.
Feeding Africa Children is good, giving money to charity is good but you can no longer make the argument that "Food for Africa Children" is good, and you can no longer claim any moral high ground if you continue to support that organisation.
You are probabaly a remainer, as am I, but you are using a remainer's justification for a re-run. And pretending leavers believe this. They generally don't.
No significant proportion of people have changed their mind. The leavers still want to leave, everyone's sick of parliament dragging this out for years.
Many remainer's are still hoping for some sort of magic unicorn waving it's horn and we'll stay in.
The time to do that was 2 years ago, not now, just get it over with already.
Re-run or no re-run does not change much to the threat I mention.
The problem is the post-truth targetted propaganda campaign has been de-facto legalised.
The current government behaviour, especially in a country without written constitution is similarly going to set a very bad precedent. A lot of the process works because the opposition and government are expected to behave in gentleman-ish fashion, but this government is resetting the rule to "anything is ok to stay in power".
The government is abusing its 50% of the population into distrusting Parliament and the Judiciary at every opportunity. They do the same with the civil service.
You can't expect Labour or other to "stay civil" when there is a party winning with those strategies. Maybe not at the next GE but surely the one after that, all that you see today is going to be the new normal. And that will affect the UK only major asset, its softpower. One that is gone, the future government will have to double down on the propaganda to distract the masses. If your voting power is limited to vote for "mystery candidate" with manifesto in no way grounded in reality, you have a democracy in name only.
To be fair you don't need anyone to change their mind for the outcome to change, Leavers skew older so mortality would swing the result in remains favour.
Id agree that each side is entrenched, I still think you need to have that vote, or come up with an option somewhere between the 2 camps, not swing to an even further extreme as we seem to be doing at the moment. No deal wasn't a thing we were discussing in the run up to the referendum, it wasn't even a thing we were really discussing this time last year.
If we go back to the original data visualization, is that really what happened though? Especially on HN, I think we can all concede that decisions are only as good as the data they're based on. Can you honestly claim that the leave side's economic understanding matched the reality? Is it really "democratic" for the people to force action based on the carefully-crafted misinformation they've received?
I’m not sure this is true. Cameron had a majority government after the 2015 election. Prior there was a coalition government which also held a majority. May lost the majority after the snap election and had to build a coalition with the DUP and others. In Johnson’s case he doesn’t have any majority at all. It’s a weird situation that only exists afaik because of the fixed term act, as the PM can no longer trigger an election when he loses the majority. The current situation is far from normal.
Correct, the Fixed Term Parliament act was supposed to cure a government supposedly "abusing democracy" by calling an election at their whim. Well at least that seemed to be the LibDem line during the coalition.
In requiring a super-majority, and a search for a second government first it's badly broken the system. As we can see, there is a government 20 odd votes short of a majority stuck there. Stuck there having lost every vote they've called. Stuck there because they are trying to evade the extension parliament voted for, that would take EU membership beyond an election.
I am intrigued though, that neither side has made calls to repeal the Fixed Term Parliament Act, despite it very clearly not being fit for purpose.
"I am intrigued though, that neither side has made calls to repeal the Fixed Term Parliament Act"
Boris Johnson doesn't want an election. It was suggested after the first vote that he could table something that only required a simple majority, but he didn't, you cant really argue it's people against parliament, when you are (hopefully) a majority of parliament.
Those against a hard Brexit don't want an election now because it impairs their ability to do that, plus its been nicely illustrated to them why you don't want too much power to reside with the executive.
Exactly. The FTPA has been a disaster here. What should have happened was May's deal being a confidence vote back in March, so either it would have passed or we'd have had a fresh election.
> It’s a weird situation that only exists afaik because of the fixed term act, as PM can no longer trigger an election when he loses the majority
And even then, it only exists because Johnson is overtly trying to use the disruption of an election as a mechanism to enable no-deal, which is why Parliament refuses to let him have one.
Its true that Cameron won a majority in 2015- he just didn't manage to serve a full term. John Major took over from Margaret Thatcher (and so was unelected) and then despite winning the election in 1992, lost his majority again in 1996.
So yes, it seems shocking, but the last Conservative leader to win an election and then serve a full term of majority government was Thatcher from '83 to '87
...and that was only because of the early election on the back of the Falklands dividend. They were shaping up to lose badly until then, or at best a hung parliament.
> Brexit is exactly what democracy looks like at its best
Both democracies and markets assume informed participants for their proper functioning. If the participants are not informed or misinformed then both democracies and markets can be gamed by those “in the know” at the expense of the misinformed.
Yes, the current government does not have a majority, but this was due to internal strife caused by the leaver/remainer dynamic within the halls of power.
Fair enough, the UK government is rotten to the core and the lot deserve to be thrown out and strung up. But they won't be, because the UK population is frustrated, but misinformed and distracted.
The problem with your argument is this; Brexit was not a vote on the corrupt local government, it was a vote on the corrupt EU government, and changing the focus on this matter doesn't change that.
The fact that a 80% remain parliment is supposed to represent a 52% leave population is ridiculous.
The fact that the supreme court were permitted to make walking away from the negotiation table illegal, thereby making it not a negotiation but a discussion of the UK's servitude from this point onward, is a disgrace.
If you cannot walk away from a negotiation, you're not negotiating. Your discussing the terms of your slavery. The task of getting the UK out of the EU in any kind of positive way is now utterly impossible.
So I'm afraid this is a remainer vs a leaver problem, because the majority of the population ("leavers") are not represented by the majority of the government ("remainers").
That is the problem with British democracy, not the steps taken by PM Johnson to put in to affect a desicion made by the people in the referendum!
> The fact that a 80% remain parliment is supposed to represent a 52% leave population is ridiculous.
Come on now. 544/650 MP ran for a party that had Leave as a Manifesto promise in the 2017 GE.
Yes individual MP could disagree with their party and defy the whip, but that is an overwhelming cross-party majority in favour of leaving.
In comparison, no party ran with a "Remain" outright manifesto, rather with a "Let run the deal against Remain" in a confirmation referendum. Only in the last weeks, Labour has sided with the confirmation referendum, and rejected last week to campaign for remain in that referendum.
> The fact that the supreme court were permitted to make walking away from the negotiation table illegal
That's nonsense. The supreme judged the suspension of Parliament by the PM illegal. It is loosely related to No Deal.
> thereby making it not a negotiation but a discussion of the UK's servitude from this point onward, is a disgrace.
> Your discussing the terms of your slavery.
That's appeal to emotion territory here.
International negotiation like leaving the EU do not have the information asymmetry where leaving the table is a real asset. As advanced economies, the threat of instability or uncertainty is enough to keep both the EU and UK in search of a win-win agreement. In addition, the UK is an important contributor to the EU budget and the USA would only too happy to step in, so it is clearly in a position of strenght ... relative to its geopolical and economic size. A good deal is achievable, just not the cakist deal that was promised.
> supreme court were permitted to make walking away from the negotiation table illegal,
No, Parliament made this happen. The Supreme Court has not ruled that no deal is illegal. The most recent ruling was that proroguing Parliament simply to stop it acting was unlawful. You've been misled by the rightwing fake news sources again.
Parliament isn't "80% remain" either, even the Labour party haven't officially given up on the idea of "Lexit" yet.
The cost of "walking away" is huge. That's what the discussion has been about. The UK could walk away from its obligations and put a fence across Ireland. Or not do so and turn NI into a VAT fraud centre. It would just be a colossally stupid and negative thing to do.
At every stage Brexiters assume we could walk away from "them". Brexiteers have never thought about what might happen if they walked away from us and put the barriers back up.
How do you feel about the unelected House of Lords? Or, for that matter, the election-untested Prime Minister and his definitely unelected SPADs?
The EU parliamentarians are paid well, but I think there's a staff quality issue here and that UK MPs are actually underpaid; for the hours and responsibility, it's basically a company director level job.
(Of course, the only people that take EU pay and deliberately do a bad job or fail to turn up are ... UKIP MEPs)
Edit: I missed your reference to "proportional representation", which of course we don't have in the UK parliament either. Which is why the government was able to be formed with only about 42% of votes, plus a veto of the 0.9% of DUP votes. We have a semi-proportional system for MEPs, though.
> (Of course, the only people that take EU pay and deliberately do a bad job or fail to turn up are ... UKIP MEPs)
Well that's blatantly not true. And their "job" is to represent their voters, which they are doing. "We shouldn't be here," was their cry in the Euro election.
Absenteeism/disruption by representative politicians is perfectly fine in my book, as long as that's what they campaign on.
>I voted leave because I was dubious about the control the elected and unelected officials and secretaries in brussels had over British politics, and the rats nest of well paid jobs with crazy benefits waiting for british politicians in brussels when they retire from british politics, so long as they play nice with the EU and go along with the will of the government in Brussels.
What do you base this on? It's clear that this sentiment is shared by many brexiteers but what makes you think that? And what makes you think that an independent UK will be impervious to having external interests mingling with internal affairs? At least as a member of the union you have a voice during the elections, I doubt you'll have nearly that much influence with your post-brexit commercial partners (of which the biggest one will be... the EU).
If anything, as a European myself, this Brexit crisis only served to make me respect the work of Brussels more than before because of how professional and rational their response has been so far. On the other hand the circus going on inside and outside 10 Downing Street makes the news almost daily. I guess that what I'm saying is that I'll gladly leave you your pure bred British-loving MPs and I'll keep my European Deputies. And if they get good benefits then good for them, as long as they do the job correctly.
I wish people wouldn't characterise the UK leaving the EU as "gaining independence". The UK is was and will be an independent state with UN membership and sovereignty, including the right to leave international organisations.
What of the rats nest of well paid jobs waiting for British politicians, and the revolving door to and from Westminster? Priti Patel, current Home Secretary, twice censured and one resignation in her short career for misusing public office and not revealing financing. Or BoJo and the apparent dodgy funding of Jennifer Acuri. Or Nick Clegg now in charge of Facebook ethics or some such (seems fitting somehow). Or the expenses scandal - now infamously moats and duck houses. There are hundreds of other examples.
How exactly does leaving help?
In the morass of abuse, personal gain and lies that is modern politics it's often the EU and those unelected folks in the Lords who hold British government to account. It's been the EU that has limited the worst excesses of both NewLabour and Tory of governing for the haves, and forgetting the have nots. As I understand it there was a lot of additional regional development funding that could have been claimed for UK regions, but wasn't. Because politics.
I know Hacker News policy is to not talk about votes, but can we please be more vote friendly to this user, especially as they're new? I find it's very rare to see a Brexiteer in my usual bubble so I'm grateful to hear the opposing view. (At time of making this comment, the parent is greyed out from down votes.)
Appreciate the support, but I usually lurk specifically because I know my opinions aren't welcome.
Despite this shortcoming I enjoy HN and happily read the lower vote comments first in every thread, haha.
Unfortunately this is pretty standard on HN, plenty vote down just because they don't like the other person's point of view, irrespective of the quality of the argument.
At this point, anyone who's still a Brexiteer has engaged in some extremely selective listening. There's no point in having a discussion with someone who won't seriously address the entirely likely problems of Brexit, both as a concept and how it is currently being done.
(I mean, Brexiting to the status of Norway might at least have been feasible, but that's now a long way in the rear view mirror.)
I'm personally very worried about sentiments like the one you express. The smug complete dismissal of another's viewpoints, complete refusal to even just listen, generalizing over all people with the same ideas...
Opinions like being in favor of Brexit are not in any sense as fundamentally objectionable and unacceptable even for disucussion as, for example, nazism or racism. Political divisiveness is a significant issue, and behavior like this is only going to make it worse.
Being in favor of Brexit a few years ago was defensible - I used to be a moderate Euroskeptic myself. Being in favor of this Brexit here now is exactly what you're talking about: it requires dismissing all the other viewpoints and possible problems, such as the Irish border and what happens to people from whom freedom of movement is removed.
"Smug complete dismissal of another's viewpoints" is exactly what the Tory government has done, and exactly why it's got into such a mess.
This is the same kind of shit as the faux neutrality news reporters are held to on scientific topics. But, suddenly, because it's political we should then listen to their shit viewpoints?
If you don't want to listen, I can't force you, but what's the point of poisoning the discussion so the people who do want to listen, like me, don't get a chance to? How can you even say their viewpoints are "shit" if you don't know what they are, what the nuance is, the context. Is that opinion informed, or is it from out-of-context snappy soundbites repeated from your filter bubble?
This dismissal of an entire group of people who just happen to have a different point of view to you is a major part of what is so toxic about the Brexit debate and political discourse in general.
There is always a point in having a discussion with someone, even when they are severely misinformed and blind to their own biases because neither of those makes their perspective void, just harder to understand. But gaining that understanding is the only road available to you that can lead to them changing their perspective. Additionally, no matter how much sense you make to yourself and how much nonsense the other individual appears to be spouting, the moment you dismiss even the possibility that you yourself are wrong and that they could have a valid point, albeit poorly articulated, is the moment you throw away the claimed high ground of being rational.
There was however a significant amount of misinformation coming from the leave campaign which are hard to ignore and given our current situation are fairly relevant. For example it was repeatedly stated that a vote to leave didn't mean a vote to leave the single market or that Turkey was joining the EU which will 'flood' the UK with Turkish immigrants.
The leave campaign was extremely successful because it targeted different groups of interests with different messages. That's why none of those different interests can now agree on the final outcome.
If I was you I'd also be slightly dubious about the dark money behind all of the pro Brexit 'grassroots' campaign groups.
Didn't intend to imply that the Leave campaign was performed wholly in good faith, I'm not so naive as to think that there are not parties that benefit from the weakness of the pound and instability that the unprepared government has caused scrambling to react to a referendum the majority of MPs were sure would come up remain.
However your point on the leave campaign is only one side of the story;
The BBC's coverage of the lead up to the referendum was overwhelmingly pro-remain, the figures I've seen (though I don't have them to hand) were 80% pro-remain coverage.
Additionally, the remain campaign had full overt government backing; Every single household in England recieved a flyer explaining why David Cameron and his cronies thought that the UK should remain, which is much more penetration than any slogan on a bus could get.
Thanks for your reply, it's nice to have a reasonable debate with people with differing opinions on this matter, usually I just get called racist for voting leave and have trouble explaining my views after that.
So the government and BBC being (unfairly perhaps) pro-remain is a reason to vote leave? Yes, you can argue "both sides were unfair". But one side was unfair by lying, the other was unfair by using their position of power to spread correct (but favorable to them) information. Not the same kind of unfair at all.
The problem is that so much of the Leave argument is based on easily debunkable misleading news stories in the press, that it's impossible to give it 50/50 coverage without people being (rightly) outraged about the low quality of the coverage. The BBC is not obliged to give airtime to political flat earthers, but it still does anyway.
From my point of view they helped create the problem by running Farage et al on Question Time far more often than the electoral popularity of their party would warrant.
I voted Remain partly because I am dubious about the control of elected officials in the UK. I feel like some of these concerns have been vindicated as part of this process.
Regardless of one's original outlook, I'm sure we can all agree that this is just one political party slowly shitting the bed over the course of three years. I'm pretty disgusted that they spent three years failing to get a deal past themselves and now they've shat so hard they've tossed their majority.
UK MEPs have only ever voted _against_ 2% of laws introduced by the EU (laws about human rights and closing corporate tax loopholes), they have voted _with_ 95% of the time. There's a reason for this, they took part in the shaping of those laws.
Now we have no way of shaping laws throughout the continent we're a part of. We've thrown it all out the window because someone told you that the EU is trying to stop us from having bendy bananas.
First paragraph: We can choose to take on and add similar laws to our own government from outside the EU, including HR and tax loopholes, without having to worry about getting suckered in to things like the EU army (the latter of which is the reason why members of the armed forces overwhelmingly voted to leave.)
Second paragraph: Bit disegenuous to throw a "you voted leave because XYZ" at me when I specifically posted my reason for voting leave in the post you're replying to...
> worry about getting suckered in to things like the EU army
There is a veto right in the EU on everything defense related, nobody is getting suckered into anything.* I know that, you know that, why do you perpetuate the lie?
*Except for the UK military into the Iraq war because their so-called "representatives" didn't and don't represent them. But that's another story.
The "EU army" has been rather oversold, but why do people object to it when they don't object to NATO? Is this rooted in the actual structure of the EU army or is it based on what people read in the Brexit press?
> ... because it chips away at the very concept of majority rule and proportional representation.
I'm not entirely sure how to read this comment. This country has one of the least representative electoral systems in the whole of the EU and this is for the commons, nevermind the wholly unelected lords.
Do you recognize that this comment doesn’t expose anything contradictory in the OP? The British system can be far from ideal, and yet it still wouldn’t be better to overlay an even less accountable, more centralized government on top of it.
I think the point is proportional representation. For instance, as a Lib Dem or Green voter living in a constituency with a strong Labour or Tory majority, you are not represented in the UK parliament at all.
Being able to influence EU decisions through the EU parliament, which uses a more proportional voting system, at least gives you some democratic representation and accountability.
Besides, "overlay" is not quite the right word for the relationship between the EU and the national level. The term used in Article 5 of the EU Treaty is subsidiarity, which essentially means to handle things as locally as possible and as globally as necessary to solve the problem. So it's not like the EU gets to overrule national parliaments on anything and everything.
Of course you can endlessly debate what's possible and necessary in each individual case. But that's unavoidable. They're having the exact same debate in the US and the proponents of Scottish independence have yet another take on it.
Fair enough, maybe that's the wrong term to use, after all just after the leave vote UKIP got an eighth of the national vote and no seats in parliament, so from the right wing point of view that's a poor term to use as well.
Fair point regarding the house of lords, though I was under the impression they were more veto holders/policy checkers vs actual writers of law. Though I'm no expert.
Good for you. Unfortunately, I have encountered quite a lot of people who do care about the money.
Today, just half an hour ago, I saw someone tweeting that the EU was “bleeding the UK dry” by “taking” “£1 billion per month” [1] so I’m fairly sure that quite a lot of people did actually vote on the basis of the money.
[1] 1e9, or roughly 0.01% of the EU-(annual)-GDP per month
I should’ve mentioned that the tweet in question demonstrated a belief that the money is of substantial importance to the EU, which in turn is part of a broader meme that the EU is reliant on the UK and would be bankrupted by its departure. My comparison is part of an ongoing frustration I have that so many leavers not only care about the money but also don’t understand the scale difference between the UK budget contributions and the EU economy.
Yes, better to compare to UK gov budget in the linked article. So £12B vs £772B, or 1.5%. Also the the £12B doesn’t include the rebate or other benefits, so the real value is less.
> The amount is in and of itself irrelevant. What really matters is the ratio of that amount to the benefit the UK gets from free trade with the EU.
I only recently learned about the mistake-theory/conflict-theory dichotomy. I think the benefits don’t matter to a conflict theorists, only if insert-tribal-leader-here likes it. (There are at least four relevant tribes that support Brexit, at least five that don’t, and in one case they share a leader who has been carefully trying to keep both sides on his team).
I am almost entirely a mistake theorist on that axis.
2a. If a Pole used to a certain living standard is happy to work for a lower wage than a Briton who is used to a higher standard of living then is that good or bad? Is it ok to have an opinion about it? Is it ok to have an opinion about it if you are a low paid Briton and a million Poles move to the UK?
2b. The UK is of finite size. Population is concentrated in certain areas within it. A significant growth in population has an effect. It affects traffic ("but we could build more roads" "but maybe I like the countryside and don't want more roads"), it affects housing ("but we could build more accommodation" "but maybe all that housing will be built close to jobs and amenities and thus be small and ugly and result in more crowded towns and cities and maybe I have a subjective view about that"), etc.
3. Foreign aid budgets and charities. More can be done. Make a donation! Be the change!
4. National security. Food rationing in the second world war. Farmers look after the countryside. Maybe we like to have farms and farmers. Is it ok to like to have farmers and farming? The EU thinks so - read about the CAP.
My point is that none of those arguments have anything about them that makes them specific to nations. For example 2a could equally be said by someone in London about immigration from the North.
Why do we let these arguments have force at the national level but ignore them at subnational and supernational levels?
"Why do we let these arguments have force at the national level but ignore them at subnational and supernational levels?"
Because nations already exist and are they are accepted. Sometimes their borders are accepted too.
Around 2015 I had a conversation with a Slovenian who told me that if I didn't like the new population density in my city then I could move to Wales.
It's unlikely that I would be allowed to build a wall around Worcester or that London would be allowed to create a high tech system for identifying, catching and repatriating northerners. (Although a Chinese-style social credit system might work.)
Voted Leave in support of the agenda of Brexit politicians due to doubts about European politicians’ pay, when pro-Brexit MEPs make 4x the compensation compared to average MEPs [1]. I wonder who is paying them this extra money? This argument confirms my general impression of the reasoning powers of Brexiteers.
There may be more nuance, but as long as at least 650000 people were hoodwinked by that, or by the threat of their children being conscripted into the EU army or by the fear of Turkey joining imminently; or lured by the bogus newfound opportunities like buying fewer than five bananas at a time in the supermarket, or sending foreign criminals and scroungers back where they came from, then misinformation tipped the balance.
I don't doubt that many people had legitimate, considered reasons for voting to leave. Those people are not the point of the argument.
I'm certain that many did not have good reasons. I have met them. They post stupid memes on Facebook about poppies offending Muslims.
If enough of those people were swung by The Bus or anything from Boris Johnson's 30-year campaign of lies about "Barmy Brussels Bureaucrats", then this is not a democratic result.
It's harmful to the national discourse not to address misinformation. That is what truly chips away at the concept of democracy.
If we just accept that lying to the electorate is all part of the game, then it becomes just that - a game, to be won by the loudest and least scrupulous players, rather than a sensible decision-making tool.
Yes, we've heard this side a million times. What is in shorter supply is some examples of adverse outcomes of the "control".
And "nuance"? Nuance about what?
Your kind of comments can sometimes be summarised as: "I made a very educated and considered decision." It is not doing any explaining or engaging in debate
Of course this lack of nuance is utilised by brexiteer politicians a lot when it suits them. By talking about the "will of the people" they are reducing millions of people to a single constituency who want one thing. When actually leave voters want and care about lots of different things. And the best way to represent those opinions is through the normal democratic system giving equal weight to remainers. Except that isn't allowed to happen because politicians want to use the vote to push their opinion.
I'm as aggressively anti-Brexit as any Canadian could reasonably be, but I do find your point about the NHS bus to be very interesting. It's fascinating to take a look at what one political group's view of their opponent's core values and news are. It's a bit like when I read an article about what millenials are doing, and am perplexed to the point of questioning if I was really born between 1982 and 2000.
So you voted leave in case some people had career progression within a bureaucracy? So happy you felt it appropriate to sacrifice my right to live in my country of residence because you were "dubious". To think it wasn't for the money. It's comments like this for which half the country will never be forgiven.
maybe if you got less angry, you wouldn't have spend so much time searching for forgiveness. The GP's comment opened with `I voted leave because I was dubious about the control the elected and unelected officials and secretaries in brussels had over British politics, `
I think it's a valid concern. Though not enough to sway my vote iff I'd remained but I was leaving the UK all by myself so it seemed unfair. But if all you can do is talk about how those who disagree with you do or don't deserve your forgiveness, then the fault is within you.
But it's an extremely narrow view. It's a single concern, that requires ignoring all the other concerns. And in this case it's not a mere disagreement: every European living in the UK will be subject to the inconvenience and expense of settled status at best - and not all of them are eligible. Plenty of people have been handed the life-wrecking answer that they aren't eligible for settled status and have to leave their home or eventually the Home Office will deport them. I see no reason why those people should forgive.
Wanting to leave the EU is an opinion. Voting to leave the EU is an action. That action has imposed a lot of costs and inconvenience on people, seemingly for no good reason. Why should those people forgive?
>I voted leave because I was dubious about the control the elected and unelected officials and secretaries in brussels had over British politics, and the rats nest of well paid jobs with crazy benefits waiting for british politicians in brussels when they retire from british politics, so long as they play nice with the EU and go along with the will of the government in Brussels.
Have you considered that after Brexit for UK to trade and work with Europe(which is vital for UK economy) they would still need to follow all the rules of EU and have no say about those rules? Not to mention that hard Brexit is impossible without giving North Ireland to Republic of Ireland.
Did you notice that whole Brexit got traction when the deadline set by EU for UK to implement anti-tax evasion measures that target UK overseas territories?
I honestly loathe EU, i absolutely hate huge parts of it, it is a bureaucratic Kafkaesque nightmare, that reminds me of my country under soviet occupation(The part i hate the most are unelected officials with basically minimal oversight).
Yet it is still better for my country to be "in" than "out".
From outside perspective it looks like Leavers want to have every benefit of staying in EU(trade deal with EU that mirrors current rules), Northern Ireland and every benefit of leaving EU(hard border). It isn't feasible.
Nevertheless i respect your decision - it is your vote, cast in favour of what you think was the best for the country, what i loathe the most in democracy(which actually turns it into a farce - a popularity contest instead of merit based one) are people voting just because something is popular.
It's not a matter of national expenditure, but that of personal expenditure of those pulling the strings. It's just being framed that way by the "will of the people"/"take back control" brigade, and people are dumb enough to listen.
I'll never stop being amazed by how available, accessible, and important these data are, yet so rarely accessed. People will argue with their relatives over the holidays until they're blue in the face, but can't take 10 minutes to read this vital information.
I'm totally fine with people disagreeing over how to interpret these numbers. A healthy democracy should see us able to debate policy based on differences in values or philosophy. Instead we mostly decide what we believe first, then filter to only see information that supports that belief.
Seems low. That office was formerly known as the Welsh Office. I'm not sure how it separates from or overlaps with the Welsh Assembly, who don't have tax raising powers like Scotland. Presumably spends on a number of Welsh schemes, infrastructure, projects, roads etc.
- We spend a billion on water management ("deltafonds"). I had no idea it took so much upkeep. I also like subsection "experiments" of 21 million euros.
- 21 million still goes to "healthcare for resistance fighters and victims of world war 2", plus 246 million for pensions of the same group (https://rijksfinancien.nl/visuele-begroting/2018/jv/u/volksg... ). We're still paying for the after-effects of war (though the amount went down by 5% relative to the year before).
- The climate budget section links to this site: http://klimaatagenda.minienm.nl If you scroll down to "Is warmer eigenlijk erg?" ("Is hotter actually bad?") it breaks it down in a way I haven't seen before. It also drives home just how little we can oversee the consequences, e.g. going from "30% of species might go extinct" at 2°C to "many go extinct" at 5°C (I'd say 30% is quite a disaster already, can't imagine what +5 would bring us). The section below that visualizes the options: what if we prevent the issues, or what if we have to adjust to them?
I have no clue how a country can have billions of debt and not be declared bankrupt or (at least) go through major cost-saving reforms. Many (most? all?) countries have massive amounts of debt but apparently there isn't anyone who isn't getting paid (given the amount of debt countries have, everyone should have an uncle that is still owed $100k or so by their government, but I don't know anyone that works for the government and doesn't get paid, so apparently it's not that kind of debt). I don't get it, but I'm not surprised that we have a huge amount.
Yes, some 375 billion in total. I don't see the exact number anywhere but the chart near the top of the page shows 2018 as somewhere between "350mld" and "400mld" (miljard; billion).
The tables are a little confusing at first, dividing the amounts by 1000 and still having 8 figures, but I got used to it after a bit.
There are a couple of good graphs of the U.S. budget on wikipedia as well.
Take a guess at what you think we spend (dollars and percent of budget) on major categories (defense, Social Security, transportation, education, Medicare/Medicaid, SNAP, interest) and see how close you get.
This is quite interesting, a sizeable chunk (roughly 16 out of 90 bil) come from "Investment returns" - I guess the SG government have substantial stakes in businesses operating there?
Nice visualisation. But why is "VAT refunds" an income? And why is "Petroleum revenue tax" an expenditure? (2.2B, coming out at the top of the 241B "Taxes on income and wealth")
I can't say this with certainty, but my assumption here is that the UK government buys products and services from the EU, for which it then reclaims the VAT in the same way a business would.
Petroleum revenue tax just sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole - according to https://www.gov.uk/guidance/oil-gas-and-mining-petroleum-rev... PRT is effectively zero rated for any field approved after March 1993, but because of government vagaries still exists as a concept. Given that I could entirely believe that it costs the government more to adminster the tax than they make in revenue from it.
Is this due to the VAT Reverse Charge that European companies can do when they sent each other invoices?
So VAT is all regular VAT, and VAT refunds is VAT that would be collected by countries abroad but is now collected by the British government because of the VAT Reverse Charge.
I was surprised that £69 billion (9% of the budget) goes to Wales, Scottland, and Northern Ireland. That was until I found out that all three are part of the UK and they contribute to the tax revenue.
Overall the budget is nicely balanced. I wish the US ran a deficit as small as the UK's.
Lovely visualisation, but this doesn't reflect the direction of travel properly. Spending occurs before taxation. Taxation balances the books - not the other way around.
The "Budget" is 702 billion.
The expense is 698 billion.
Now the department expenditures is 702 billion.
So they spend 4 more billions then they got.
At that point I laugh.
No, look closer. The deficit is £55 billion. What I think you're confused about is that there's a £698bn allocation that seemingly magically feeds into a £702bn budget for department expenditures. However the £4bn difference comes from HM Treasury (it's quite a thin line at the bottom)
That doesn't seem like a good ROI at all. A product of an over-complicated tax system?