U.K. Government Abandons Plan to Cut Rate of Income Tax for Top Earners

They are sticking with most of the plan but yes, this was an embarrassing u-turn, as we call it.

The pound is still at a low level, the economy generally is struggling and a fresh round of major austerity is heading our way.

In a political sense, Truss still has a lot of problems because her credibility has been badly damaged. She climbed down only after realising that she probably wouldn't get the policy through Parliament, a quite shocking state of affairs given Tory MPs have a big majority.

I think it's unlikely she will last two years until the next general election. Tory backbench MPs now know they can overturn her policies and the party itself is divided. The cost of living crisis here is getting worse and I just don't see how Truss can recover.

I don't know why the tax paid by the highest paid is judged really so important, or perhaps significant. (Provided they are not doing anything illegal such as tax-evasion, of course.) The income from them would be tiny, in the grand scheme of things - the higher the income the fewer the people affected.

Besides, even if some of such people can afford expensive accountants and off-shore accounts, they still pay a lot of indirect tax in this country as the VAT and Council Tax on their much more flamboyant private expenditure.

What will matter instead is how the Government deals with the problems of the overall national and international economic situation; and how well they deal with them. That is not easy, and I do not pretend to know the best approaches to these. I doubt many of us here know, but destructive criticism is oh so easy and oh so pointless.

I do think though, that mere jealously of anyone on some stratospheric wage - whether a merchant-bank director or a First Division star ball-kicker - won't solve anything.

What worries me more seriously is this idea, from Labour as well as Conservative politicians, that somehow we need "attract overseas investors". When are they going to wake up to what that means, every time another British company and its trading profits vanishes abroad to the so-called, American-sounding, "inward investors"; i.e. the money-traders in America, the Middle East or the People's Republic of China?


Ye Gods - having alluded to it, its genuine supporters even narrowly fought off a bunch of spivs in the USA wanting to destroy our country's national sport's league structure, just to make money from its ruins!

She's beyond incompetent and really not very bright, but was elected by an extremely small minority of the UK (81k votes vs 60k). Only paid up members of the Conservative party were allowed to vote, mostly old, rich, white, upper class (and an unknown number registered from abroad, just to add to the ridiculousness 🙄).

The main reason they chose her was that they were angry their poster-boy, Boris, got drummed out (for being lazy, corrupt, incompetent and, final straw, supporting a serial sex offender in office) and they blamed her main rival, Rishi Sunak who resigned to spark the revolt.

She supports an extreme firm of neo-liberalism (low tax, extreme deregulation, profits over people, Charter cities, small state...) that the vast majority of the UK (and even her own party!) would find abhorrent if they took the time to understand what it would really mean for them and their families. The policies she is trying to introduce are nothing like the manifesto the Conservative party stood for election on in 2019, so she has no mandate.

Under Conservative leadership rules she in theory can't be ousted for a year after selection but if MPs fail to support her policies in Parliamentary votes she'll be left with no real option but to step down.

Either way, we're fucked for the foreseeable 🤷‍♂️

See you on the other side (hopefully).

For someone so new to that position, Liz Truss seems to be globally known as an idiot already!! I’m not really into politics, but all I ever hear is people laughing about how useless she is.

It’s undergoing a drastic change….hoping for recovery from past losses. No harm in waddling arms and legs if you wish to float, I’d say..

It reminds me of a Monty Python "upper class twits" skit.

Does seem that way huh? Dumb idea to begin with

Probably.