Well, you can count me out. I don’t want to pay a penny piece more than I already do. Indeed, I should be paying less if the state wasn’t so wasteful.
Voters are ready by nearly two to one to pay more tax to bolster the NHS. A large face-to-face survey carried out before the winter crisis struck the health service in November has recorded the biggest-ever shift of opinion on the issue.
The poll, carried out by the respected British Social Attitudes research centre, has recorded a jump from 41% support for higher taxes in 2014 to 61% at the end of last year. An even higher proportion, nearly nine in 10 people, thought there was a funding crisis.
No, what voters want is for someone else to prop up this anachronism with their money. Given that there are billions pissed up the wall by the state on fripperies, we most certainly do not need more money for the NHS. The NHS is in urgent need of reform and there are layers of management that could be stripped out, but that deficit could be closed very easily by closing down the department for media culture and sport and stopping all funding to the third sector and foreign aid.
If 61% of voters really do think we should be paying more tax, that merely tells us that 61% of voters are idiots who think that throwing good money after bad is a winning solution.
There is nothing stopping these people who would like to pay more tax from writing a cheque to HMRC and paying more tax. Can we please have a supplementary question in any future survey to ask how many have actually done this?
I suspect that what most people are saying is that they want everybody else to pay more tax.
Precisely this.
Polly… where are you Polly…?
https://www.ft.com/content/4b3e6db0-e57a-11e7-8b99-0191e45377ec
https://www.ft.com/content/4b3e6db0-e57a-11e7-8b99-0191e45377ec
£8.3 million over 17 years is about £500,000/year. Split that between about 25 million tax payers (a guess, but it’s probably in the right ball park), that’s about 2p each.
I rest my case. That’s about 2p more than I’d be prepared to pay. 🙂
One can only hope those 61% of sheeples voted ‘leave’, for truly PMT.May will ensure they get their just reward on Earth as in Heaven. Does anyone really think the yUK government will NOT use BrexSShite as an excuse to raise taxes (mind you, they would have used a ‘remain’ vote similarly too)? As a wise old sage said back in the 80s “the only way to win is not to play”.
It’s all about the number with these survey’s
Which magically inflates to a majority of voters as if voting made a shite of difference to anything. Whilst people carry on voting for government they will get government aka moar taxes.
The problem is who do you vote for? If enough abstained, it might make a difference. Otherwise, it’s a case of the least worst option. Which, of course, is always the government. I live in a Labour/Conservative marginal. I have no option really if I am to help deny Comrade Corbyn the keys to the kingdom.
If your moniker is on the governments electoral roll then you support government no matter what flavour it takes on. It makes not a jot of difference which state actor is put at ‘the helm’ they are all cut from the same cloth just styled differently.
Nobody alive on this island knows if government is the least worst option or not as there has never been a day, nay a moment, without it.
Probably the day we dropped down from the trees. Big mistake that was, too.
That brought back memories of a joke my late father once told. Unfortunately I can’t repeat it here or I will be swiftly arrested for being “Wacist”…
“Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…
Winston Churchill, House of Commons, 11 November 1947.
I tried (and failed) to put the case for a “None Of The Above” box on all ballot papers to my sister the other day. She indirectly works for the NHS, and has clearly drunk too much of their coolade…
If only three people in the entire country voted, you would STILL get the numpty that won saying “I got 66% of the vote” and the other wazzock saying “I only lost by one vote”.
They are so far up themselves that they would not see the irony of it.
Whatever the flavour of the elected government it is in name only, since the actual government is represented by the un-Civil Service and they only care about the interest of their own bureaucracy (hence the gnashing and wailing of teeth over BRexit which frustrates their ambitions on the EU gravy train as well as all those lovely European trips on the taxpayers dime)
The elected government is just a thin veneer on top of the actual government which almost universally acts to frustrate and subvert government policies they don’t like or which go against the interests of ‘the service’.
Yes Minister was not a comedy, it was a documentary.
As Margaret Thatcher was wont to observe.
Subsidies to train operators….in work benefits being paid to prop up employers that are failing to pay staff adequately…at least 75% of the foreign aid budget…yep there are lots of areas that could do with cutting back or cutting out altogether. It’s a funny one for me because although I would like to see more money diverted to various services I do agree that we need to start cutting the level of waste that goes on. Stopping local councillors being paid for feck all would be another good one. I say this as the child of two local councillors that never took a penny for doing what they saw as a civic duty and an honour.
Stop off all housing benefit. Just stop paying it, and let the market find it’s own level. Most Housing Benefit is using cash extorted from people by force to keep housing owners in clover; cease distorting the market and a lot of stupidities will stop.
Hmmm, that would make an awful lot of people homeless and basically the same argument for dismantling the welfare state generally fails to recognise the one thing that the welfare state provides. Stability. Take away the benefits including HB and you would end up with a situation where a lot of people would have to then steal just to stay alive. That would be the first step in the breakdown of society. I hope you have a big steel fence with machine gun towers around your house because the displaced people would soon be coming for it. Like it or not if you get rid of the welfare state you are asking for the UK to become Somalia.
Didn’t Gordon Brown double the amount of money going into the NHS during his tenure? Why isn’t the NHS twice as good? It appears to be pretty much the same as before but just costs twice as much. I don’t recall any government ever cutting NHS funding, it would be too much of a vote loser, funding has always increased whichever lot were in power. Yet, as long as I can remember it has always been a bit rubbish, with waiting lists, and rather patchy service. The whole thing needs tearing down and rebuilding but I can’t see this happening in my lifetime.
The thing nobody ever seems to point out is that even right now – today – the NHS consumes more than £2 BILLION of UK Taxpayers money every single week.
TWO BILLION POUNDS.
That’s Two thousand million pounds. Every week.
Or put another way £2,000,000,000. Every single week.
That is an awful lot of money…
I also thought that you might like this, from News Thump.
“Leaked report says that reducing MP numbers by 98% would ‘increase efficiency’
Parliament efficiencies
A leaked email has revealed that a recommendation has been made to the government to reduce MP numbers by around 98 percent, claiming that the changes will have a positive effect on how the country is run.
An independent strategy group was brought in to look at making efficiency savings in Westminster and have reached the conclusion that the house would work just as well with just 13 MPs debating top matters sensibly and with valid and well-informed opinions.
Roger Harrison, the consultant leading the project, told us, “What we really need to do is get rid of the people who don’t turn up, the ones that fall asleep and the pissed ones at the back who sometimes shit themselves.
“Once we trim those down, then get rid of the thick ones, the sexist ones, the corrupt ones and the bigoted ones, then we will have a strong backbone of around a dozen or remaining MPs, who would be able to make swift and effective decisions.
“Most large organisations, which have to make huge – in some cases multi-billion pound – decisions would never have a boardroom of 650 people. It would be ludicrous, expensive and end up as an absolutely catastrophic shower of shit,” he concluded.
The cuts, if approved, would mean an annual saving to the country of almost £50M per year on salaries alone, before other costs, such as expenses, rent boys and prostitutes are taken into account.
MPs will be asked to vote on whether the recommendations should be actioned later in the month.”
Hardly a new idea! I confess to being involved in the creation of this mash-up back in 2010:
http://oi65.tinypic.com/k03ajm.jpg
The blog still exists, but all his Photoshopped images are missing. Fortunately I still have the original on my HDD…
I don’t even think you need to reduce the numbers by an awful lot to make a big impact. I would suggest that the modest act of stopping Anna Soubry and Ken Clarke from making speeches would probably increase the efficiency of Parliament by 13% on it’s own…
WHEN this has been accomplished (along with removal of all the other wasteful practices in the NHS), I MIGHT be more favourably inclined to contribute a bit extra. But we all know that will never happen, so as things stand they can FCUK off…
The press release is also carried by The Express.
The comments indicate your view is shared by the majority, myself included.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/945333/NHS-crisis-healthcare-tax-increase-poll
You know the funny thing is how all these surveys seem to magically support the political position of the people commissioning them, but then when there’s a general election and people are actually given the choice to vote for loadsa higher taxes they don’t… funny that…
There’s a simple way of determining if people are truly happy to pay more for the NHS, and its to propose charges for using it, such as a fee to see a GP. After all, if people are happy to pay more tax to ‘help fund the NHS’ and get nothing in return but the warm glow of NHS virtue signalling, surely they’ll be doubly happy to pay money AND get to see a GP?
However a pound to a penny you’ll find that people are in fact very upset that they might have to pay something to see their GP, in which case we can safely throw their expressed happiness to pay more into the bin where it belongs. What people really want is for someone else to pay more tax into the NHS so they can get better services for free. Its naked self interest, nothing more.
Interestingly enough, you do pay to see a GP in France. I paid around twenty euros. Not a huge amount, but enough to concentrate the mind. Prescriptions were “free” however.
Yes, I know free isn’t really free at all.
Precisely, yet when you propose such charges you are called a right wing b*stard who wants the poor to die in a ditch, despite such terribly well known right wing countries like France having exactly such health usage fees.
Personally I’m beginning to think that the ‘public support’ for the NHS is not as deep or as widespread as the usual suspects would have us believe. I think the howls of protest that attempt to shout down anyone who proposes NHS reform are mainly from the vested self interests – the unions and NHS workers who see their sinecures being threatened, and the Leftist politicians who derive money and votes from those unions. I think actual members of the public are beginning to see the NHS for what it is – everyone I know has their own horror story of poor care, indifferent staff and waste on a massive scale.
I think the first political party who has the balls to face down the unions and the vested NHS interests and stand up for true interests of the patients and taxpayers will reap a rich reward in votes. Just like Brexit, I suspect this is another issue where the political and media classes are increasingly at odds to the general public, or at very least are ignoring the views of a large % of the public entirely. No one ever even intimates that there could even be any public support for NHS reforms. As far as the media and politicians are concerned ‘everyone knows’ that 100% of the public love the NHS unconditionally, its a given. And the degree of dislike of the NHS will come as a big a shock to the Establishment, when it finally manifests itself in votes, as big as Brexit was.