Osbornes budget

[french frank]

Well, all I can say to that is, thank heavens you're still alive, FF!

Yes, indeed. I can just about get a full tank of petrol for my "new" car on it (if I hurry!).

EA

I had a letter recently stating that I owed £14,000 in tax because of my second job with the Handsworth Working Men's Club.

It's a bit like the NHS: people's personal experiences vary widely. I've always found the staff very pleasant and helpful, possibly due to my anxiety neurosis about doing the wrong thing, and may be one of the few private individuals to send back a tax refund with a letter explaining why I was not entitled to it . Now I don't fill in an annual tax return and leave it to them to decide whether to give me a refund .

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I've always found the staff very pleasant and helpful,

Yes. When I spoke to them on the phone (after 20 minutes of diversions) they were most understanding. It's the letters that arrive in the doormat that are so annoying and offensive - "We know that you have a pension with Tiddlywinks Inc..." No, I haven't!

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

i would bet good money that all tax offices make the most horrendous mistakes now they have the new computer system .... my partner is a Teaching Asst on some £6k or whatever sum for part time work at the minimum wag,e was classed at £31000 income and a wrong letter [more than ominous that] and told repeatedly during half a lifetime of phone calls to the poor miseries who actually are employed by HMRC [work does not seem a fit word] that "it must be right it is on the computer" .... and this experience is repeated around the place in neighbours and acquaintances ....

but i digress, we fiddle while Rome burns; the situation is dire and the granny tax 50p and other fandangoes are scarcely the point ...

Osborne claims his deficit reduction plan is on course and borrowing has come in below targets – but these are the same targets that were revised upwards by £112bn only in November. Keynes's remark, "look after unemployment and the budget will look after itself" is more to the point than Osborne's "look after the budget and unemployment will look after itself".
Skidelsky in todays Graun

it might just be that being unfair is one thing .... but being wrong entirely another?

[mangerton]

i would bet good money that all tax offices make the most horrendous mistakes now they have the new computer system .... my partner is a Teaching Asst on some £6k or whatever sum for part time work at the minimum wag,e was classed at £31000 income and a wrong letter [more than ominous that] and told repeatedly during half a lifetime of phone calls to the poor miseries who actually are employed by HMRC [work does not seem a fit word] that "it must be right it is on the computer" .... and this experience is repeated around the place in neighbours and acquaintances ....

Not just the new computer system. Many thousands of employees have gone, and the volume of work has not diminished. Unfortunately, this can lead to errors. Those of us who are still there work very hard, despite being abused and sworn at daily. People are very brave on the end of a phone line.

Best wishes to CDJ and all board members from a "poor misery". Have a lovely weekend.

[Serial_Apologist]

i would bet good money that all tax offices make the most horrendous mistakes now they have the new computer system .... my partner is a Teaching Asst on some £6k or whatever sum for part time work at the minimum wag,e was classed at £31000 income and a wrong letter [more than ominous that] and told repeatedly during half a lifetime of phone calls to the poor miseries who actually are employed by HMRC [work does not seem a fit word] that "it must be right it is on the computer" .... and this experience is repeated around the place in neighbours and acquaintances ....

but i digress, we fiddle while Rome burns; the situation is dire and the granny tax 50p and other fandangoes are scarcely the point ...



it might just be that being unfair is one thing .... but being wrong entirely another?

As has been pointed out elsewhere on here many times it always seems strange that Britain was enabled to pile up a huge deficit post-WW2 and allowed to reimburse it gradually to by the time of Brown. Could it be that in harkening to the credit agencies Cameron, Clegg & co fear lenders not getting their tuppence back before that good idea civilisation ends means those a rank or two below the cosmic bailiffs will come knockin'?

[eighthobstruction]

NO!!....we have to have the Company Wars first....

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

Britain is at war. ...

pitting the generations against each other is as misguided as it is dangerous. There is a clear division in society: the rich – of all ages – who continue to boom, and everybody else who face the biggest squeeze in living standards since the 1920s. It is possible to generalise about the wealthy: by definition, they are all doing very well compared with everybody else.

The generations, on the other hand, cannot be lumped together. The prospects of, say, an 18-year-old in an ex-mining community are entirely different from those of an Eton-educated son of a millionaire. Austerity Britain cannot be understood without the prism of class.

...

i tho8ught we'd had that war .....

[Lateralthinking1]

That article in The Independent - post 142 - is spot on. One of the best I have read.

[mangerton]

i tho8ught we'd had that war .....

No, it's still with us. The tories - and to an extent all MPs and as lateralt1 pointed out the senior civil service - still think they're better than the rest of us, the "little people".

They couldn't care less about petrol hitting £1.40 a litre. They don't pay for their travel. They make the rules for the rest of us, and then break them with impunity.

When I joined HMRC, I undertook to obey the Civil Service Code. I claimed £16.20 in expenses this week, and my computer coughed up a screen reminding me that if I wasn't entitled to claim that money I could lose my job, and could even go to jail. Quite how this fits in with senior people being entertained at Lords and jetting around the world at the expense of big business was not made clear.

[mangerton]

That article in The Independent - post 142 - is spot on. One of the best I have read.

Hear hear!

[Anna]

That article in The Independent - post 142 - is spot on. One of the best I have read.

And I have just read it and agree entirely. There was, on the radio today, phone in discussion of how we could take the money off the baby boomers (current pensioners or soon to be pensioners) because, basically, they were old and had endured a good life, but this is also from the article in The Independent. Now, I support class war but age war is somehow sickening. I think I'm of the Lat school of thought and slightly beginning to despair that those in power have absolutely no comprehension about everyday life. And, incidentally mangerton, all my dealings with The Revenue have been painless and, on their part, good humoured!

Neither can we make sweeping generalisations about the older generation. There are certainly those thriving with cushy retirements, but there are also two million pensioners in poverty. Up to 2,700 old people froze to death last winter because they could not afford to heat their house. Sure, some of today's ageing population were among those for whom 1980s Britain was one long party, particularly in the South-east. But others were among the millions who lost their jobs in the recessions of the early 1980s and 1990s,

[scottycelt]

Ahhhh ... I get it now ...

Boy George has taken money off these idle, cushy pensioners, now scrounging off the State, and directed it towards the needy, grafting millionaires?

Quite right too ... old folk don't know they're born these days owning their own 1-bed retirement cupboards after a lifetime of baby-boomer skiving.

It's about time they got off their fat backsides, emptied their overflowing wallets and purses, and gave something back to our hard-pressed, young and thrusting millionaires unable to properly maintain their mansions, I say ...

[johnb]

This budget, in hindsight, might come to be regarded as something of a turning point in the public's attitude to Cameron's government. This, in large part, is due to Osborne's arrogantly crass mishandling of the Granny Tax. Not only did he not prepare the ground for the change in order to square public opinion but he, rather patronisingly, glossed over the change as simplifying matters for those poor old dears so they wouldn't have to worry their heads about filling in forms. (It seems that he was warned about how he was presenting the change in the draft budget speech but rejected all advice and all the efforts by others to change the wording.)

The conjuncture of the reduction of the 50p rate and the freezing of the Age Related Personal Allowance sets the tone of the budget (whether justified or not). This is, of course, mid term so by the time of the next election the details will be forgotten but what I believe will remain is a change in perception - something in the air. Before the last election Cameron was desperate to decontaminate the Tories but Osborne (that reputedly master tactician ) has gone some considerable way in undoing all that.

[Anna]

Just been wishing my friend's Mum a happy 90th birthday. She tells me her pension credit has been reduced to - 2p a week because of the rise in State Pensions. Unbelievable, imagine the cost of administrating that 8p per month. And, this is what really annoys me and makes me want to join some organisation to fight for ordinary pensioners, that their payments are calculated in pence and then look at the bankers .... Her husband was wounded at Dunkirk (OK, don't want to play the Noble Soldiers and What they Sacrificed for Our Country card), but she's genuinely frightened, having worked all her life, that she's to be disregarded and discarded as worthless.

[Serial_Apologist]

I must admit, I did almost take my eye off the ball for a moment when Clegg came over all effective, like, at that pre-election telefest, and Cameron as a MacMillan-type Public School One-Nation Aristo. Some of us have been living ideas opposite to that for a very long time, but all the while the gaps between years of plenty and of austerity shorten at ever increasing rate. It gives one no pleasure to say this, but there really is no alternative to a class analysis.