From The Metro:
I think it's only fair we help out Harry and Meghan with their home alterations, as I imagine their mortgage payments must be enormous.
Bruce, Edinburgh.
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As to the endless comments about it not being fair that Tory party members will be electing the next Prime Minister:
Firstly, if you want a vote, join the Tory party.
Secondly, every party can decide its own rules for choosing a leader, by election or lottery or anything else.
Thirdly, it is the House of Commons which decides whether somebody can be/can continue to be Prime Minister, traditionally they choose the leader of the party with most MPs.
Fourthly, Neville Chamberlain*, Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, Alec Douglas-Home, Jim Callaghan, John Major, Gordon Brown and Theresa May. Which is half the people who have become PM since the late 1930s.
Fifthly, for my Scottish viewers, Nicola Sturgeon.
Sixthly, as Farage said, the key to democracy is accepting an outcome you don't like. I didn't vote Tory, and I wouldn't vote for Hunt or the overgrown public schoolboy, but enough people do, and that's that.
* Baldwin and MacDonald seem to have taken it in turns since the 1920s, without a general election each time they swapped.
Wednesday, 26 June 2019
Reader's Letter Of The Day
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11 comments:
Fifthly, we don't have any system of directly electing the prime minister, so even at a general election, you have no chance of voting for the PM unless you happen to live in their constituency.
Sixthly, most people vote for the party first, the candidate second and the potential PM last, so it really doesn't matter who the PM, a vote for your local Tory candidate will never be a vote for Boris Johnson/Jeremy Hunt, however much the media would like it to be and pretend it is.
MW. B. Personally, I think voting is a fairly negative process. As in " them and them and they are NBG so all I am left with is that lot".
B, good sixth point.
L, faced with the choice, I prefer Hunt.
Hi Mark, why haven't the Labour party embraced 100% land value taxation? I would contact John McDonnell and the Labour party as many times as possible until they introduce 100% land value taxation. Maybe something like LVT replace 20p rate (to 0p) VAT and National Insurance so more 'progressive' tax reform than the YPP proposal?
I would send the following letter:
John McDonnell MP
Constituency Office
Pump Lane
Hayes
UB3 3NB
Dear John McDonnell MP,
Please support a 100% land value tax on the unimproved value of land, not including buildings or improvements to the site, only “location, location, location” value. We can use the revenues from a LVT to reduce taxes on earnings and output. Taxation is the price of a civilised society; civilised society and public services create land values; so let's fund public services out of 'service charges' on land values. The main aim is to make land owners pay for the value of the public services they receive instead of making businesses, workers and consumers pay for the cost of those public services through very arbitrary and damaging taxes and then making them pay for the value of public services, in rent/mortgage repayments. So the system is rigged, it is a massive ongoing transfer of wealth from the productive economy to landowners, and the transfers of wealth from the productive economy to simple landowners (the selling price of land) need to be reduced to £nil and we can do that with 100% land value taxation.
As to bank regulation, I would ban all bank lending except capital development with 0% overdrafts for capital development lending (agency businesses deliver state funds.) Since the entire financial sector has been regulatex out of existence, we can then monetarise the entire national debt as no bank lending will happen if we print money. Along with LVT replacing Corporation Tax and Capital Gains Tax, the 0% overdrafts mean Labour will win support from business.
Yours faithfully,
Mark Wadsworth
U, good letter. I happen to be an official of the Labour Land Campaign and they've been battling for thirty or forty years to no avail.
We need to get the Labour leadership on board. I hope you will start writing letters as well as me. If anyone else is reading this please write a letter.
Contact John McDonnell at mcdonnellj@parliament.uk via email.
Uknown "... I would ban all bank lending except capital development...
Why does everyone want to ban things?
LVT needs to be accompanied by serious reform of the Banking Acts and regulationism. A better way to inhibit out of control credit expansion is to neuter the ability of the banks to leverage demand deposits - chequing accounts - and to amend the 1844 rule that once someone deposits funds in the bank it becomes the banks money. That effectively gives two entirely separate people equal title to the same asset. And I would not 'ban' FRB. But the reforms would have the effect of making it unlawful under existing property rights laws for banks to leverage demand deposits. At the same time it would make sense to shut down the Bank of England as Lender of last resort. That only encourages credit expansion and recklessness. And of course you'd tax bank assets since they are predominantly loans secured on land.
L, I think it's simpler than that. Tax land values and bank assets and get rid of deposit guarantee. That will clear out the dead wood. What's left will be the good kind of deposit taking and lending.
L. Yes. That'd work. Mostly. I still think that we need to sort out the peculiar situation with chequing accounts and ownership, which isn't difficult.
L, a deposit is a loan to the bank to do with as they please. What we really need is a truly safe alternative which is a government run bank that just lends to the government. Like tsb. Or NS&I with banking convenience.
Doesn't need to pay interest. That's the price of safety. Up to private banks to offer higher interest for slightly higher risk.
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