This is totally untrue. As long as it's selfish, unpatriotic people leaving, I couldn't care less what their skin color or sexual orientation is.

Selfish? I'll take that. I'm choosing to put the future of my children ahead of those who couldn't care less about them in any respect.

- this kind of authoritarian nonsense is just what Home Secretaries do. David Blunkett brought in RIP (then, to his very slight credit, changed his mind). Jack 'boot' Straw was famous for his I-AM-THE-LAWing. I don't think the Tories are any better.

- No, criticizing the NHS is not against the religion there. The newspapers are forever getting in digs about long waits, unpopular (but perfectly rational) decision from NICE about what drugs to pay for, and junior doctors and their apparent insistence on being paid properly.

- And with that in mind, having lived in three countries (four if you accept that the NHS in England and Scotland are different) I personally think the NHS is fucking fantastic. Someone close to me was diagnosed with a serious illness and immediately swept up in a production line of modern, effective treatment. Sure, it was somewhat impersonal, the biscuits are rubbish, and they were a widget on the production line, but they're also still alive ten years later, and we still have a house and savings.

- kudos to your sister. The UK is an ethnically diverse place, one of the least racist and divided that I've seen, but - like everywhere else - imperfect. The NHS always seemed to me to be a reflection of what things could be elsewhere with doctors, nurses and cleaners hired from all over the world. [which reminds me that while the right-wing press hates the NHS for being free, the left wing press occasionally hates the NHS for bringing in medical staff from poorer parts of the world. They just can't win]

This is exactly what I'm saying. The NHS are seen as perfect by some. All criticism is digs that are wrong.

I'm pro-NHS. But this perspective that it's infallible is beyond all reality.

Often, when people criticize the NHS they have an ulterior motive, like privatisation. Consider all the political difficulties the NHS has had in the past few years. As such, negative remarks can be read or misread as dogwhistles for other views, so they're something that have to be phrased carefully and within context.

I was unclear: did you publish a book, or did your sister?

In general, for something both as key and as endangered as the NHS is, criticism isn't always useful -- support is. Problems can be recognised and addressed through support.

I'm not anti-NHS, I've no agenda to see it privatised, I just want it to be better. I tried many, many private routes first. I tried NHS England, NHS Digital, the Innovation Service, AHSNs (many sections having since been renamed/reorganised). About 20 different contact points over two or three years, most of which seemed inappropriate but I made sure if anyone told me it was someone else's responsibility I checked with them.

The problems had already been recognised through public inquiries and yet were still ongoing.

I even offered to build the software for free, which, hopefully, for an individual dealing with an organisation with a budget into the hundreds of billions, falls under supportive. But as far as I could see, offering support was getting me nowhere.

I just had people acknowledging the issue and then shrugging their shoulders, pointing fingers at everyone else. So I wrote a book on it, spoke about the issue publicly and within months it was decided to spend tens of millions on sorting it.

I think it's wonderful that you offered to do that but it simply isn't realistic. Who is going to support this software in the long term? How are you handling privacy concerns? What guarantees can you offer about server security? Who is paying for and maintaining the servers in the long term? What happens (to be blunt) if you die the day after the software is delivered?

There's so, so much wrong with the way governments provision software projects from outside parties. But there is good reason to have contracts the length of the Bible. Picking up work from individuals on a whim is courting disaster.

One guy had a brain infection and was told to wait four months for an appointment. Another went in for a root canal, left without a tooth, and fainted outside the clinic. Someone else was refused an X-ray after an accident.

Meanwhile, in my tiny country, we have a dual public-private health system, and the facilities, doctors, and dentists are top notch. It really makes you wonder what's gone wrong in the UK, considering how much taxes British people pay.

And, it's very much a "public-private" health system. E.g. all GP's and most dentists are private businesses, paid for by the NHS to varying degree, but also with many providing private services.

The NHS uses an extensive network of private providers, including (when sufficient funding is provided) to drive down waiting lists. I've personally had a procedure carried out at a private hospital at the NHS's expense.

The NHS has many problems, but at the root of a whole lot of them is that the NHS needs a funding increase of 20%-30% to get to similar levels of funding per capita as similarly wealthy countries.

The UK spends about as much per capita on the NHS, providing universal care, as the US does on just Medicare and Medicaid.

As a percentage of GDP, UK healthcare spending is well above the EU and OECD averages. We spend a greater share of our national income on healthcare than Belgium, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Australia, Denmark, Finland or Norway.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.GD.ZS?most_...

I've lived in both the UK and the US and there are issues with healthcare in both. Maybe the model your country uses could scale up to populations the size of the UK and the US, maybe it wouldn't. Difficult to know.

Unfortunately the main problem is chronic underinvestment by successive governments of all political inclinations. We tend not to fix our roof in the summer because we hope the other guys will be in government by winter when everyone inside is getting wet and they'll get blamed for the consequences of our decision. We've also made some poor choices historically around selling off national assets and questions of privatisation or public ownership.

This isn't unique to the NHS and ironically among the current Labour government the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, is one of the few people suggesting significant changes that actually do make sense for the long term future of our country. Unfortunately a lot of them will probably require more than 5 years to implement and that puts the results over the horizon beyond the next general election. So the price for trying to "do the right thing" might be that he won't get re-elected to see it through. This enables the cycle of short-termism and lack of consistent investment to continue even though its horrible results are increasingly clear for all to see.

Ironically, that's not a problem in China, they have a one-party authoritarian state and can plan 10, 20 years ahead without worrying about elections or political instability.

There are persistent and valid claims that the NHS is inefficient in its use of technology. It wastes lots of money, wastes clinicians' time, and sometimes fails to get accurate information to the people who need it in time to be used.

But there is a best being the enemy of the good problem here. The amount of regulation involved in supplying any kind of tech product or IT service to these public sector organisations is becoming prohibitive. Parts of the industry that have been providing these products and services into the NHS are being crippled in productivity or even literally shutting down whole supply chains because it's too onerous to comply with all the red tape. It's not just individuals but the small businesses that employ or engage them and then the medium-sized business that use the small ones.

If you're working with big consultancies with their own legal and compliance teams then sure you can write hundreds of pages of contracts and require compliance with several external standards about managing personal data and IT security and whatever else. But that regulation flows downhill to the smaller suppliers who don't have resources already available to deal with those issues and at some point it becomes overwhelming and everyone has had enough and decides to become a gardener. Now your only options for supply are big consultancies engaging big suppliers who charge big prices and provide big company levels of service and responsiveness (in the most pejorative sense of these terms).

Surely this isn't the best strategy for a system that desperately needs to be more efficient and sometimes more innovative. There is a broad spectrum between "adopt a one-off product with no support from a single well-meaning individual" and "everything requires so much red tape that only the places charging those £x000-per-day consulting rates we're always mocking are actually allowed to provide it".

Good questions, but the quickest way I can answer them all is to say that my company had delivered software for national security purposes to central government departments. This really was nothing.

It certainly wasn't my preferred option. The offer was mostly a tool to ensure that cost of development could not be used as a reason to reject.

There are also plenty of rules that exist for dogmatic reasons and impose absolute requirements that don't always make much sense in context instead of stating principles that should be appropriately applied.

I understand that those administering these rules don't want to leave loopholes where people or cost-conscious suppliers will cut corners for convenience and/or to save money. There is obviously a danger of that happening if you don't write everything down in black and white.

But you have to remember that the starting point here is receptionists at medical facilities asking people to email over sensitive health information or casually discuss it on the phone when they don't even know who they're talking to and what information is appropriate to share with them. Doctors are trying to read vital patient information from scrawled handwriting on actual paper in potentially time-sensitive life-and-death situations. Expensive scanning equipment in hospitals relies on software that runs on 20-year-old versions of Windows from a supplier that shut down long ago.

In this context you probably win a lot just by having clear policies and guidelines that really are short and simple enough for rank and file staff working in a wide variety of different jobs to understand. A reasonable set of basic technical measures would be far better than much of what is in widespread use today. Trying to make everything perfect so we have fully computerised health records and integrated diagnostic and treatment systems and everything is 100% secure and privacy-protected and supported is a laudable goal that would obviously be much better for patient outcomes and also for the daily lives of everyone working in healthcare. And in 50 or 100 years maybe we'll be able to do it. But not today and not tomorrow.

It certainly wasn't even my preferred option, I'd have been much happier if they said they had a team that could run with it.

This kind of political insecurity is toxic for rational conversation. Blindly rejecting the criticisms of our political opponents is just as naive as blindly accepting their criticisms. Either way we handover control of the conversation.

I've never met anyone who thinks that the NHS is perfect - least of all anyone who has used it or anyone who works there.

Many years ago now my sister turned down the chance to go to an international conference held in the Netherlands, when I asked why, she said it was because the NHS was the best in the world and had nothing to learn from other healthcare systems. I'm still stunned, and she still doesn't know anything about other healthcare systems.

Very very very few people think the NHS is infallible. What are you even talking about? We all understand the NHS has many many problems, and those of us that have used the NHS understand this even more.

However, we still think it's a lot better than the private healthcare model.

Not sure what you're getting out of this weird strawman argument you're putting forward.

What private healthcare mode? WHat they have in the US? Then definitely yes. What they have on France or Germany or Japan or almost every other developed country.? Then No. What they have in Singapore? Still No.

Yet private healthcare is a strawman, I've never argued for it.

This is why I'm pleased that for the ward I visit, biscuits and snacks are provided by a charity, it is the best of both worlds.

Not only I am not bankrupt from medical care, but I also get to enjoy decent snacks and a good coffee machine.

This is the issue.

Skilled immigration or the Channel crossing?

Unfortunately due to the Boris Wave, we got mass, unskilled legal migration.

The channel crossings are a rounding error compared to that (but should be stopped as well).

20 years ago it was mostly Poles whose only quality was that they were willing to work for less than native UK citizens in jobs that said UK citizens supposedly did not want to do (which is doublespeak for businesses not wanting to pay a decent wage). This kind of immigration was one of the reasons Brexit happened.

It was more the later additions to the EU a few years later that were actually problematic and got people's backs up.

It didn't help that we were allowed to restrict immigration from those countries but didn't as the government needed mass immigration to disguise the fact there was no growth.

Not really?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Polish_alliance

Errr, what? A lot of people complain about the NHS, whilst conceding there are issues that are difficult to address eg staff, lack of investment etc.

That I could have multiple negative NHS experiences relating to missed cancer diagnoses of friends in that relatively short span of time is suggestive of a real problem. The institution seemed to have less of an issue with elder care (in the US, the phantom menace posed by Obamacare or any governmental involvement in healthcare was meant to be "death panels" deciding the fate of grandparents) than with avoiding at all costs detecting potential long-term problems in the young. It's a 'rational' fear in the sense, as you note, that such cases put tremendous pressure on services, but there's no world where the best health outcome is refusing to screen your working age population.

I don't know anyone that doesn't complain about the state of the NHS. The only time I've heard anyone defending it would be when compared to countries without national healthcare (e.g. America).

Granted I'm in tech so that's steady employment with benefits, but there you go.

The irony of you replying like this to a comment that replied to an American is stark, as unlike in the US, in the UK the care you get if you opt to go without private care is very viable, and private insurance costs far less than in the US.

If anyone should be upset over paying twice, it should be Americans.

I imagine medicaid funding is directly tied to the enrollment count so they are very aggressive about getting people on it. Granted it was trash insurance and most specialists wouldn't take it, but it covered basic care fully.

Yes, after paying approximately $70,000 per year in premiums, I still have to pay a couple thousand dollars for routine, non-emergency, common healthcare procedures.

Technology wise, I think we have the greatest healthcare system in the world. Finance wise, it feels like the worst parts of Cyberpunk 2077.

Costa Rica has an affordable all inclusive public health care system (Caja). But you can also pay for extra for private healthcare. Is it the same in the UK?

In canada we’re in a phase where this is just starting. Private clinics (e.g. telus health) have started to pull doctors out of the public system and put them behind subscription paywalls. We’re still paying the majority of their salary, but they can only be accessed if you pay their private overlords a monthly fee.

Yes

In real terms the budget is the largest it's ever been, it's a relic of the time when people worked and died shortly (a decade) after retiring, not when they live for 30+ years longer.

Which it needs to be given the demographic changes you note. It's about 15% smaller per capita than comparable countries spend. That would suggest that we need to increase the budget if we want comparable service.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.PC.CD?locat... https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.GD.ZS?end=2...

To bring it to a comparable level to similarly wealthy countries would take an increase in funding of 20%-30%.

There are policies that are wildly popular. Free public healthcare is one of such policies in many countries, and perhaps for a good reason.

A lot of that money has gone on stealth privatisation through inefficient outsourcing of contract staff and PFI of infrastructure.

So the actual standard of care is far lower than the funding suggests. And it has been deliberately run down so a US-style system can be implemented.

So yes, the organisation should be improved, but in the exact opposite direction to the one you're suggesting.

The UK's real problem is that it's run by an out-of-touch inbred aristocracy with vast inherited wealth, working through a political system which prioritises stealth corruption over public service.

They don't see why they should contribute anything to the welfare of the peasants. The obligation is all one way - from the peasants to the gentry.

And there's a layer of middle class professionals who have convinced themselves they're the gentry, even though they can't afford to pay their school fees, never mind maintain a huge estate.

So - private ownership good, public spending bad. More sensible countries don't have this attitude problem, and are proud their public services actually benefit the public.

So public/NHS vs private/US system is a false dichotomy, and "free at the point of use" is a red herring.

Looking at the reactions, this whole threads does exemplifies what the OP said about the NHS being a "religion".

In addition, I'd say most of this thread is a bunch of people debating what issues there are with the NHS (I don't see anyone claiming there aren't any) with some people for it, and some against it.

A fair few people believe that it is the duty of the state to care for individuals, and that one right that people have is free access to healthcare.

If someone expresses that viewpoint I don't think it's fair to say that they're being religious or dogmatic about it, just like it wouldn't be fair for people to argue that your view (which I assume is for a more privatised healthcare system) is religious or dogmatic, it's a simple disagreement.

> because if you're employed there is additionnal and mandatory healthcare

Yes, if you are employed in the private sector there is now mandatory additional private health insurance to cover what public healthcare does not.

Healthcare isn't free at the point of use in any case. Things may be automatically paid/reimbursed as the case may be. Private sector is much more involved than in the UK, too, starting from GPs who are all private practices.

The point is that it's not because you have to pay at point of use or because things are more private that you end up like in the US. This is an FUD argument against change.

https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/insight-and-analysis/long-reads...

That's quite different from a private practice (like a solicitor here) that you pay directly and/or that seeks payment from health insurance.

These ca. 200 trusts operate with a great degree of operational independence, though they are public entties.

The distinction is important because they are what makes the scale manageable, and it also provides resilience.

Though it also leads to inconsistency and the "postcode lottery" problem where the quality of treatment a patient receives for a specific condition can be extremely variable depending on where they live.

But it's better to have management failings contained to individual trusts, that are monitored, than to have these failing affect the system as a whole. Not least because it does allow patients going elsewhere as a last resorts.

One nice perk though is that [private, corporate] jobs offer cushy health insurance as part of the deal as standard really so you can go and see one of the many private doctors in their offices at your choice and leisure.

There is also a lack of a respected teaching class. With the changes to universities and schools, there is no longer any respect for those with an education and able to teach.

That's really not my experience. In fact, almost everyone is surprised when I suggest that despite its many problems, the NHS does better for the people than most modern countries' health systems.

No one I know who has lived in France or Germany or any developed country other than the US thinks the NHS is better than the systems in those countries.

There are times I opt for private services for speed, because I can afford to, but I could also afford private health insurance (which is cheap in the UK), and haven't felt the need to.

That said, dental is a weak spot of the NHS, with too few dentists offering NHS services, and there's a perceived quality difference in that the NHS treatments have fee caps that mean they will often not include the best aesthetic options. For dental I do tend to go private (but dental for adults is also excluded in quite a few other "universal" healthcare systems - like Norway; don't know about Spain)

> There are times I opt for private services for speed

I'm guessing the NHS, being public, comes with long waiting lists. So it's more about speed than quality of service? I'd assume most doctors with 20–30 years of experience are working in the private sector, right?

New Years Eve, my son was referred to an out-of-hours GP service within an hour of a phone consultation.

But while the shortest wait I've had for a video consultation for myself (via the NHS) was literally 10 minutes, the longest was two weeks.

If you have an emergency, you will be triaged and given a faster appointment if you use the right channels (111 - the non-emergency alterantive to 999/911, or urgent care walkin centres, or A&E as the last resort), but of course many things that are not an emergency will seem intolerable to wait for, and then it absolutely sucks if you can't afford to pay your way to be seen faster.

This is a political/cost issue - the NHS is bargain basement in terms of amount spent per patient compared to many other countries.

A large proportion of doctors in the private sector also works for the NHS, so quality of clinical experience has never been a concern to me.

E.g. when my ex looked for a doctor when she considered having a c-section done private, the top expert she could find was an NHS consultant that worked privately on the side. This is the widespread, and often the private clinics are operated by NHS trusts, as a means to supplement their budgets, and/or the operating rooms etc. are rented from NHS trusts.

If anything, my only negative experiene with lack of experience here has been with private providers (the only nurse that has ever struggled to draw blood from me in my entire life failed to get any blood from me after 3 agonisingly slow attempts where she rooted around in my arm for a vein. Every NHS nurse that has drawn blood from me or my son have been so fast at drawing blood you hardly notice before they're done even when they're filling multiple containers)

But if you want to be pampered, then private providers will be nicer. They're also nicer if you e.g. want more time - GP's are expected to allocate an average of something like 7 minutes per appointment for the NHS patients, for example, and how flexible they will be varies, while with a private GP you can pay for however long appointments you want.

So what they get out of it is at least to some extent that it is expected many places as a means to getting job offers from private providers.

Speaking personally, the biggest issue isn't the waiting, but the chaos and uncertainty. Every part of the NHS is in a constant state of crisis management. I don't terribly mind that I usually have to wait about two weeks to see my GP (family doctor), but I do object to the fact that I'll invariably be seen by a locum (temporary) doctor who doesn't know how the local systems work and won't be there if I need a follow-up appointment. I could live with waiting lists if they were always 14 weeks, but it's incredibly disruptive to not know if it might be 14 or 40 weeks, to not know if your long-awaited appointment will be cancelled with no notice due to staff shortages or industrial action. I've almost got used to the fact that the corridors of my local hospital are permanently full of "temporary" overflow beds, primarily occupied by frail elderly people, often in considerable distress, sometimes obviously neglected.

I'm fairly high-agency and I feel that the system is hostile and difficult to navigate; I have no doubt that many patients who are less able to advocate for themselves suffer preventable deaths because they fell through the cracks.

I'm not entirely sure if the UK has a public-private health system. What I do know is that companies offer private health insurance, even though everyone has access to the NHS. That suggests there's a private system in place, one that probably attracts the most experienced and competent doctors and GPs?

E.g. my old GP used to provide both private and NHS services (they were precluded by their NHS contracts from providing private services to people registered with them with the NHS).

Many NHS trusts also provide private services, as they are allowed to do so to improve utilisation and supplement their budgets, so in practice this is part of the reason the NHS is so cheap compared to universal systems in similarly rich countries.

Most private hospitals in the UK also e.g. rely on NHS for intensive care, and this, along with relying on the NHS for first-line care (A&E, GP's unless there's a wait, etc.) is also why private health insurance in the UK is unusually cheap, and why private hospitals in the UK are unusually cheap (if you're in the US, and planning elective treatments, it can be cheaper to fly to London and do it here, even factoring in hotels - and some Central London hospitals have hotel suites, and at least one have or had a previously Michelin starred chef because they cater - literally - to high-end international healthcare tourism).

This significantly underplays the situation here. The UK state views "anti-migrant" views as extreme: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/07/26/elite-police...

In the UK attending a protest against putting illegal immigrants from Afghanistan in a hotel by your kids school is likely to have you on a watch list or arrested. This might not sound that bad to our European friends, but you guys in the US might be quite surprised to hear this.

It's not just "right-wing" positions which are dealt like this either, I should note for legal reasons that I strongly disagree with the actions and views of "Palestine Action", but arrests of peaceful protestors who simply wish to voice support of them as a group (without actually being part of the group themselves) is in my mind absurd. It's one thing to make membership of the group illegal, but to also make debating that judgement illegal is highly problematic in my mind. For those interested you'll find videos of the police arresting elderly women for terror charges for simply peacefully voicing their opinions on Palestine Action. It's vile.

The UK government has announced a new "squad" who will check social media for anti-migrant sentiment. Even if you are not "anti-migration" (whatever that means), I think we can agree that opposing migration is still a valid opinion to hold in a democratic society.

   Detectives will be drawn from forces across the country to take part in a new investigations unit that will flag up early signs of potential civil unrest.
   The division, assembled by the Home Office, will aim to “maximise social media intelligence” gathering after police forces were criticised over their response to last year’s riots.
   ...
   “This team will provide a national capability to monitor social media intelligence and advise on its use to inform local operational decision-making.
   “This will be a dedicated function at a national level for exploiting internet intelligence to help local forces manage public safety threats and risks.

Unfortunately, this opinion gets framed as "hate speech" in many countries, with legal consequences. How convenient to criminalize opinions of opponents !

Hysteria about crime is just far right propaganda.

(Obviously keeping crime low is important, and a generally low crime rate doesn't reduce the impact on those who are victims. But pretending that high crime is a pressing problem for the country as a whole is disingenuous)

You change it to be a not-finance-centered economy.

They didn't build it up on their own. They saw opportunity in western businesses who wanted lower wages and less strict environmental laws, and lured them in. The western businesses then moved all their manufacturing to China who then spied on these factories to out-compete the western businesses with "home grown" products they copied.

It doesn't fit together as a strategy to me and I don't see it fixing the economy, but I guess they can talk about it as a success?

They will slowly cycle out this historical group of parties resulting in painful economic results and poor social cohesion nationally.

There have been an influx of Londoners who have discovered that they can actually afford a house in the North and enroll their kids in decent schools and maintain a good standard of living, especially those who are able to move while maintaining a London salary.

> just mentioning increased immigration

One of these seems like the solution to the other.

> as long as those people leaving are straight, white males, or their families, they're being told "good riddance" regardless of the brain drain and loss of tax income

Having UK work experience and having talked to thousands of british folks over a decade, I find this hard to believe.

I started working with folks from the UK right at the start when social media really took off, and I personally think that what ails the UK is the same as what ails the world. Too much social media.

The UK has always been an empire in decline, but the wheels didn't come off until everyone became glued to feeds. It's Garbage In, Garbage Out. If your view of reality is driven by stuff that you see online, it's a distorted lens which then leads to distorted decision making that then leads to authoritarian creep.

Just my 2¢.

I only have to look as far as my own wallet to see the effects. I'm being taxed to the eyeballs while there is a glass ceiling preventing me taking any more pay home without a major jump which just isn't coming due to stupid tax rules keeping the working class from bumping into the middle class.

I see mine and my family's living standards drop only to be told by the news that I'm a likely target for more tax hikes, and there's just no room to tax me more while my bills have also gone up significantly, and something will have to give. If it gets to the point where I can't pay my bills despite being a "high earner" I'll have to start considering whether I leave with my family, and where to.

I'm not exactly the milky bar kid, but I imagine beyond my friends and family, I imagine the consensus would be very much the same, yet there goes two "successful" professionals and the children we were raising probably to be high earning professionals too.

I don't do social media, but I do keep on top of the news from all outlets, I try to look beyond the biases and form an opinion on a combination of sources.

Emotional phrases aside, what is your total NI + income tax deduction percentage, and what percentage do you think you should be paying?

They're well known an documented, but I'm sure you know that already.

I figured you'd say that. It's a well-used talking point to change the topic. Because if you give me a %, you know I'll compare it to other countries, and point out it's actually not that high.

I also note you ignored my other question.

For other readers: even a £140k salary, your net deduction is 39%. At £200k, it's 41%. This is why people like OP don't like talking about total deductions, because it isn't aligned with their Daily Mail cliche talking points. And once you're earning very high salaries, you don't do PAYE and start using a good accountant.

edit: but yes I do agree about the £100-£125k tax band being a glass ceiling of sorts. But that is a different topic to "I'm taxed too much", which is what you claimed

Perhaps it was a problem with my wording but your statement about the daily mail suggests you've entirely misunderstood me, but to be specific I'm generally left leaning and prefer broadsheets, though I currently mostly use aggregators to combine sources to find where the facts are as opposed to "cliche talking points".

I thought I was clear when I said that the effect on my wallet is where my opinion is formed, but it seems you might have missed that.

I have no problem with paying more tax as a higher earner, but I don't agree with a tax system that literally prevents me from earning a penny more and would even have me earn less unless I can find a significant jump.

You clearly have a different view on this but the facts of what I see right in front of me have little to do with talking points and consensus and everything, right now, to do with tax or the tax system.

I'm taxed too much on every penny I've earned over over £99,999 and way too much because of the privilege of having pre-school aged children, that's my opinion, agree or not.

Look at salary sacrifice. This give you the option of buying childcare vouchers before tax. So taking you below the 100,000. Otherwise pay more into pension and drop below the 100,000 threshold.

Not tax advice, not financial advice...

I wasn't aware of this, I'll take a look and see if it applies thanks.

The pension route is the way I've gone to deal with it, but it doesn't fix the issue of "my bills are going up while my income can't". I'm sure retired me will be glad for it if it makes it that far, and we don't somehow end up being taxed to the hilt on _that_ too when we eventually get there.

EDIT: does > doesn't

He keeps on top of the news from all outlets, and tries to look beyond the biases and form an opinion on a combination of sources.

It is funny you say these are well known and documented, yet provide no links or sources.

https://www.gov.uk/income-tax-rates https://www.gov.uk/tax-free-childcare

For other readers who don't want to go through that:

Say you earn £99,999 and get a pay rise to £100,000 and have two pre-school aged children, you lose £4000 (£2000 per child) per year, so you now earn less.

Now for the next ~£25,140 you earn you'll pay an effective tax rate of 60%, so from £99,999 you first have to hit ~£110,000 to break even, then it's ~60% tax up to £125,140, then beyond that it's 45%.

And you wouldn't be receiving it at all if you didn't have children.

Like I would choose to not means test such a policy were in charge, but it's also got nothing to do with marginal tax rates - it's why liberals like me generally oppose means tested welfare policies (because it costs more to deliver and tends to deliver less).

You also don't have childcare costs once they go to school, so the loss of that outgoing makes up for the loss of the tax credit.

I'm also liberal, and I think that everyone should be given the child tax credit, if the government wants you to work, and earn, and have children (it does), the tax credit is an effective way to help everyone work harder and earn more.

The issue I've been trying to describe, is that after you've already had children, and you then hit 100k, you lose it entirely, making you 2k per child worse off, so let's say you get to 100k, and you already have two children in childcare, you lose 4k, then you get a pay rise to 110k, with the loss of the 4k and at the same time you also hit a marginal tax rate of 60%, you now earn exactly the same as you did at 100k.

If you got a with-inflation pay rise every year from 100k onward, you'd be earning less for almost all of that time until those children go to school.

Lowering the higher band threshold to 100k from 125k and not tapering the personal allowance would actually leave you better off.

EDIT: Typo in my numbers (100k > 110k).

That said, I agree that is pretty stupid.

The only connection to marginal tax rates is that the pay bands line up though?

On the part from 0 to 1000, no taxes

1001 to 10000, ten percent

10001 to 20000, twenty percent

20000 to 30000, thirty percent

30001 and more, forty percent

So if you were earning 29000 and get a raise to 31000 those 29000 are still taxed as they used to and the extra 2000 are split among the two bands around 30k.

Edit: Ah, there's a baseline personal deduction (12.5k) that disappears between 100-125k, meaning, for that narrow band, every dollar earned in that range has a higher effective tax rate due to that deduction slowly disappearing. It's still progressive, so you don't suddenly start paying 60% tax on everything.

https://www.brewin.co.uk/insights/earn-over-100k-beware-the-...

EDIT: it's interesting that anyone genuinely asking and trying to understand is getting downvoted as opposed to anyone who just disagrees with me.

I struggle with the child tax credits. If I'm childless and move from 99,999 to 100,000 it doesn't change my situation at all. I don't think we can view that in the same light - it's a tax credit benefit, but it's not just a matter of earnings. The goal is to support lower income families, so the line has to be drawn somewhere, and whether it's gradual or not someone is still going to complain about it going away.

Nobody is expected not to use it if they earn below the point it is taken away, it's just an arbitrary tax on parents who earn 100,000, while at the same time a few other paper cuts are piled on.

I know Americans always do tax returns, sounds like a pita for you guys, and I believe until recently you had no choice but to use some sort of service and couldn't DIY it?

Here if you're PAYE (salaries), it's dealt with on your behalf, the tax is deducted before you're paid and you don't have to deal with it, unless you're self employed. It's not necessarily a huge issue, but it's a time cost and that has to have a price, and if you get it wrong, HMRC are notoriously hard and will demand full payment immediately, if you're lucky and they accept your "excuse" (their word), they might let you split it over 3 months.

At this point it's best to make sure you have £10,000+ in savings aside just in case.

I've not had to do a tax return yet, but I've frequently seen tax bills in the tens of thousands from family and friends because their accountant got it wrong, and holds no liability.

I don't think it's as big an issue for me people have taken from my original wording, that's fine, poor choice of words on my part perhaps, but it has certainly been blown out of proportion including some minor jabs at me and (incorrectly) at my political leanings etc. Despite this really all having nothing to do with politics or news and quite clearly as I pointed out at it's direct effect on my family finances.

As the saying goes here in England, "I'm sorry I mentioned it".

This seems to be me to be a weird framing. It's a tax benefit for parents that's taken away when you hit £100k. When you hit £100k you don't face an arbitrary tax, instead you're now playing by the same rules everyone else is. You're in parity with your child-less coworker. Not disadvantaged, just no longer advantaged.

The government has been clear they want you to work harder and earn more, they also want you to have children and raise future tax payers, if you do have children either your career and earnings take a hit or you need to put them in childcare, in that case I think all child care should be tax free, they're only in there so you can work and earn and pay tax. It's typical that your wages should increase with experience but you can't un-have children, perhaps you didn't even know you'd hit that threshold when you had them, or more likey that such a threshold even exists.

If we don't think of it like that, but simply that you're no longer advantaged as you put it, the issue is that it's sudden and affects unevenly, two parents can earn £99,999.99 EACH and still receive it, but a single parent or one person in a couple earns that extra penny they're now £2000/child worse off and still have to put their children in childcare.

Of course there's an option to have or not to have children, but I'd argue that the global consensus in countries with ageing populations, like the UK, is that the government want you to work more, and for longer and have more children, so it should be fair to say that from the government perspective, having children is the expected norm.

Having it go away is less of a problem than having it go away all at once. If it was phased out over a range of incomes such that every marginal dollar of gross is still a marginal increase in net, that'd solve the problem mentioned in this thread. Key property of a tax system: the function from gross income to net income should always be monotonically increasing.

Obviously very different if you're self employed or have income mostly from investments or properties, but the you have an accountant to do it for you.

The income numbers are already there and if I want to check it's easy: my employer gives me a form with the same numbers in the same numbered boxes. I just need to specify how much income I had from bank interest.

The tax witholding system usually works as well - the main exception being straight after starting work for the first time or changing jobs, when you can have a temporary code. In these cases I just called HMRC and told them what was going on. The employer gives my pay numbers to HMRC and HMRC give my employer a tax code that determines how much to withhold each month.

We could imagine fixing the problem by making the childcare voucher phase out between 80k and 100k, and at 100.2k you'd get exactly the same amount as you get under the current system.

In this hypothetical would you still say taxed to the eyeballs? If so, what would your justification be?

With a progressive tax band, the burden is different, you're aware of it ahead of time and you set your living standards accordingly, you won't see a big sudden drop and can adjust accordingly. You can't suddenly sell your home or find a much higher paying job in the same space of time a small pay increase took you over the cliff.

For my generation, a professional that's having a family has probably focused on their career to get there, having there kids once they break some income threshold at a certain age, let's say it's 80k to fit with your numbers. You bought your home somewhere where those higher salaries are, paid a premium, higher SDLT on a small new build flat, you upsize when you have kids, buy a(n) (old) house, now overpriced due to property price jumps in the last few years, another chunk of SDLT, bills much higher, then you hit 100k as your costs have gone up significantly, that might be manageable, but you've just lost 2k per child to the tax credit trap, then the next 10k breaks even, after that you're taxed at 60% while your salary can't/won't be able to increase enough to offset that additional tax burden and your living standards have materially dropped because you got a pay rise.

I suppose the nuance I'm trying to convey is one of timing compounded by cliffs in the tax system that wouldn't become the sudden problem they are if the tax system wasn't set up the way it is.

One could argue that you could have known this, but I don't believe anyone would be seriously aware of the pitfalls until they have kids or hit a salary where you're going to be hit with a big step in tax burden.

Sure it won't affect everyone the same, but if you happen to meet those specific criteria with that specific timing, it can certainly feel like being "taxed to the eyeballs" even if that isn't the best way to put it. I'm far from the only person in that position, it's just the natural progression for some.

I hope that explains my position a bit better. I wasn't trying to say "I pay too much tax as a percentage of my income", in fact I DON'T think that, but I and others I've spoken to in this situation believe it's a tax-based ceiling on our progression and is a tax-based contribution to the growing wealth devide pushing anyone down that attempts to break into the middle class, which as a whole just makes the rich richer and the poor poorer; no I'm not putting myself in those brackets before someone jumps on me, but pushing the middle down makes the rich richer and the poor poorer (sorry slight tangent at the end there).

https://thesalarysphere.com/blog/average-salary-uk/

Owning a home, having significant savings, holidays abroad at least once a year, sending your children to private school, etc are probably some things I'd consider markers of being in the lower middle class.

On that basis, homes are becoming harder to own, savings are being eaten up by higher cost of living, the pound is weakening and taxes are making it untenable to send your children to private school.

Maybe my idea of what being middle class is is wrong, but it can't be far off, and that's exactly the group of people who aren't going to go much further beyond that to whatever comes at the next stage, I don't know what living standards look like for people above that; multiple properties, significant portfolios, not working for a living?

If my perspective if off, I'm willing to hear it.

You come across as out of touch and entitled. You live in the future - enjoy it!

But it’s not obvious that the standard of living associated with being better off would ever have been near the 90th, let alone 90th percentile of salaries?

Not convinced that sending children to private school would ever have been seen as a ‘lower middle class’ expectation.

But I’m also not convinced that the markers you describe are not available to someone at the 75th percentile of income, say, let alone to people at the 95th percentile. Now the luxuriousness of those markers may not be at the level marketed in glossy brochures etc but isn’t that an issue with unrealistic expectations?

I suspect it's nowhere near the 95th percentile of earned wealth.

If the income of everybody above the 80th percentile dropped to be equal to the 81st percentile, the 80th percentile income wouldn't change the ones above would just be very closely bunched.

(Last time I checked the opposite was true and they got more spread out)

The truth is I don't know the exact numbers but it's not relevant to my point, as I've tried to point out elsewhere.

Now despite your previous admission, you are here telling me that you did answer it and I just didn't like the answer. The question has revealed more about you and your motives than we could have ever imagined.

That is not how marginal tax rates work. Each income band is taxed at the rate for that band. It’s why it’s called “marginal” - because the rate change happens at the margin between brackets.

You are taxed 0% on your first £12571. You are taxed 20% on your next £37669, or, £7359.80 on £50270 of income. If you then earned one more pound, or £50271, you would owe £0.40 (40%) on that one additional pound only, for a total of £7361.20. There is no income stage where earning more money has you taking home less.

If you go from £99,999 to £100,000 and have pre-school aged children, you lose £2000 in tax-free childcare per child. If you have 2 children, that extra penny cost you £4000, 3 children, £6000, you take home less, fact.

Combined with the 60% marginal rate, you now have to get to £110,000 just earn the same you did at £99,999 and then there's the side point that a couple can earn £99,999 each, or £198,999.98 and still benefit from it while any single parent who hits £100,000 loses it completely, so a single parent high earner loses out vs a couple. I'm not a single parent but that doesn't seem reasonable to me.

EDIT: and that person who hit £100,000 has the extra burden of having to file a tax return from now on simply because they hit an arbitrary number, and despite being on PAYE, though perhaps some people love doing tax returns, so not necessarily a negative point.

https://www.gov.uk/tax-free-childcare

That's not where I would say the line between working class and middle class should be drawn.

there are several

there's one at around 50k (where child benefit is removed) and another at 100k (where childcare vouchers are removed)

Here’s an explanation of the figures:

https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/money/article/high-i...

https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2024/10/17/reform-income-tax-end-th...

Also, if you’re paying a decent amount in to your pension your effective salary is lowered and won’t hit that child benefit threshold until your salary exceeds £60k or more, and you still get to keep all of that money.

The real kicker is the 99,999->100,000 trap where you lose all tax free childcare care allowance, £2000 per year per child, it's assessed quarterly, and if you exceed it by a single penny, not only do you lose it, they also demand immediate repayment of all childcare allowance so far that year.

So this might or might not be in line with official guidance but I was exactly in this situation and I expected to earn around £99k last tax year then I was given an unexpected £4k bonus in my march salary, and I wasn't told about it until it was in my account already so it was too late to put it into pension. I asked HMRC about it and they said as long as I was being truthful at every quarterly questionnaire where they ask if you expect to make over £100k and I told them the situation changed as soon as I became aware of it I don't have to pay anything back for the free childcare hours. I asked my accountant and she said since I have it in writing it should be fine(but HMRC can always change their mind so who the hell knows).

Compare that to the insane situation of the benefit for carers where people are being asked to repay benefits going back years if they went over the threshold by a single pound - I imagine HMRC is being incentivieed to go after benefit takers more than other areas like childcare hours, for various more or less political reasons.

I take it you lost your allowance for the rest of the year due to the bonus?

Luckily for me the childcare tax people contacted me about it the first time it could have become an issue because I received a bonus at the start of a tax year, so I adjusted my pension contributions for the rest of the year lowering my take home. By this point though I'd already been taxed that marginal 60% thanks to the bonus being paid to me, like yourself without being notified.

knowing HMRC it's because they can't figure out how to work it out

at least without giving infosys/fujitsu a couple of hundred million quid

For example, if you pollute 99 ppm, then you're good. If you pollute 100 ppm, you're bad.

Because if they knew about the welfare policy before they started typing, they would've actually mentioned it then - it's a specific problem, with several obvious solutions (i.e. don't means test at all or taper off more gently) unrelated to the concept of tax brackets (and potentially not related to the actual bracket index values themselves.

I’m no longer eligible to have an opinion UK or local conversations. “how would you know”, “the city’s changed a lot since you left”, “why are people who chose to leave so interested in X”, statements specific to ex-pats.

For those from outside the UK, ex-pat (expatriate) as a singular term is almost always derogatory regardless of context or publisher.

If you don't like it you must be foreign; I'm not, I was born and raised in England to British parents. Nowhere did I say I was even planning to leave, I merely suggested that if things got worse I might have to consider it, and I was jumped on for that.

Things ARE getting worse, but I'm not at that point yet, maybe we'll have a miraculous turn around and our public services will improve and our economy will grow, I'm not even asking for it to be sunny for 3 months of the year, but if they don't, am I just supposed to sit here on a sinking ship with my children next to me?

And let's be real, it's not even about me at this point, it's about what is and what will be for my children, I've worked hard to give them a better life than I had as a kid, and I'll be damned if I don't do it.

The peak of the empire was around WW1, where the victory was immediately followed by Irish home rule, and Churchill(!) putting the UK military into austerity to save money, which is how it came to be that evacuating from Dunkirk involved a lot of civilian ships, amongst other things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Year_Rule

WW2 was a Pyrrhic victory. Not that Westminster collectively realised the nation's weakness until the Suez Crisis and the Wind of Change: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_of_Change_(speech)

I'm not sure the people of the UK have yet fully internalised this decline, given the things said and written during the Brexit process. Perhaps social media really did make it all worse, but it's been authoritarian, chauvinistic (both internationally with imperialism and domestically via the aristocracy), and theocratic, ever since Harold Godwinson may or may not have taken an arrow to the eyeball.

Thatcher reversed the feeling by selling off the nation to rentiers and foreigners in the 80s, we rode that money in the 90s, and the wheels came off in 2008.

I don't know where you're getting this information, but it's in stark contrast to all of the statistics I've ever seen on the matter.

https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/51484-how-do-britons-...

Even Nigel Farage has called it a disaster.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-leave-...

Here's some Farage quotes, so you can see that there is no contradiction between the comment you were replying to (him saying it was a disaster is compatible with all this) and him still being a leaver:

  “I don’t think that for a moment,” Mr Farage replied when he was asked if the UK would have been better off staying in the EU, the world’s largest single market area. “But what I do think is we haven’t actually benefitted from Brexit economically, what we could have done.”

  “I mean, what Brexit’s proved, I’m afraid, is that our politicians are about as useless as the commissioners in Brussels were,” he added. “We’ve mismanaged this totally, and if you look at simple things…such as takeovers, such as corporation tax, we are driving business away from our country.

  “Arguably, now we’re back in control, we’re regulating our own businesses even more than they were as EU members. Brexit has failed.”

The same thing is true in Sweden. People vote for the party that blames the immigrants and then goes on to rule with the liberal conservative part. They all know that during the time they claim is the downfall of Sweden, we have more than one third of state tax income and had the worst privatisation of schools worldwide, . Yet the problems with schools and healthcare is immigration.

Demagogues are what they are.

IMO, many of the UK politicians themselves don't realise how out of touch they are, both with the people and with the systematic reality of the world in which they exist. (Thinking back to David Davis on Brexit, saying they had a good idea what Czechoslovakia wanted from negotiations, despite it having ceased to exist in 1992).

All of the currently-rich nations had a multi-generational baby boom*, long enough for their systems to assume and become dependent on that population growth.

* babies being the most extreme example of "influx of illiterate people, totally dependent on government handouts", though people only objected to them in the UK when I was a kid when it was single mothers producing them

Families started to have fewer kids, but the systems still presumed and needed more people to avoid stagnation. Japan chose stagnation instead of welcoming as many immigrants as it needed, and "the lost decade" became a plural: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decades

> Healthcare and insurance, literally everything is pricing the middle class out of existence.

I assume from this that you're American? That's basically just America that has this problem. Healthcare and health insurance is fine in most other developed (and developing) nations, even e.g. here in Germany in those few years where it took on around a million asylum seekers.

• https://ourworldindata.org/us-life-expectancy-low

• https://ourworldindata.org/financing-healthcare

The school results are worse. Even here the claim is that it is the immigrants' fault. The privatisation of the school system in sweden has led to increased segregation of the school system. Private schools can be found in areas where they get "easy students". Yet they fail to deliver any better results than public schools. Which is amazingly dumb. The state pays private schools (they are open for anyone and have no tuition fees). The schools can then let less money go to tuition and more to the share holders/owners, while being able to claim that they are just as good as schools with all the tough students. By all measurements they should be much better. It is such an enormous failure.

And who do we blame? Immigrants.

And social mobility is going downwards. Not nearly as low in the US, but I want to think that we at least still believe in the value of hard work.

Are you sure you replied to the right comment? Where have they claimed that?

my original comment

https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/52410-nine-years-afte...

I see your point.

In the 90s, it brought us some of the best economic times we will ever see.

So sure, lets rewrite history.

You should care about the economy. More money means jobs and prosperity. Less people dying in the streets and more tax revenue to help the helpless.

"in my country and the UK."

The UK has universal healthcare and it's been touted for years as the best answer to healthcare. What happened?

"libertarian fantasy of you being and island and accountable to nothing and no one but your own piddly, small notion of what moves you forwards."

I see. You are still bitter about Brexit.

America is a precise model for what the UK will look like if it shirks liberalization. Here in the US, we've lost almost all of our postwar industrial capacity. We can't ship cost-competitive smartphones or electric vehicles without importing parts from China. We can't mass-produce the things we consume or even export enough to keep out of a trade deficit. Our biggest exports are software services reviled the world over for being surveillance systems installed and moderated by America's government. Our businesses are no longer seen as stable blue-chip stocks, but moonshots and gambling opportunities.

If you actually knew the consequences of a financier economy then you wouldn't wish it on your worst enemy.

Every inch of our economy is now owned by some faceless fund. All serious capital generated in the country is extracted out into the pockets of fund managers and Californian pensioners.

We're screwed until we can stem the outflow. I always thought taxing money leaving the country might be interesting way to approach the problem.

> taxing money leaving the country might be interesting way to approach the problem.

This would end very poorly because what the U.K. sorely needs is investment (to create new productive capacity). For example, Americans invested huge sums in North Sea oil and created an entire industry (before we destroyed it). Conversely, if you force people to keep wealth in the country then you just make things more expensive: they will bid up the price of property and the like. Nothing is added to the UK’s real economy by increasing the number of pounds flowing around in it - it’s only helpful if it’s invested. So what you actually want is tax breaks for foreign investment, but with some kind of ownership cap.

There's been enough in the way of tax breaks and "derisking". A huge part of the problem with our public finances is being on the hook for some very ill-advised "investments".

The money going out exceeds the money going in, because that's what an investment is. An opportunity to make money.

What the UK desperately needs is actual shareholder capital actually being invested into British companies, so that they can create new wealth. They are welcome to take a share of the wealth they create! Everybody wins!

What I see is every national asset, every successful company, and increasingly land and housing sold to (typically overseas) capital, with the proceeds sucked offshore.

Whether it's new housing in London, ARM, the water, the electricity, most products and most supermarkets: the beneficial owner is outside the country, being largely taxed outside the country, and spending their money outside the country.

We're discussing this in the context of a deeply dysfunctional Britain. If the "wealth creation" route were in any way effective, we'd be in a very different place right now. There's been concensus among pretty much every party in my lifetime around supporting "growth", "investment", number go up. It's clearly not working for most of us. Everyone but a select few in this country is living on the edge.

I personally see a major component of our malaise as the rentierism practiced by largely foreign interests throughout our economy. Alternative explanations are welcome, but it's hard to see how we'd be worse off without the vampire squid up each and every orifice.

> There's been consensus among pretty much every party in my lifetime around supporting "growth", "investment", number go up.

Yes most U.K. governments have talked about fine talk but other than Thatcher, failed to actually deliver on securing enough investment. It’s not that the investments are bad, it’s that they have been decreasing for 25 years:

https://www.economicsobservatory.com/boosting-productivity-w...

It’s funny that you mention ARM because it was created under Thatcher back when the U.K. was willing to start businesses. Yes it should never have been sold.

Even China with extreme capital controls and pervasive surveillance can't stop money leaving the country. Unless the UK was willing to go fully authoritarian and ban its citizens from spending money overseas, and ban crypto (and build all the internet firewall/DPI infrastructure that doing so would require), it wouldn't stand a chance. And attempting to do so would destroy the value of the pound, because nobody with any options would want to hold a currency that could only be spent in the UK.

Capital controls. By the time they are applied it's always too little, too late, and they only ever apply to the plebs -- the wealthy always have ways to move money out (and back in, later -much later-, if it becomes necessary or advantageous). Always too little too late because -I suspect- capital controls don't really work -- not against the wealthy.

Without money society is just doomed.

Could you elaborate? From over here the Netherlands seems almost a paradise of modern society.

We do suffer from many political parties not willing to cause short term pain to improve long term outcomes. There are a few urgent issues going on in politics at the moment. Stuff where a decision needs to be made now and action should be taken. But the political parties do not want to make those decisions because they would inflict short term pain to some voters but would also improve the long term quality of life and economics of the Netherlands.

The worst part is that those issues have been known for a long time, but decisions were postponed over and over again because politicians didn't want to make the decision. Making the issues worse and more urgent over time.

At the same time populism is clearly on the rise in the Netherlands. A famous thing happening in a debate before the previous elections was a populist saying "But this woman cannot wait for the costs to be decreased, she needs it now." about decreasing a specific part of healthcare costs for citizens. Of course when the same populist became the biggest party during the elections, they never introduced anything to decrease that part of the healthcare costs.

So politicians LIED?! Color me shocked.

On average as a tourist, the Netherlands is straight up just a better version of Germany. However a friend of mine recently moved. She’s from India, moved to Germany and then fell in love with a Durch man she ultimately married. In the process of moving she of course also switched into the Dutch health care system and that I think is legit worse than the German one but I don’t know how much that might be a symptom of a greater issue in the Netherlands.

The difference is essentially that the Dutch health care system tries to be profitable which is nice but then results in procedures not being covered by health insurance that a German doctor would find essential. Specifically preventative care and child birth related stuff where very problematic for her.

But otherwise I think the Netherlands takes a very practical approach to society. Is it annoying for cars to navigate Dutch cities? Yes but also it’s the only country where you can basically always take a bicycle anywhere and be safe. Is 100km/h on the highway annoying? Yes but it’s also the most relaxing drive in heavy traffic I can imagine. I think in a quite literal sense, i think the Dutch are less conservative than we are. The way things were done matters less which results in people seeing the benefits of change much more. Like everything car related. Youd start a riot in germany just doing parking like the Dutch do.

There's a strong focus on streamlining and reducing "unnecessary" care (including a lot of preventative care that is accessible in other countries) but without doing that now the whole system will not be affordable in 20 - 30 years.

Is that the optimal approach? I'm not sure, taking a patient wishes into account and doing (some) preventative care does probably have a positive ROI. Having said that I can see both sides of the coin but as a younger person I'm glad they're taken future demands into account.

This. The UK was a band of feudal kingdoms that somehow managed to create an overseas empire. The empire is now gone, and the feudal kingdom is struggling to transform itself into a modern nation.

I appreciate the proximity of the two sentences made it unclear, but the general population isn't what I'm critical of in this case. I briefly had an Iranian project manager, that nation is almost as high as you can get on the theocracy scale (IIRC it would be beaten by Afghanistan), but he absolutely was not and had tattoos of video game characters.

Also, I should say that the use of "theocracy" in the modern sense is somewhat looser than the historical, and therefore ask if we're actually disagreeing? Certainly I don't mean in the sense of the deification of the Pharaohs.

Re the rest:

Given my focus is the rulers and not the people, I think the Lords Spiritual remain relevant (the attempt to replace the HoL with an elected one being promised by the HoC in 1911, still waiting).

Likewise that the head of state is also the head of the national church and there being a religious requirement for being crowned monarch, and that there is no desire to reform away the monarchy as an institution, likewise the Establishment nature of the CoE, making this the only non-meta conversation I've ever had where I can legitimately use the longest (recognised, non-systematic) word in the English language by saying that the UK political system is one of antidisestablishmentarianism.

I don't think I'd count the coins, even though this is about the ruling classes who are much more likely than anyone else to speak Latin and thus recognise the abbreviation printed on them. "FID DEF" has an ironic history, but so does the much easier to read "In God We Trust" and I'm not (yet) going to describe the USA in this way.

Aside from all of that, there's also the requirement of schools that:

  All maintained schools must provide religious education and daily collective worship for all registered pupils and promote their spiritual, moral and cultural development.

  Collective worship in county schools and equivalent grant-maintained schools must be wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character, though not distinctive of any particular Christian denomination.

If the per capita spending is exceeding per capita taxation, increased immigration does not solve the problem. More people requires more spending.

> The UK has always been an empire in decline

I find this fatalistic attitude to be very unhelpful in determining good policy decisions. If you start with the assumption that the empire is in decline then it doesn’t seem as bad to add policies that contribute to decline, as long as you get some short-term win out of it.

The other factor is that everyone now knows how powerful social media can be. Remember when we had positive movements like Occupy Wallstreet, the Arab Spring and Anonymous Hacktivism all facilitated by social media? That doesn't happen anymore. Small things like getting traction for a petition still work, but anything that questions existing structures has no chance of succeeding anymore. Instead social media is overrun by bots that simulate broad consensus on many issues

And that’s without putting things like dating apps, advertisements and privacy violations in the mix.

A common thread is that when people complain about too much media consumption, they’re always talking about other people consuming other media. Few people believe their own consumption to be a societal level problem. Almost nobody believes that their sources of media are the bad ones. It’s always about other sources that other people are consuming.

This is why age verification has the most support of these topics: Adults see it as targeted specifically at a group that isn’t them (young people) whose media they dislike the most.

Technology is advancing must faster than humans can biologically evolve and very few people seem ready to seriously tinker with the human genome to keep pace.

Perhaps "the feeds" are just the inflection point where the information overload becomes obvious and baseline humans actually need a majority baseline human experience with all of the associated problems in order to prosper?

People also complained about literacy rates and the printing press, but how would we have been better off without any of these things so far?

Maybe whatever X newest way to communicate is bad, but when the only evidence against it is the same old arguments that failed to hold up to scrutiny over and over again, I see no reason to give it any more prudence than someone claiming carbonated beverages have caused all out problems. There needs to be compelling evidence beyond people complaining about the collective woes of society that have a cacophony of sources and contributing factors.

To me, different and new communication methods only bring a spot light on issues that we already had. Having a town crier instead of a newspaper, radio, or TV isn't going to make me better informed or less likely to have my information manipulated against me. Sure, it limits the number of sources of information, but that doesn't curate the sources of that information any better when I have no control over them.

But social media is different. For most forms of media, TV, movies, books, radio etc. You had some degree of agency and choice over what you consumed. You couldn't set what a channel or station was playing, but you could change the channel.

You don't choose what you see on social media. You see what an algorithm thinks is most likely to keep you hooked / going.

Our brains only know what's real based on what's in front of it. You can acknowledge something is rage bait, but as you process it, you will still feel some degree of anger / discomfort. You can acknowledge that something is a cherry picked example, designed to tug the sensibilities of users, but it will still tug on your sensitivities.

And so sure enough, as you keep getting rage baited, concern trolled into algorithmic oblivion, it changes your gestalt. Your worldview shifts to one where those are data points, and it starts distorting your perception of reality.

Garbage In. Garbage Out.

Other people have said that it's like electricity consumption. No. This is very much like tobacco. I don't use social media. Even though I get paid to post to it.

However the uncomfortable truth is that many people enjoy what they see in social media, just like they enjoyed the manufactured bait of Jerry Springer and Jeremy Kyle on TV.

I wish this were the case so badly... it seems to be more the opposite with many companies doing RTO now.

Humans are not fungible cogs

Absolutely. It's not the only problem, but it is a serious and deep problem.

Social media is a forum for people to complain about the problems they face, if you don’t like that the solution is not to censor the messenger but to fix the problems.

As someone who grew up in the UK I can tell you that the elitist mindset of the UK is a huge part of their problem: only the elite are capable sophisticated right-think, all others are wrong-thinking simpletons and must be silenced for their own safety. The BBC is a huge part of the problem as it is inevitably pro-government but trades off a strong image of neutrality, to the extent that it regularly misleads the public and they lap it up.

IMHO, there's nothing authoritarian about either editors or social media. It only becomes authoritarian when they intentionally align with a central political authority.

I don't support censorship. But increasing the accuracy of the information most people are getting is a difficult problem to solve.

There have been a number of public scandals regarding immigrant crimes, along with subsequent anti-immigrant riots started via social media and people being sent to jail for internet posts. Social media seems to be more of accelerant for social unrest than than the cause. For me (an outsider) observing the situation, it seems to be mainly caused by immigration.

News coverage of child grooming convictions in the month of their conviction was dominated by a different group of scumbags who were convicted of similar crimes up to a decade earlier though, which underlines my point about obsessions quite neatly

Implying that the recently -convicted gang who spent several years hosting "rape nights" targeting minors in Glasgow I've linked to was somehow less depraved than people of Pakistani descent doing the same thing in Rochdale years earlier because they weren't members of an ethnic minority does kind of underline my point.

Your second point is a hallucination on your part. Nobody is saying it's bad because they're minorities. We're saying it's especially bad because the government was implicated - they very people charged with keeping children safe sacrificed them for political reasons, by the thousands, for years, and still are. That, combined with the scale of crimes by the Pakistani and other rapists and the acceptance these crimes received in their community, form a different type of crime - a massive crime committed by authorities and a whole community over years. That's what's so especially horrifying.

You're literally doing what you're accusing me of "hallucinating" yourself, bracketing a group of crimes by the ethnicity of the perpetrators, and ignoring white British people doing exactly the same thing and also getting away with it for years, and pinning the blame on the crimes committed by ethnic minorities specifically on the "entire community"; Somehow the Glaswegian associates and neighbours of the "Beastie House" aren't tarred with the same brush, and according to the person I was replying to even the perpetrators aren't as depraved. Police and social services (not generally considered part of "the government") failed to put a stop to grooming gangs for a wide variety of reasons; yes, in the case of Rochdale specifically where there were a number of warnings that shouldn't have been ignored that made it warrant a public enquiry and elevated news coverage. Needless to say social media coverage driven by agendas tended to skip the more robustly established findings that police repeatedly didn't take victim reports seriously out of assumptions about the behaviour of working class girls staying out late at night and often failed in fulfilling basic child protection protocols in favour of the "politicians covered it up and still are" angle. Back in reality, we've had a lot of convictions, multiple public inquires and people from all political parties talk more about them than most other sex crimes put together (even including Jimmy Savile)

In any case, the wider discussion was whether the UK's current ailments and political schisms are "mainly caused by immigration", and its quite hard to logically connect even the immigration-driven controversies like Brexit, "caps on migrant numbers" and fixation on small boat crossings to crimes committed by gangs of mostly second generation British Pakistanis, mostly in the early 2000s.

>Somehow the Glaswegian associates and neighbours of the "Beastie House" aren't tarred with the same brush

Because this is an isolated incident, not something happening at a mass scale in that community.

You are helping mass rape continue by trying to minimize it; you are part of the problem here, right here, right now. Your kinds of thoughts and words are the support that those ongoing mass gang rape of children requires to continue. Hope you're proud of yourself; at least nobody can call you racist.

>crimes committed by gangs of mostly second generation British Pakistanis

It's hard to connect immigration to crimes by committed by ethnic immigrant gangs? Dear lord.

Look up the stats on sex crime convictions per capita by immigrant origin in various European countries.

Although at police level, it came out yesterday that multiple officers in Rotherham were under investigation for sexually exploiting the victims themselves. Which would sound a much more likely reason why victims were ignored until they became part of wider investigations than some high-level conspiracy to empower taxi drivers to rape. I'm quite comfortable in being able to declare this is a major scandal without having to wait for the ethnicity of the police officers to be identified to decide whether it was an isolated incident or the fault of the entire community.

Only one of us is implying that some gang rape perpetrators and groomers are less of a big deal than others; it isn't me. Whether that is your intention or not, it certainly isn't helping victims get the support they needed or crimes get solved.

> It's hard to connect immigration to crimes by committed by ethnic immigrant gangs? Dear lord.

I mean, yeah, it's super hard to connect immigration routes that British Pakistanis and their ancestors didn't use at any point to crimes some of them committed.

> Look up the stats on sex crime convictions per capita by immigrant origin in various European countries.

We've got stats for sex crimes per capita for the actual UK, for convictions and for reports and for those targeting minors specifically. They certainly don't support your argument that white Britons' sex crimes against kids are "isolated incidents". Statistically, they're actually slightly overrepresented on a per capita basis, and that's after decades of large investigations into specific northern towns.

With no intention of downplaying the particular scandal that you're referencing, I don't think this is correct. Victims of sexual abuse by the Catholic Church are also usually estimated to range in the thousands, particularly e.g. in Germany

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_sexual_abuse...

Yeah they were: https://www.cps.gov.uk/cps/news/operation-stovewood-seven-me...

You're pointing to another rape case(ironic there's so many of them) but the other one was the OG that exposed the British government being involved in the cover up of migrant crimes to not seem racist, where the British citizens talking about the Muslim rape gangs were the ones being persecuted instead of the gangs themselves.

You can't make this shit up. It was a betrayal of the British people of epic proportions, whose trust in their leader was lost forever, because if they're willing to sweep that under the rug to protect their image, what else have they been covering up. Then the post office workers comes up.

Sorry to say, gizajob, you would make a terrible dictator.

Contrary to your statement, the UK is a center of education, innovation, and still a major player in finance. The current malaise infects the West and is much more than “brexit” or “colonial hangovers”.

The only successful professional white men I know and have known for the last 10 years are self employed...and even that is under attack. If you want a permanent job as a white man in the UK, your hope of career progress is minimal at best. You will only be promoted if there is no other option.

There is so much home grown talent in the UK going to waste in the name of modern ideology.

Its creating a kind of apathy towards work for a lot of people. Especially those now reaching their 40s. There are loads and loads of professionals with 20 years under their belts that have seen nothing but stagnant wages and slow / non-existant career progression.

The sad thing is, all of this hard line "white and male is stale" rubbish hasn't changed the balance in terms of wealth distribution...you can still he financially successful as a white man in the UK, just not through permanent work and definitely not working for British businesses.

Ive seen it first hand, I spent ages pitching a business idea and prototype to raise some funding. Not a sausage. As soon as I had a couple of black ladies involved (great lovely women, but far from the top of their game) money fell put of the sky. They didn't even have to deliver high quality pitches.

What is equally as sad is these two ladies don't want to be given hand outs based on their race. They struggle to work out whether what they're trying to do actually has value or whether they're just being given money because they're black and female. It messes with their heads as well.

I can't speak for OP but I can report on what I'm seeing... I know a lot of British, Canadian, and Australian expats that have moved to California in the past 5-15 years.

Why? Healthcare is probably everyone's first concern, but expats tend to be well educated successful people who can afford excellent healthcare... I'm an expat from a different country and seeing the top end of the healthcare facilities in the States is a luxury experience compared to national healthcare where I'm from. I wish everyone here had access to that, but at least poor people in California do have access to state healthcare.

Politics is a shit show, and has gotten worse recently of course, but that's true in a lot of places now and everyone I know came in before the most recent decline. I know a couple of families who have gone back to their countries, but all of them went back because they wanted to be close to family again, but none of them left because they didn't like it here.

Across everyone I know, the main appeals for coming to California seem to be weather and lower taxes than their home country. Cost of living is similar to many of the big cities in the countries I mentioned above. I'm not suggesting America is a better place, that's a different calculation for everyone, just reporting on what I'm seeing.

For me, it'll be the UAE. Instinctively, some people will probably attack that choice, which is fine. I've lived in the Middle East previously, it's not perfect to say the least and I have some personal history with that, but I understand the choice I'm making. One thing people won't like is the headline tax rate, but I probably won't come out ahead there initially as cost of living is quite high - it'll cost me about USD 70k just to put three kids in school. Accommodation is also quite expensive, private healthcare also needs paying for, but at least you get what you pay for then.

Where the tax situation is appealing though is that then I'll be incentivised to earn more beyond those high living costs, where I just don't feel I am in the UK. Sun and swimming works for me too. Job adverts there are absolutely rammed with literally thousands of applicants and I'm hearing from recruiters that a lot of people from the UK and wider Europe are trying to head in the same direction. I'll be working for myself though.

I likely won't see out my days there. I'd imagine we'll retire to somewhere on the Med, my wife would prefer NZ but I don't think that works for me. The US is perhaps desirable, but it seems quite hard for a Brit to get into unless they happen to have a job with a company there. We'll have to see.

Just a note to you or anyone else reading this, USD 70k is on the high side; average yearly schooling cost in Dubai is around 40k for 3 kids. And the accommodation cost depends heavily on location; it's more than 50% cheaper if willing to live at least half an hour's drive from the city centre.

Where are you going?

Anecdotally, the loaded people I know are all still here and largely back up polling data that the rich tend to favour higher taxes on themselves.

The spice/money must flow. Making money selling addictive products like smartphones? Probably the least bad way it can be made to flow. When that sort of thing breaks down, the rich run down the list: increasing taxes (except their own), culling the poor, outright seizing property, etc.

It’s also not entirely up to the UK, the EU has to be convinced about the seriousness of such a decision and how it would benefit them.

Have they though about joining some sort of economic union, maybe one with like minded countries that share the same continent?

There are so many charitable and earnest ways to make the point you're getting at, why reach for such intellectually low hanging fruit?

Is this the same comment where they said good riddance to the entire country?

I really prefer that sort of earnest, thoughtful comment compared to short-form little quips.

The EU might be better on digital privacy right now, however the emotional winds of the political mob change often and many people in EU government feel differently. The EU is also an aging population of technologically illiterate and immigrant-afraid retirees. I wouldn’t expect much different coming from them in the future.

Most of the OP's assessment that I quoted is about the UKs failing economics

Both have collapsing demographics, collapsing social welfare systems (turns out forced government pension payments thrown into low yielding bonds for people in their 20-30s who should be 100% equities is a bad idea), non-competitive taxation policy, and decades of underinvestment in risk assets that have starved their business community of capital needed to innovate or grow.

Who wouldn't be afraid of violent uneducated third world boat migrants, incompatible with your culture, moving next to you? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doKEworwVmE

Humans are tribal creatures seeking comfort in those like them. Do you want to live around those people? Because all the liberal people who are vocally pro immigration in public, are voting in private with their wallet and choices on housing and schools for their kids are voting against immigration, paying a premium to live away from the cities/areas with illegal migrants because they don't want their kids being the next Rotherham grooming gang victims.

So don't look at what people say, look at what people do and if they put their money where their mouth is. That's how you filter out the liberal hypocrites(champagne socialists) who only parrot the socially acceptable talking points.

So you can downvote me if that makes you feel better, but notice how nobody is sayin that I'm wrong.

Any stats showing uniquely high propensity for violence?

> uneducated

Any stats here?

> incompatible with your culture

Any data here? My MP is not white and was granted asylum, what incompatibility are you talking about precisely?

> illegal immigrants

People seeking asylum aren't yet illegal, the legality of their stay is decided when their case is heard.

The reality is that travelling over multiple countries and crossing the channel just to claim asylum in a country someone wants to be in requires a ton of determination, bravery, and desire to improve one's life. Way more bravery than anonymously spreading xenophobia online.

To quote you: "I have receipts for every point, just didn't want to post a wall of links"

>The reality is that travelling over multiple countries and crossing the channel just to claim asylum in a country someone wants to be in requires a ton of determination, bravery, and desire to improve one's life

Classic HN libtard brain rot take. TIL that breaking the law is "bravery and determination and desire to improve one's life". Can I use this defense for robing a store or a bank?

The one that is also working on a digital age verification system?

The one that created an AI regulation that stopped all innovation, and a data protection innovation who's single result is billions of people having to spend 3 seconds before visiting every website clicking a button that doesn't actually do anything (in 80% of cases)?

Yeah, great.

Isn't the cost of living crisis and rising wealth inequalities a problem that many western countries face?

Cost of living and wealth inequalities aren't key concerns for me personally. It's more quality of life for my family, safety and economic opportunity.

I left for greener pastures a long time ago and subsequently all of my friends and anyone I knew of any talent has also left, it feels weird visiting a place I once called home and not being able to see friends.

okay what are you implying tho?

The grass is always greener I suppose.

Your comment was mostly on point until you decided to put straight presenting white guys as the victims

Sounds like you...