DEM not gonna CON dis NATION: Rolling UK politics in the short-lived post-Murdoch era

she also has a Ronald Searle drawing as her twitter picture which is kind of making me want to reconsider but seems like too shallow a reason to vote for someone

Mine is a safe Labour seat and our local MP is largely reasonable if not exactly distinctive. Have serious issues with Labour over welfare policy right now and I don't particularly want to be complicit in any form of continuing austerity, but I haven't looked into Green policies enough for it to be anything but a soft-headed protest vote. There's a couple of standard issue Trot guys as well but looking under that particular rock usually reveals something horrific so fuck that.

^^ similar situation. Am probably going for the soft-headed protest vote option though.

Corbyn is my MP, don't see why I shouldn't vote for him tbh.

Corbyn is great. Was proud to vote for him when I lived in that neck of the woods.

Lammy is ours now, but I can't bring myself to vote anything other than Labour this year.

i'm in a tory/labour marginal now so have been psyching myself up to hold my nose and vote for the ex-investment banker labour are fielding (admittedly he has made housing a priority and seems willing to actually talk about inequality)

back in 1922 battersea elected one of the uk's only communist mps/the third ever ethnic minority mp!

Green is the only choice for me in my area, realistically.

Natalie Bennett has been terrible in interviews and under pressure and not particularly great in the debates compared with others, but no one voting Green is doing so in the serious expectation that she will be PM so I don't see why it particularly matters. Otherwise there's no real social democratic option that doesn't have an overt nationalist agenda and that fragmentation is both frustrating and depressing.

If I was in any kind of marginal Labour seat I would vote for them, but I'm pretty happy not to have to worry about holding my nose (especially as the nearest challengers in this seat last time were the LibDems).

I'm in a normally safe Labour seat, one of the few where they increased their majority in 2010, but I think it's possibly winnable for the SNP, though it would take a huge swing.

We also have a candidate for the "Cannabis is safer than alcohol" party.

not sure if he inhales
http://cista.org//static/media/candidate/Craig.jpg

he's got the same eyes as vin diesel in pitch black

think that guy will be starring in sticky black

http://media.giphy.com/media/10xZU9b7JBx14s/giphy.gif

the whole thing is a total farce - can't get motivated about it in any way. apart from fear of tories getting back in.

fun 'create your majority' game on BBC albeit currently broken
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2015-32336071

appropriately enough

i am voting Yorkhire First because this whole shit is a mug's game

^

Croydon First

Started looking at the SNP manifesto, since it seems to be a national document these days and the first glaring fiscal error jumps out at the top of only the third real page of text:

Scrapping the Bedroom Tax
We will vote for the immediate abolition of the unfair
Bedroom Tax. Abolishing the Bedroom Tax would mean
that the £35 million a year that the Scottish Government
is spending to compensate those affected by it would be
available to spend on other priorities. We would invest that
money in measures to tackle - and eventually eradicate -
food poverty.

A+ for sentiment. But if it costs you £35M to rule out the effects of a tax then that tax raises £35M. So if you cancel the tax you raise £35M less in taxes (particularly if you want full fiscal autonomy because then they're directly your taxes) which is neatly cancelled out by the £35M you save in not compensating people for being taxed under it. So whether it exists or not, the money to invest in the final sentence just doesn't exist.

That's a pretty fundamental error of double accounting.

scottish govt pays the bedroom tax for ppl out of its own pocket iirc

But do the funds raised by bedroom tax in Scotland go to the Scottish government, or do they go to Westminster at present? If the latter, then it makes sense. xp

The £35m benefits saving from the Bedroom Tax goes to Westminster. The Scottish government spends £35m to offset this, and would be £35m better off if the tax was scrapped.

Similarly, when the government in effect put an end to the bedroom tax last year, that £35m had to be found from somewhere and accounted for (Scotsman article) rather than just paid for by the savings from BT.

If you're saying that a £35m plus is cancelled out by a £35 minus elsewhere, that's just how money works.

£35m-£35 = £0 is not how money works.

35m they had to scrape together from down the back of the budgetary couch

Well it is how money works when the prime directive of your manifesto is that all taxes raised in Scotland stay in Scotland. Since that tax money is raised in Scotland it forms a £35M income to the Scottish budget which is currently offset by the £35M compensation. If you don't have the income then you don't need the compensation. But neither of them gives you an extra £35M.

Giving extra money has to assume that taxes collected /= pro-rata return of taxes under the Barnett formula, which would imply fraudulent accounting by the Treasury in which case please show working. Either that or there are a disproportionate amount of people in Scotland living in houses that are too big for them and therefore they are paying a higher than pro-rata element of the Bedroom Tax, in which case please show working.

so you're saying scotland should keep the bedroom tax if they're able to wrest control of the money it yields

No, I'm saying it makes no difference from a financial point of view whether it exists or not. Cancelling it does not create extra money.

If you're saying that a £35m plus is cancelled out by a £35 minus elsewhere, that's just how money works.

― Eyeball Kicks, Monday, 20 April 2015 12:46 (1 hour ago

I'm saying this, whereas the manifesto says that creates £35M.

can't show working but maybe there's some extra money created cos how much does it cost to administer your bedroom tax

Can't show working either but can't see how it would be 1) a meaningful figure and 2) not offset by dealing with all the taxes and deregulation proposed under fiscal autonomy. Unless you sack the people then you don't save their wages.

Every other figure this campaign has just been a number pulled out of somebody's arse so I don't see why the SNP should behave any differently.

ah, uk politics 2015, it stirs the soul

Well it is how money works when the prime directive of your manifesto is that all taxes raised in Scotland stay in Scotland. Since that tax money is raised in Scotland it forms a £35M income to the Scottish budget which is currently offset by the £35M compensation.

You do realise that the Bedroom Tax is not actually a tax, don't you? It sort of sounds like you don't.

By the way, Labour is making the same promise, with the same amount mentioned:

Labour’s proposal will not involve new money. Murphy said the £175m fund would come from the £35m a year saved for the Scottish government if Labour wins the election and scraps the bedroom tax.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/mar/24/scottish-labour-pledges-175m-anti-poverty-fund

From a Treasury pov, collecting extra income and paying out less have the same effect it's just the overall budget total that is then affected. This is at heart, I guess, the difference between austerity and the alternative.

Let's rephrase then. The 'tax' is expected to save circa £500M from welfare expenditure annually (which actually means Scotland are pro-rata up on the deal). If you have to find that extra £500M you can either take it from elsewhere in your budget and cut that area, increase taxes or increase borrowing. Scotland's chunk of this welfare saving is £35M. Abolishing the 'tax' would increase the welfare bill by £35M, which you have to hand because you're not directly subsidising people. So a net effect of zero.

The only way you get to spend the £35M on what you like is if you maintain the welfare bill at the austerity level. To then spend it on anti-austerity measure measures seems a bit counter-productive.

It's criticise Labour as well then, they're double accounting too.

Abolishing the 'tax' would increase the welfare bill by £35m

I don't think it works, not least because you're comparing shaky projections to actual spend. In a perfect world, the bedroom tax just means everyone moves out of their homes with spare rooms into more appropriately sized homes, and the social security (when the fuck did we let the Tories call this "welfare"?) benefits are unrealised.

In the actual world it will mean some extra income, but still less because at least some amount of people will move and others just won't pay.

Here, looks like that £480m estimate was overcooked by £160m:
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/oct/14/bedroom-tax-ministers-likely-savings

A bit stretched, but this is more like if Westminster collected speed camera fines and Holyrood said it would pay for speeding Scottish drivers, whether they were caught by a camera or not. If the speed cameras were scrapped, Holyrood would end up saving money either way.

Westminster would lose projected potential income, but in both these scenarios it's incredibly unlikely it comes out as zero-sum.

("Perfect" there meaning mathematically perfect, I guess. Fuck the bedroom tax imo)

^

I agree, fuck a bedroom tax, and agree with the inference I think I'm supposed to make that it was a policy that was never supposed to work as stated. One of the worst things that could have happened (from a Conservative pov) would have been people moving house when the intention was clearly to cut welfare.

Wait, I must be missing a trick here. Are you saying the £35M is a made-up Scottish figure? I was under the impression it was ACTUAL compensation payments made to restore benefits for people that had had them cut, in which case the number of people moving house is irrelevant from a financial perspective. If, instead, it's the value which would be needed if nobody moved and everybody was 'taxed' then since we seem to be assuming some people have moved then the whole £35M can't have been spent so it can't all be 'saved' either. Also missing from your analogy is Holyrood getting their collected speed camera revenue given to them.

Also noting that if the actual saving turns out to be £320M as the Guardian article claims then the pro-rata of £35M turns out to be about right.

Things that you won't need to pay for as a result of no bedroom taxes:

People getting evicted for arrears and then having to downsize into a private let, possibly an ex-council place owned by a BTL landlord
People getting evicted for arrears and then going into shockingly expensive hostels and/or B&B
People getting evicted for arrears in London and then being transported/socially cleansed away from their support networks
Administration for the above
Knock-on costs to social care and the NHS

^^^these things *do* add up to quite a bit, but I can't say how much.

People getting evicted in London has no effect on how much money might get added back into the Scottish budget. Knock on costs exist, sure, but they do for the implications of any policy (such as cancelling Trident turning Cumbria into an unemployment blackspot {haha, autocorrect wants to turn that into Blackpool Blackpool} which doesn't seem to be addressed in that policy).

You only save money on administration if you have less staff (or give them new things to do which are unrelated).

meanwhile:

http://www.mirror.co.uk/usvsth3m/17-reasons-to-register-to-vote-immediately-5553337

(not sure about all this but as I understand it)

Housing benefit is paid by local authorities.
Local authorities reclaim housing benefit from DWP, not from the Scottish government. (so Holyrood doesn't see the speed camera money)
Local authorities administer the "bedroom tax" (i.e. cut housing benefit).
The Scottish government makes up the shortfall in benefits for those who have been "taxed" by giving money to local authorities from the Discretionary Housing Payments budget, thus allowing people "living in houses that are too big for them" to stay in them, rather than moving to all the non-existent smaller ones.
The Scottish government's figures say £35m was paid this year and budgeted for next year from the DHP, though I think some of the money set aside was unclaimed.

Abolishing bedroom tax means full housing benefit is paid by local authorities and claimed back from DWP and that the Scottish government therefore will be able to use its DHP budget on things that aren't bedroom tax.
I think that adds up to a saving in Scotland paid for by central UK government.

There are issues around DHP that I'm not 100% on - it was provided by DWP but I think ScotGov had a cap removed to allow additional spending to help with bedroom tax/housing benefits issues. Of course Scotland's chunk of DHP might be cut following an abolition of bedroom tax which would affect the total saving figures.

I imagine the cost of administering DHP claims is also significant as this is down to individual households to claim - the government/local authority can't issue a blanket extra £20 to everyone who's been docked £20 for rattling around a massive council mansion.

With you now. "We'll have more money to spend if Westminster gives us more money and doesn't stop giving us the extra money that only exists because of this policy." Not nearly as sound bite-y.

To save the administration costs local authorities will have to pay off staff or give them less hours on their contracts.

It doesn't only exist because of this policy.

Yes, or maybe not cut as many other services to meet budget shortfalls (caused in part by presentationally nice but ultimately damaging things like Council Tax freezes enforced by the SNP).

the bowels are not what they seem do you love trident

Tories going ridiculously hard on the horrific prospect of a Labour/ SNP coalition of some kind, yet they don't seem to have thought through that the best way to avoid such outcome is to, er, vote Labour.

Are the Tories actually building up the SNP north of the border or is this just extra froth on top of the hysteria? I know the Scottish Sun published that cuddly Sturgeon front page today, but that's their usual back-the-obvious-winner thing from what I can see.

The Scottish Sun has been broadly pro-SNP for quite a while - Salmond has been as shameless a supplicant to Murdoch as any other politician

Idgaf about Trident itself one way or the other, less than £2Bn a year saving feels like a small return for closing a facility with 5000 employees (since the subject of consequential effects on people and the cost to health service etc) which is the county's only major employer, see also the effect on Rolls Royce Derby (11,000 employees) and AWE Aldermaston (no idea how many but over 2,000 certainly). And the effect on Scotland's biggest single site employer, which will have the reason for it existing removed - it may well continue but on a very minor scale; I'd expect >70% jobs to go. Also to be debated would need to be the impact on permanent membership of UNSC, which is as yet untested, and other benefits of Big 5 membership would need to be quantified (better/closer trade is often thrown about