Latest Moan From You and Me 2024

It maybe, but it shouldn't be, it should be based on that households impact on local services.
Afterall that is supposed to be where the money goes.

Bring back the poll tax, just change the name, I'm sure nobody will notice.

It is a time of difficult decisions and black holes afterall.

 

I followed the Bus Franchise parlament debate and listening to Sir Keir, the busses go back to councils, the £2 tickets will be stopped, eventually the OAP bus ticket also stopped.
All this to make busses more effective so that people can come home in the evening.
Translated, that means, 1/3 of the councils are nearly bankrupt, the council tax will go up, and we still pay the same price for a bus ticket that we paid before the £2 ticket was introduced.

Next “Sir Keir has spoken”, “NHS must reform or die”.
In other words, patients have now to pay and no longer get what we got until now.

 

I've not been on a bus for about 50 yrs, not a local one anyway.

They never go where you want to get and often involve changing if its the other side of town.
Can take an hour to do a 15 minute journey due to detours around every road in the town, I cant see how it can ever be efficient.
Used to like the old days when you just jumped on and off, although I'd probably end up spawled on the pavement these days.

Public transport is a joke, I cant understand the trains either and buying tickets seems to be a nightmare.

 

I always take the bus to London, Heathrow (National Express), Oxford, Salisbury.
I would never bother going by car to locations that have a railway or bus station. Oxford and Salisbury for £4, the car can’t beat that. We recently went to Trowbridge by train, had to change in Bath, discovered in Trowbridge on the way to the Canal that a bus from us ends there. What a shame, missed that.
Holiday with car? Forget it. Only public transport.
One of my targets if I reach the age was to go from Land's End to John o' Groats on foot and public transport with my OAP bus pass. I probably can forget that, and have to walk all of the route.
@pete I noticed when I visited England for the first time at the beginning of 2000 and was using every single countryside bus, older people have a nice tendency to talk. I loved it back then and still enjoy it today.
To buy a train ticket, I go to the station and buy it there.

 

I suppose were spoilt in London. I have a look on my phone and it tells me how many minutes away the next three buses with that number are.

 

Buses here are run locally and are free on Saturdays to encourage people to get out and about to shop or play or eat out or whatever they fancy. it means the less well off can get into town centres to shop or out of twon to breathe and play and encourages people with cars to leave them at home.

Having said that, I haven't used a public service bus since we moved here - nearest bus stop is 5kms away and the destinations and time-table do not serve our needs.

 

It's actually a tax to pay for provision of local services. The size of dwelling was adopted years ago as an 'easy' measure of how many people were potentially using those services. If a family of six people live on one side of a pair of semi-detached houses and a single person lives in the other it is plainly unfair that they pay the same council tax. That is why a 'poll' tax was (or would have been) an extremely fair way of managing local taxation.

 

A window tax?

 

And a sunshine tax, the bigger your window the more tax you pay. Wasn’t that the reason why you see often old houses where windows were bricked up?

 

Yup.

The Window Tax of Yore

The origin of the term “daylight robbery”.

 

Just watching the news, its now being actually stated everyone is living too long and its not sustainable, so why bother sorting out the NHS.
Forget it and problem solved.