Latest Moan From You and Me 2024

We can only vote from the available choice.

@Fat Controller, I don't think passive resistance would work. The gov can bring in emergency powers. In the digital age, they can freeze bank accounts and deny access to vital services. If you have a smart meter, they could possibly even deprive you of utilities. Mass protests across the world (the Arab Spring, the truckers in Canada, etc) have not succeeded in the medium or long term.

@shiney, Band H is way too vast, covering properties worth £1.5 million (say a town house in Richmond) to the most expensive house in the land. But suggest a rethink and the media explodes in apoplexy about the politics of envy and mansion taxes and hurting homeowners who are cash-poor, etc, etc. So the discussion never gets off the ground.

 

We have friends in Ealing - small Victorian terraced house extended up into the attic but still a third the size of ours here with a garden the size of our terrace - and it's now worth over a million because of crossrail. Doesn't have to be a mansion to be in band H but yes, rates should be based on income/wealth as well as house size in places like London where house prices are just ridiculous.

Rates here are based on rental value which seems a fairer way as it's income and market based.

 

I really "feel" for those people living in Richmond in a £1.5 million house.

If I had a £1.5 million house you wouldn't find me in Richmond
Not for long anyway.

 

I'd have a small house with a bit of land, and work a few hours a week. £1.5m would solve about 98% of life's bothers for us.

 

Which is why all the countryside has disappeared under houses around here, they are selling up and not buying small houses but big ones, but they dont get any garden, and most from London dont want garden anyway.

Even the signs say" your new home in the countryside", well it used to be.

 

Most, no. My point was you can have a fairly small property in an expensive area (eg parts of the south-east) that falls into the same band as the largest mansions in the country, and that, it seems to me, is not how the system should be set up. Across the country, 3 bed properties probably fall in any band from C upwards. Where I live, these are mostly between D and G.

 

If a viable option was on the voting slip I would vote for it, truth is the main parties have the money and the publicity.

 

What services would you like your local council to abandon?
What you gain on the pretend tax decreases is recovered in council tax. Financially, it makes little difference to you but how this council tax money is spent can be decided locally. If you vote in a local election just based on the colour of the rosette, you get what you deserve.

 

But that thinking could be applied to all local and government run things, I'd start by sorting out the NHS and get that running efficiently, but its all a massive problem in all things.

Layers and layers of added on bureaucracy and things being done twice or three times, just because that's how we do it.