:labour: New Old Labour in trouble

It doesn’t to me. The purpose of Government is to govern and not to implement prejudicial policies against sectors in society. The Tories have rightly been castigated for this and if (its a big if) Corbyn gets in, it will be more of the same, just with the pendulum swinging the other way. It is not, for me, the purpose of Government. The way to introduce real change is to put all his sort of rhetoric to one side (We’re after you rich bastards!) and provide an administration based upon fairness and equality.

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To create that, a government is going to need to intervene and redress the imbalance that has been created the last few decades.

Politics is a struggle for power, distribution of wealth and the means of production. It is because of that it is inherently confrontational.

Saying a government should just govern doesn’t really get you anywhere. A government should protect the most vulnerable in society. Not just for reasons of fairness and equality - but even for purely Capitalist reasons. Left to their own devices, the richest in a capitalist society will swallow up all the wealth and assets. Even to the point where their employees, who they rely upon to generate their profits, will not be able to afford to eat, house themselves or have adequate education or healthcare to do their jobs.

It is absolutely the job of the government to prevent this from happening.

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Share purchase - fine

Share give away - no so much

It just smacks of a 10% nationalisation of the top 250 companies in the LSE

What happens when you drop out of the 250 - can you withdraw the scheme?
What about the multinational like Anglo American?
Pretty much every international business would delist from the LSE within 6 months of this

Question about the possible tax increase.
Will the raise mean anyone will pay more tax than they did pre Cameron?
If not, i don’t see the issue, as the man did say “all in it together” and then slashed tax for the rich(is his English a bit challenged?).
Back dating it, just so Cameron doesn’t look such a liar, would be the fairest solution.
If some do indeed end up paying more, they’ll just have to point the finger at those that put us in this position.

Reading a bit more about this

It for every company of 250 employees of more (FTSE is irrelevent)
Shares are ring fenced in trust - cannot be sold
The most a dividend can be paid to the employee is £500
Any surplus is snaffled by the government therefore its a tax

Its actually more shit than I first thought

UK Politics is a “struggle for power” only once every five years and is not a constant problem, particularly to a Party in Government with a majority in the Commons. It is confrontational only because it is made out to be by those playing the game. Very few political debates are ideologically based. I would say 95% of political debate is not debate at all, just arguments centred around levels of expenditure. How often have we heard “You’ve cut money to x” “We’ve spent more in real terms” “Yes, but you’ve spent it badly”, etc, etc. No politicians disagree about the necessity to spend money on the NHS, the argument is always about how much. All that is required is decent administration.

Onto protection. You took my point and imposed a context that isn’t there. My point revolved around Corbyn’s rhetoric. However, i’ll address your point. It is one purpose of government, along with a comprehensive legal system, to protect those who are vulnerable, however I can’t recall once in recent UK history where the “Rich have been left to their own devices”. There are instances where they have been allowed to profit too much, but there is no instance I can think of where they have enjoyed being above the law. I’m all for more equitable redistribution of wealth but it is not the purpose of a political leader to use such inflammatory language to propose it. McDonnell spoke some sense this morning. Corbyn does not.

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Issue new shares, diluting the value of everyone’s shareholding by 10% to give to your employees.

Those employees then immediately become shareholders and are expected to, and are motivated to increase the value of their shareholding.

How long would it take a motivated workforce to build the share price up to where it was before the new issue?

I’m sure the company could also be offered tax breaks to be used as extra dividends for original shareholders.

They also get voting rights to keep The Man honest.

I really can’t see the problem.

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The “free money” thing is nowt new either. Most employee SEP schemes are discounted.

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But they are not shareholders - they get a vote, but they get a maximum restricted dividend £500 and no rights to any capital distribution or gain in share price

Anything over and above the £500 is trousered by the treasury

I picked this from a BBC site

"Let’s take just one company - bumper dividend-payer Shell. Ten percent of its £12bn annual dividend comes to £1.2bn.

If each of its 6,500 UK employees got £500 each (totalling £3.25m) that leaves £1.116bn for the government. That’s just from one company - every year. Wow."

So what do you think Shell will do in this situation? - They hold listings on multiple exchanges. they will drop the UK listing and sod off back to the Netherlands and we will get even less money than we do now.

It is a shit idea

there are a number of differences

It is not generally 10% of the company

The employee gets to keep the entire dividend

The employee gets to keep any capital gain which arises rewarding them for the success of the business

Compare that with the present situation. There are few capital controls. Most of the stock is in the hands of those that run the firms. The stuff that isn’t is bought back at a rate of knots with company money, artificially inflating the value of the company to personally benefit those already holding.

I’d prefer that the Treasury got hold of some of that money.

Then just raise the corporation tax rate and stop effing about with some crack pot scheme

Doing that too.

So are far as tax announcements go - what have they said so far?

Dunno. Going by the 2017 GE manifesto, it was 26% corporate tax and everyone over £85K paying the additional rate of income tax.

This is McDonnell’s conference speech. Quite excellent. He begins with a personal tribute to Corbyn for withstanding the nonsense he’s got from the media with such dignity, thanks his staff and then gets onto it.

I would imagine that this is the sort of thing that’ll have the Conservatives shit scared. It’s basically a big box of retail policy mixed with a meticulous takedown of Tory policy.

It’s a bit revolutionary. The Establishment will hate it. Most of the working public will love it.

Let’s see how the current trend anti-establishment politics fare, eh?

Yeah, that’s a good point.

But I don’t think it’s a shit idea, perhaps one that needs to have some wrinkles ironed out.

We just need a way to ensure that the right proportion of that £12Bn (it’s worth restating that figure - twelve billion pounds) profit stays in the UK.

This country has become massively skewed towards those that understand how to exploit others. And I don’t mean exploit in such a pernicious sense but just those that get somewhere at the expense of others. So we need to do some drastic shit to rebalance it.

That it feels weird to redistribute some wealth and in doing so better fund our public services, tells you just how much of the corporate capitalistic cock we’ve swallowed.

The next political epoch, should it come to pass, will be about going too far the other way but the net result will be a fairer society.

That these ideas are being discussed tells you that the Tories (and New Labour) have taken the piss for too long, and that Labour has the largest social membership of any party in Europe tells you it’s an idea whose time has come.

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Considering that it is our pension funds that currently own a good chunk of the dividend paying shares, we would just be taking from ourselves.

A bit of cash up front now to fritter away on the latest must have phone or Considerably more in a pension.

No offence, but talk of pensions means nothing to some people.

You might as well have said “it is our swan and caviar” they are taking - as some people will not have any personal pension arrangements and many will have the minimum.

Actually, I’m trying to think through the implications of shares being issued but then held in a trust that can’t dispose of them, but I’m not smart enough.

I mean, what does that actually do to the value of the company (market cap.)?

I’m almost thinking that it would have near zero impact on the capital gaining element of the remaining shares in circulation - i.e. their value wouldn’t be hit too much because, as a trade-able commodity, they haven’t actually been diluted.

What would of course happen is that the dividend pot would have to pay out to 10% more shareholders. So the actual impact on shareholders - and pension funds would be in the dividend, but less in capital appreciation.