Re: Brexit
U.K.gov is perfectly entitled to put together subsidy projects for semi/micro, if it thinks it’s a good idea. It doesn’t think it’s a good idea relative to other priorities, and I believe it’s correct about that. Now that same money will be spent on other U.K. gov priorities - care homes and NHS.If you think U.K. gov priorities are wrong, or taxes should be higher to pay for a larger public spending cake, that’s fine, use the ballot box to tell them so.
By definition, EU subsidies are subtracted from U.K. government taxes financing stuff that are seen by U.K. Gov as *needs* and pumped towards other peoples “nice-to-have”. The cuts to un-financed *needs* fall disproportionately on the less well-off, while the nice-to-have goes to the upper-middle-class. I’ve always said that if we’d had the more honest conversation in 2015/2016 it could have had very different results. The honest conversation would have been to make the referendum conditional on a U.K. cost/benefit wealth transfer tax, recognising the differential impact of EU membership. Very roughly, on condition of Remain, higher-rate income tax needs to go from 40% to 55%. The top rate needs to go to 90%: all the subsidised client companies are owned by that population sector, they need to live on their EU income rather than any be left over from the output of their U.K. workforce. And all the tax funds freed up need to go to what benefits below-median only. E.gl Only social and NHS, zero higher education spending (the EU can pay for that via Horizon).
You’d be amazed how many of those “stupid uneducated” folk would suddenly have voted Remain. And how the FT and “economics experts” would have re-analysed their equations to show that Brexit was obviously correct.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
