Straight out of Corbyn's little red book, the Tories are apparently considering increasing council tax on higher value properties AND reducing the 40% tax relief on pension contributions, in order to raise £10 billion per year for the chancellor.

Any double standards for the "one nation Tories", not many.

Corbyn would have been slaughtered for mentioning such policies but, the Tories, with their huge majority, ma be hitting many of their traditional voters with these kind of policies.

Will the tax raid on pension contributions mean there is less of a tax liability when it is paid out ?

I wouldn't have thought so. It would just mean that you would have contributed less, by virtue of only getting basic rate tax relief on all contributions.
Mind you, there would be ways around any changes and a company could quite easily increase it's own contributions and take a lower share from the employee.

Steep hikes in the minimum wage, energy price caps, talking about bringing northern rail in to public ownership and coming out of the EU state aid regime so we can subsidise struggling industries and now we have this.

These are the politics of Labour in the early 1980s.

Still it will be fun watching Tory MPs and right wing commentators have to make arguments justifying these.

The media will not say a word.

You will need to include the cost of his proposed bridge. You would think after the debacle of the garden bridge he would want to keep away from these type of structures.
I did read that like Trump he wants to leave a legacy so that his name lives on forever. The bridge is Johnson’s wall pointless and very expensive much like the garden bridge, water cannons and the Thames island airport.

It shouldn't cost too much to do a feasibility study into the new Boris Bridge. Let me see now, the Irish sea has been used for dumping nuclear waste containers and WW2 munitions. Conclusion: a bridge is not feasible. Cost to you Mr Johnson? Oh just buy me a pint next time you're up north.

Has he said whether there will be checkpoints on this bridge or will people and goods be free to move in either direction







If you see some of the bridges that they have in Scandinavia, a bridge would be a great thing - it's just the cost of the damn thing.

Money doesn’t matter when it comes to egos.

You can bet Johnson's 'feasibility study' will cost a bit more than a pint.

I wonder which company will be in line for pocketing the public money for his latest fantasy?

I wonder what the people who thought 'free broadband' was a delusional idea think about building a bridge from Scotland to Northern Ireland is....

I guess when you are spending 'other people's money' (ie the taxpayer's) its easy to sign off the cheques.

Even easier when the recipient is an old school chum.

I have a question how can the government invest in the bus industry which is now run by the private sector.

Subsidise loss making routes?

Why should private operators be subsidised for loss making routes? Surely the first thing to do would be to find out why those routes were loss making in the first place? And if it turns out the current operator wasn't up to the job, they lose the contract to someone who is up to the job.

I'm not sure it works like that - some routes are loss-making, because they service rural or small communities, with low use, but high need for the people who do use them; if you leave that to the market, no provider would take it on. That's why the privatisation of bus services has failed people - the market goes where the money is; same story with superfast broadband and the left behind rural communities - BT focused all its infrastructure investment on where it could make the most money.

For me, if something can reasonably be called an essential service, the private sector is likely to fail to deliver it in an equitable way.

It should be a per requisite that the bus companies have to run certain routes, along with the more lucrative stuff.
This is one area where privatisation just doesn't work.

It's all well and good for the "bean counters" to chop out loss making routes. However, some of these have to be part of the overall service.
Some things are not just down to pound notes.

Maybe we should have stuck to the socialist model, providing a decent service and with a play to reduce the amount of traffic on the roads

I was being a touch facetious. Some things just can't be left to the markets.

I agree up to the last paragraph - for 90% of the customers the bus service works - it has plenty of customers that is for sure. If you wanted to get the 10% a regular service then it has to funded so that can only be by increasing the costs to the 90% so your socialist model makes everyone poorer but that is the model drag everyone down apart from those at the very top e.g. private education is only for the very few at the top!!

Is it about the many or the few?

So what's your solution? Bo**ocks to the 10% who don't happen to live on a profit-making bus route?

Meanwhile, 'making everyone poorer' actually means reducing traffic on the roads and by extension, cleaning the air; increasing connectivity to rural and small communities, so more people can become economically active; allowing young people to live in the communities they grew up in rather than moving to increasingly overcrowded and unaffordable conurbations; all that annoying, socialisty stuff?

It would be much easier for you to just agree that Corbyn was right about the buses; I don't think it will make you ill or anything.

Its about catering to the majority - is it better to keep 90% happy or upset 90% - these routes don't exist because nobody uses them so actually you are increasing traffic and reducing clean air on the roads by running routes just to cater to a very few passengers. Young people who work in the city will be serviced by routes that exist to service that requirement i.e. early morning and early evening rush hours. Capitalism at its finest.

Corbyn was wrong about buses - much better to invest in electric rail infrastructure. Do you think Leeds would be a more efficient/effective city if it had a Metro similar to Newcastle/Manchester or Liverpool or a load more buses creating even greater traffic jam? If we want to get people out of cars then we need a fast reliable service in the city and its surrounding boroughs - buses are not the way.

You really are a tiresome dullard.

Nobody uses them *because* they don't exist - of course *someone* wants to use them - but not enough people to make it profitable for a private company; your typically selfish and glib suggestion was in fact, a resounding yes to my question about bo**cks to those people.

The modern bus would of course use alternative fuel - so whilst it serves your argument to conjure up an image of an old Routemaster spewing out black diesel smoke - you know that's not at all what I'm advocating.

Electric trains are a lovely idea - but there does have to be a viable way for people to get to the stations.

Of course I am because unlike you I don't worship with uncle Jeremy and uncle John. You are a Neanderthal hankering after a by gone age just like your heroes. If the election didn't suggest you are out of step with public opinion then nothing will. When will it get into your thick skull that Socialism is idea not a practical solution to anything. As a society we have to make choses we cannot be all things to all people - we could dump the GDP into the NHS and it still wouldn't cover everything everybody wanted. The fact that you cannot comprehend these simple concepts and that compromises are needed - so we put your bus routes we have take money from somewhere else - so we run less routes when people want to actually use them so a very few get a great service - we upset many to cater for the few - where is the logic in that?

How do people get to the stations on the underground - usually either walking or via connectivity through main line stations - this is not difficult even for you.

What on earth are you talking about man?! My entire point was that not everything has to be capitalism v socialism argument; and that when Corbyn talked about buses in the HoP and was jeered at, Johnson is now talking about buses and is being lauded for investing in northern communities. It's just common sense that if you want people to work and to travel in a greener way, you have to provide the infrastructure to enable that - and it's not socialism or any other ism to understand that if you leave the profit motive as the only driver, it won't happen to the extent that you need it to.

Cool story about the underground - maybe he'll build one in Rotherham when the bridge from Scotland to Ireland is finished?

The fundamental of any public transport system is availability, accessibility and affordability.
Left purely to commercial operators, the less profitable routes are axed and the profitable ones kept.

However, this doesn't work in rural areas and there has to be some provision for EVERYONE

Personally, I'm pleased that HS2 has finally got the go-ahead and it should have happened long ago, which would have kept the lid on some of the spiraling costs.
Nothing that was costed 15 years ago would cost the same price today and in many ways, we only have ourselves to blame.
WE (as a nation) should be striving for the best and most efficient transport system possible.

Regarding the NHS, perhaps there should be some limits put on the service. However, in a fast moving sector and with the development of new medicines/ procedures, this probably isn't realistic.
However, the hard facts are that despite Boris having found how to open the public purse, the 10 years of austerity have put us all so far behind the start line that, it will take some time to catch up.

Mind you, out "healthy" ecconomy may not quite contribute enough for his new myriad of spending promises and with falling tax receipts and zero growth, it looks like the "one nation conservative" model, is something stolen from Tony Blair.

It's a funny old world.