If you read the Labour manifesto it tells you how it is to be paid for. i.e. by big companies, by restoring the level of corporation tax to where it was before the Tories started cutting it.
Marxism is not on Labour's agenda (as I should know because I am a Marxist)as it is not advocating that the proletariat should expropriate the property of the capitalists.

Because it's easier to parrot tropes than think and delve.

Actually the take went up after they changed the accounting method. Furthermore each year that passes takes us further away from the GFC and so companies, such as big banks, returned to profit and have burned off their losses since then so have started paying tax again. This is not a consequence of anything the government have done, unless you count the bail out of the banks in 2008.

The tax law has also changed significantly to increase the tax base and restrict what companies can do to divert profits or class income as non-taxable.

What's telling is that tax take of CT as a % of the whole went from just above 8% in 2010/11 (right after a recession) down to below 7% in 2015/16.

So you can say that despite businesses having some measure of recovery since the GFC and the widening of the tax base, the cuts in the rate has seen CT fall as a percentage of the total tax take and so increased the burden borne by other taxes, in particular indirect taxes (regressive taxes).

There have been a lot of perceptions thrown about here and that's as it should be should be. A great deal of politics is perception. Having worked in politics for many years at a local level, here is what I perceive about your last general election.

The 20% polling gap at the outset of the election season was totally theoretical and not based on an actual election. Therefore, there was only a perception that Labour was far behind and the Tories. There is also a long standing perception that British voters choose a party instead of a candidate. I challenge that. Having observed the 1992 election while living in Streatham, a marginal constituency that year which Labour gained from the Tories, quite a few people I talked to were down on the incumbent, Sir William Shelton, and planned to vote for the Labour candidate, Keith Hill. It had nothing to do with either Major or Kinnock. I believe pollsters overlook that dynamic.

There also as the perception that the UKIP vote would monolithically go to the Tories. If I learned one thing in politics, no "bloc" vote is ever monolithic. As the election proved, while both the Tories and Labour gained votes from 1995, Labour gained more. Part of that may be attributed to a higher vote count but the shattering loss of UKIP votes distributed far more evenly between the "Big 2" than was predicted. That allowed Labour to gain more votes overall than the Tories thus gaining seats while the Tories lost seats, particularly in England and Wales. The "win" that Corbyn is being credited with is one of momentum. Political momentum is very fleeting. Just ask David Cameron.

The final point I'd like to make is what happened in Scotland. Going into the election, the Tories had one seat and ran their previous campaigns from Central Office. This time they allowed they Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party a lot more autonomy both on issues and campaign style and it showed. This is the one area of the country where the Tories out gained all other parties, a phenomenal 12 seats gained to Labour's 6 and the Lib Dem's 3. This gain is allowing Theresa May to form a viable government. Subtract the Scottish Tory 12 and Corbyn would have a path to form a coalition government that he doesn't have now even with Sinn Fein's 7 not sitting. I would watch Ruth Davidson as she is the rising star in the Tory Party. The Tories like people who win and coming out of this election Davidson is their one true winner.

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Reality is the only way you can increase the tax take from the wealthy is to increase their profits...that increases the tax you take from them. As for elitism, as a societal problem I agree. I often rally against policies that insulate those with money from failure...it is directly against meritocracy.

Still, this said, for people to invest they need confidence that they will receive a return. Unless you have some world government allocating tax policy any other approach is irrational.

Socialism, on an economic front, has failed pretty much everywhere it has been used.....As usual those who suffer the most are the poor. I've looked into the Nordic countries where it has half worked and anyone who does that and then tells you it can be just repeated here is directly lying to you.

There are problems with it but it does also produce a better society in general. However, once you look into it you can see that it can't be repeated here.

Edited by Stirlingsays (15 Jun 2017 12.45pm)

'Who are you and how did you get in here? I'm a locksmith. And, I'm a locksmith.' (Leslie Nielsen)

Realistically, I think you can tax the wealthy more, but not much more, unless they're seeing some kind of return for that taxation - Which I think is fair. The issue isn't really that we pay tax, but what kind of return we get from that tax.

For example, if you could improve education to a state where by the difference between public and private education was minimal, then I think you'd find wealthier people and higher earners could live with that, as it would dismiss the need to provide private education for their children etc. Similarly with Health care etc.

And there in lies the element of taxation that is often missed, people aren't so much p*ssed off with paying taxes, but with what they're getting in return for their investment.

We can't even get the f**king bins collected once a week, or have enough pens and pencils for kids in school, but then seem to be able to pay some rather excessive expensives for MPs or find money for assorted 'government vanity projects'

There is money for a new nuclear submarine project for defence, but we have cuts in policing when the primary area of defence threat to UK citizens is low scale random acts of terrorism against citizens.

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