United Kingdom Budget Visualization
uk.wikibudgets.org
uk.wikibudgets.org
That doesn't seem like a good ROI at all. A product of an over-complicated tax system?
"It cost £4 billion to run HMRC in 2018-19" [1] (page 18)
[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/hmrc-annual-repor...
Which also matches the 4 billion that the HMRC wikipedia page links to
https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20130127142016/ht...
The accounts themselves are very readable https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/whole-of-governme...
This causes an additional increase in pension costs over time on top of the effect of the country's aging population and is a source of resentment among some young people.
Apparently accelerating the changes saved around £215bn (between 2011 and 2026).
I don't yet fully understand how to read it. It's not really clear to me what the difference in income and expenditure is - the impression the diagram gives me is other that income is balanced by expenditure, or that there is a budget surplus maybe. I think I recall that there is a budget deficit that the government runs.
Grateful for advice/corrections ...
As the government runs a deficit, part of the income comes from loans. This is listed as 'deficit' in this visualisation.
HMRC sends people this information annually - a breakdown of what their amount of tax paid was spent on.
A graphic that's hard to read is a failed graphic.
Would be great to drill down and specifically see who gets paid what, for doing which jobs, how much money is going to which initiative, etc.
Would probably quite the undertaking, with the amount of beuraucracy in the British government.
That is what's governing the entire political agenda right now.
That's the amount of money stuck on the side of a bus with the suggestion that we could spend it on the NHS instead
https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/office-of-the-se...
i.e. it's not to "run the office", it's what central government transfers to Wales.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jun/18/european-co...
It's not a matter of national expenditure, but that of personal expenditure of those pulling the strings. It's just being framed that way by the "will of the people"/"take back control" brigade, and people are dumb enough to listen.
I voted leave because I was dubious about the control the elected and unelected officials and secretaries in brussels had over British politics, and the rats nest of well paid jobs with crazy benefits waiting for british politicians in brussels when they retire from british politics, so long as they play nice with the EU and go along with the will of the government in Brussels.
The "NHS bus" is a talking point very aggressively focused on by the remain campaign because it's an easy thing to point at as disingenuous, But I feel like there's a lot more nuance to the choice to leave the EU than many "remainers" believe.
It's harmful to national discourse to narrow the argument for either side down to misinformation or this "they don't know what they're voting for" narrative (not saying you're asserting this, I've just seen it said a lot) because it chips away at the very concept of majority rule and proportional representation.
The EU parliamentarians are paid well, but I think there's a staff quality issue here and that UK MPs are actually underpaid; for the hours and responsibility, it's basically a company director level job.
(Of course, the only people that take EU pay and deliberately do a bad job or fail to turn up are ... UKIP MEPs)
Edit: I missed your reference to "proportional representation", which of course we don't have in the UK parliament either. Which is why the government was able to be formed with only about 42% of votes, plus a veto of the 0.9% of DUP votes. We have a semi-proportional system for MEPs, though.
Well that's blatantly not true. And their "job" is to represent their voters, which they are doing. "We shouldn't be here," was their cry in the Euro election.
Absenteeism/disruption by representative politicians is perfectly fine in my book, as long as that's what they campaign on.
Today, just half an hour ago, I saw someone tweeting that the EU was “bleeding the UK dry” by “taking” “£1 billion per month” [1] so I’m fairly sure that quite a lot of people did actually vote on the basis of the money.
[1] 1e9, or roughly 0.01% of the EU-(annual)-GDP per month
UK GDP is $2.6 trillion, or about $200Bn per month, so a 1Bn a month is not a massive amount.
The amount is in and of itself irrelevant. What really matters is the ratio of that amount to the benefit the UK gets from free trade with the EU.
I only recently learned about the mistake-theory/conflict-theory dichotomy. I think the benefits don’t matter to a conflict theorists, only if insert-tribal-leader-here likes it. (There are at least four relevant tribes that support Brexit, at least five that don’t, and in one case they share a leader who has been carefully trying to keep both sides on his team).
I am almost entirely a mistake theorist on that axis.
£1b/month would be 0.57 of UK’s 2018 gdp.
But knowing nothing about the £1bn number except that it came from a still-brexiteer I can’t give it much credibility.
The leave campaign was extremely successful because it targeted different groups of interests with different messages. That's why none of those different interests can now agree on the final outcome.
If I was you I'd also be slightly dubious about the dark money behind all of the pro Brexit 'grassroots' campaign groups.
However your point on the leave campaign is only one side of the story; The BBC's coverage of the lead up to the referendum was overwhelmingly pro-remain, the figures I've seen (though I don't have them to hand) were 80% pro-remain coverage.
Additionally, the remain campaign had full overt government backing; Every single household in England recieved a flyer explaining why David Cameron and his cronies thought that the UK should remain, which is much more penetration than any slogan on a bus could get.
Thanks for your reply, it's nice to have a reasonable debate with people with differing opinions on this matter, usually I just get called racist for voting leave and have trouble explaining my views after that.
From my point of view they helped create the problem by running Farage et al on Question Time far more often than the electoral popularity of their party would warrant.
(I mean, Brexiting to the status of Norway might at least have been feasible, but that's now a long way in the rear view mirror.)
Opinions like being in favor of Brexit are not in any sense as fundamentally objectionable and unacceptable even for disucussion as, for example, nazism or racism. Political divisiveness is a significant issue, and behavior like this is only going to make it worse.
"Smug complete dismissal of another's viewpoints" is exactly what the Tory government has done, and exactly why it's got into such a mess.
What do you base this on? It's clear that this sentiment is shared by many brexiteers but what makes you think that? And what makes you think that an independent UK will be impervious to having external interests mingling with internal affairs? At least as a member of the union you have a voice during the elections, I doubt you'll have nearly that much influence with your post-brexit commercial partners (of which the biggest one will be... the EU).
If anything, as a European myself, this Brexit crisis only served to make me respect the work of Brussels more than before because of how professional and rational their response has been so far. On the other hand the circus going on inside and outside 10 Downing Street makes the news almost daily. I guess that what I'm saying is that I'll gladly leave you your pure bred British-loving MPs and I'll keep my European Deputies. And if they get good benefits then good for them, as long as they do the job correctly.
However, today you cannot make that argument with a straight face when Boris is a PM with a very weak democratic mandate, actively undermining the democratically elected Parliament, doubling down on the lies made by the campaigns, pushing for highly damaging (according to the Government own assessment) economic measure.
From the Cambridge Analytica scandal we know that the bus not only worked, but it is the tip of the iceberg of a propaganda machine without conterpart in the remain side.
I can't believe that on HN, Brexit is still seen as a "remainer" vs "leaver" problem. Brexit has exposed a much deeper rot and threat to democracy, not in the EU, but in the very heart of the UK institutions. Brexit is not a liberating process, it is a threat.
No Conservative government has served an entire term with an outright majority since Thatcher in the 1980s. Johnson is in a sense "unelected", but his premiership is no less legitimate than that of Cameron or Major.
Like it or not, Johnson was the "biggest" voice behind the successful Brexit campaign, and it is therefore appropriate that he is tasked with making Brexit happen, and taking responsibility for its success or failure.
Its completely fair to say that Brexit is an economically stupid and possibly xenophobic project, but its not fair to say that Brexit is a threat to democracy. Brexit is exactly what democracy looks like at its best: the people forcing the ruling classes to make decisions that are against the ruling class's own interests.
EDIT: Johnson is of course the head of government, not the head of state, since the UK is a monarchy.
In requiring a super-majority, and a search for a second government first it's badly broken the system. As we can see, there is a government 20 odd votes short of a majority stuck there. Stuck there having lost every vote they've called. Stuck there because they are trying to evade the extension parliament voted for, that would take EU membership beyond an election.
I am intrigued though, that neither side has made calls to repeal the Fixed Term Parliament Act, despite it very clearly not being fit for purpose.
Boris Johnson doesn't want an election. It was suggested after the first vote that he could table something that only required a simple majority, but he didn't, you cant really argue it's people against parliament, when you are (hopefully) a majority of parliament.
Those against a hard Brexit don't want an election now because it impairs their ability to do that, plus its been nicely illustrated to them why you don't want too much power to reside with the executive.
And even then, it only exists because Johnson is overtly trying to use the disruption of an election as a mechanism to enable no-deal, which is why Parliament refuses to let him have one.
So yes, it seems shocking, but the last Conservative leader to win an election and then serve a full term of majority government was Thatcher from '83 to '87
He had a brother and father in politics, Johnson is a very common surname, Boris unambiguously identifies him, and he's not head of state.
It is a threat to democracy because, after 3 years, we now know that it is a power wrestling within the ruling class, for the exclusive benefit of the ruling class. All the good reasons you may have had before and right after the referendum are irrelevant now. What Brexit is and what it is used to do is clear for all to see, and it is not a democratic excercise.
To take a less loaded example: that's like sending money to a charity "Food for Africa Children" and realising 3 years after, your money is instead funnelled into buying a super yatcht for some billionaire somewhere.
Feeding Africa Children is good, giving money to charity is good but you can no longer make the argument that "Food for Africa Children" is good, and you can no longer claim any moral high ground if you continue to support that organisation.
You can't really expect to be taken seriously with nonsense like this?
No significant proportion of people have changed their mind. The leavers still want to leave, everyone's sick of parliament dragging this out for years.
Many remainer's are still hoping for some sort of magic unicorn waving it's horn and we'll stay in.
The time to do that was 2 years ago, not now, just get it over with already.
Id agree that each side is entrenched, I still think you need to have that vote, or come up with an option somewhere between the 2 camps, not swing to an even further extreme as we seem to be doing at the moment. No deal wasn't a thing we were discussing in the run up to the referendum, it wasn't even a thing we were really discussing this time last year.
The problem is the post-truth targetted propaganda campaign has been de-facto legalised.
The current government behaviour, especially in a country without written constitution is similarly going to set a very bad precedent. A lot of the process works because the opposition and government are expected to behave in gentleman-ish fashion, but this government is resetting the rule to "anything is ok to stay in power".
The government is abusing its 50% of the population into distrusting Parliament and the Judiciary at every opportunity. They do the same with the civil service.
You can't expect Labour or other to "stay civil" when there is a party winning with those strategies. Maybe not at the next GE but surely the one after that, all that you see today is going to be the new normal. And that will affect the UK only major asset, its softpower. One that is gone, the future government will have to double down on the propaganda to distract the masses. If your voting power is limited to vote for "mystery candidate" with manifesto in no way grounded in reality, you have a democracy in name only.
Both democracies and markets assume informed participants for their proper functioning. If the participants are not informed or misinformed then both democracies and markets can be gamed by those “in the know” at the expense of the misinformed.
This isn't true either. Nigel Farage likely wins that unenviable title.
> ... and it is therefore appropriate that he is tasked with making Brexit happen ...
That doesn't necessarily follow. His reasons for supporting / promoting Brexit have been shown to be based on falsehoods.
> ... and taking responsibility for its success or failure.
I appreciate your optimism that there remains any doubt about which of those it will be.
It's clear that this guy - Boris, Johnson, or Boris Johnson if you prefer - has not and will not take responsibility for his actions.
Claims of 'Brexit == democracy at its best' are massively misguided - they presuppose that the voters were not outright lied to (they were).
I don't understand what you're saying about John Major.
Here's the 1992 election: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_United_Kingdom_general_el...
336 seats, out of 651, with 326 needed for a majority.
Current conservatives have 288 seats out of 650.
Fair enough, the UK government is rotten to the core and the lot deserve to be thrown out and strung up. But they won't be, because the UK population is frustrated, but misinformed and distracted.
The problem with your argument is this; Brexit was not a vote on the corrupt local government, it was a vote on the corrupt EU government, and changing the focus on this matter doesn't change that.
The fact that a 80% remain parliment is supposed to represent a 52% leave population is ridiculous.
The fact that the supreme court were permitted to make walking away from the negotiation table illegal, thereby making it not a negotiation but a discussion of the UK's servitude from this point onward, is a disgrace.
If you cannot walk away from a negotiation, you're not negotiating. Your discussing the terms of your slavery. The task of getting the UK out of the EU in any kind of positive way is now utterly impossible.
So I'm afraid this is a remainer vs a leaver problem, because the majority of the population ("leavers") are not represented by the majority of the government ("remainers").
That is the problem with British democracy, not the steps taken by PM Johnson to put in to affect a desicion made by the people in the referendum!
Come on now. 544/650 MP ran for a party that had Leave as a Manifesto promise in the 2017 GE.
Yes individual MP could disagree with their party and defy the whip, but that is an overwhelming cross-party majority in favour of leaving.
In comparison, no party ran with a "Remain" outright manifesto, rather with a "Let run the deal against Remain" in a confirmation referendum. Only in the last weeks, Labour has sided with the confirmation referendum, and rejected last week to campaign for remain in that referendum.
> The fact that the supreme court were permitted to make walking away from the negotiation table illegal
That's nonsense. The supreme judged the suspension of Parliament by the PM illegal. It is loosely related to No Deal.
> thereby making it not a negotiation but a discussion of the UK's servitude from this point onward, is a disgrace. > Your discussing the terms of your slavery.
That's appeal to emotion territory here.
International negotiation like leaving the EU do not have the information asymmetry where leaving the table is a real asset. As advanced economies, the threat of instability or uncertainty is enough to keep both the EU and UK in search of a win-win agreement. In addition, the UK is an important contributor to the EU budget and the USA would only too happy to step in, so it is clearly in a position of strenght ... relative to its geopolical and economic size. A good deal is achievable, just not the cakist deal that was promised.
No, Parliament made this happen. The Supreme Court has not ruled that no deal is illegal. The most recent ruling was that proroguing Parliament simply to stop it acting was unlawful. You've been misled by the rightwing fake news sources again.
Parliament isn't "80% remain" either, even the Labour party haven't officially given up on the idea of "Lexit" yet.
The cost of "walking away" is huge. That's what the discussion has been about. The UK could walk away from its obligations and put a fence across Ireland. Or not do so and turn NI into a VAT fraud centre. It would just be a colossally stupid and negative thing to do.
At every stage Brexiters assume we could walk away from "them". Brexiteers have never thought about what might happen if they walked away from us and put the barriers back up.
How exactly does leaving help?
In the morass of abuse, personal gain and lies that is modern politics it's often the EU and those unelected folks in the Lords who hold British government to account. It's been the EU that has limited the worst excesses of both NewLabour and Tory of governing for the haves, and forgetting the have nots. As I understand it there was a lot of additional regional development funding that could have been claimed for UK regions, but wasn't. Because politics.
It's the same argument just at a larger scale.
It's bad for Polish people to immigrate here and take our jobs, but it's fine for people to move around within the UK.
We need to tax the rich more to end the homelessness on our streets, but we have no obligation to help those in Africa.
We need to use tariffs to protect our farmers, but there's no problem with shipping food across the country.
2a. If a Pole used to a certain living standard is happy to work for a lower wage than a Briton who is used to a higher standard of living then is that good or bad? Is it ok to have an opinion about it? Is it ok to have an opinion about it if you are a low paid Briton and a million Poles move to the UK?
2b. The UK is of finite size. Population is concentrated in certain areas within it. A significant growth in population has an effect. It affects traffic ("but we could build more roads" "but maybe I like the countryside and don't want more roads"), it affects housing ("but we could build more accommodation" "but maybe all that housing will be built close to jobs and amenities and thus be small and ugly and result in more crowded towns and cities and maybe I have a subjective view about that"), etc.
3. Foreign aid budgets and charities. More can be done. Make a donation! Be the change!
4. National security. Food rationing in the second world war. Farmers look after the countryside. Maybe we like to have farms and farmers. Is it ok to like to have farmers and farming? The EU thinks so - read about the CAP.
Why do we let these arguments have force at the national level but ignore them at subnational and supernational levels?
Because nations already exist and are they are accepted. Sometimes their borders are accepted too.
Around 2015 I had a conversation with a Slovenian who told me that if I didn't like the new population density in my city then I could move to Wales.
It's unlikely that I would be allowed to build a wall around Worcester or that London would be allowed to create a high tech system for identifying, catching and repatriating northerners. (Although a Chinese-style social credit system might work.)
I'm not entirely sure how to read this comment. This country has one of the least representative electoral systems in the whole of the EU and this is for the commons, nevermind the wholly unelected lords.
Being able to influence EU decisions through the EU parliament, which uses a more proportional voting system, at least gives you some democratic representation and accountability.
Besides, "overlay" is not quite the right word for the relationship between the EU and the national level. The term used in Article 5 of the EU Treaty is subsidiarity, which essentially means to handle things as locally as possible and as globally as necessary to solve the problem. So it's not like the EU gets to overrule national parliaments on anything and everything.
Of course you can endlessly debate what's possible and necessary in each individual case. But that's unavoidable. They're having the exact same debate in the US and the proponents of Scottish independence have yet another take on it.
Fair point regarding the house of lords, though I was under the impression they were more veto holders/policy checkers vs actual writers of law. Though I'm no expert.
Thanks for your replies.
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-party-...
Regardless of one's original outlook, I'm sure we can all agree that this is just one political party slowly shitting the bed over the course of three years. I'm pretty disgusted that they spent three years failing to get a deal past themselves and now they've shat so hard they've tossed their majority.
And "nuance"? Nuance about what?
Your kind of comments can sometimes be summarised as: "I made a very educated and considered decision." It is not doing any explaining or engaging in debate
Now we have no way of shaping laws throughout the continent we're a part of. We've thrown it all out the window because someone told you that the EU is trying to stop us from having bendy bananas.
Second paragraph: Bit disegenuous to throw a "you voted leave because XYZ" at me when I specifically posted my reason for voting leave in the post you're replying to...
There is a veto right in the EU on everything defense related, nobody is getting suckered into anything.* I know that, you know that, why do you perpetuate the lie?
*Except for the UK military into the Iraq war because their so-called "representatives" didn't and don't represent them. But that's another story.
Have you considered that after Brexit for UK to trade and work with Europe(which is vital for UK economy) they would still need to follow all the rules of EU and have no say about those rules? Not to mention that hard Brexit is impossible without giving North Ireland to Republic of Ireland.
Did you notice that whole Brexit got traction when the deadline set by EU for UK to implement anti-tax evasion measures that target UK overseas territories?
I honestly loathe EU, i absolutely hate huge parts of it, it is a bureaucratic Kafkaesque nightmare, that reminds me of my country under soviet occupation(The part i hate the most are unelected officials with basically minimal oversight). Yet it is still better for my country to be "in" than "out".
From outside perspective it looks like Leavers want to have every benefit of staying in EU(trade deal with EU that mirrors current rules), Northern Ireland and every benefit of leaving EU(hard border). It isn't feasible.
Nevertheless i respect your decision - it is your vote, cast in favour of what you think was the best for the country, what i loathe the most in democracy(which actually turns it into a farce - a popularity contest instead of merit based one) are people voting just because something is popular.
I think it's a valid concern. Though not enough to sway my vote iff I'd remained but I was leaving the UK all by myself so it seemed unfair. But if all you can do is talk about how those who disagree with you do or don't deserve your forgiveness, then the fault is within you.
( https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/reports/unse... )
Wanting to leave the EU is an opinion. Voting to leave the EU is an action. That action has imposed a lot of costs and inconvenience on people, seemingly for no good reason. Why should those people forgive?
I don't doubt that many people had legitimate, considered reasons for voting to leave. Those people are not the point of the argument.
I'm certain that many did not have good reasons. I have met them. They post stupid memes on Facebook about poppies offending Muslims.
If enough of those people were swung by The Bus or anything from Boris Johnson's 30-year campaign of lies about "Barmy Brussels Bureaucrats", then this is not a democratic result.
It's harmful to the national discourse not to address misinformation. That is what truly chips away at the concept of democracy.
If we just accept that lying to the electorate is all part of the game, then it becomes just that - a game, to be won by the loudest and least scrupulous players, rather than a sensible decision-making tool.
But yes the lack of nuance is appalling.
I'm totally fine with people disagreeing over how to interpret these numbers. A healthy democracy should see us able to debate policy based on differences in values or philosophy. Instead we mostly decide what we believe first, then filter to only see information that supports that belief.
- We spend a billion on water management ("deltafonds"). I had no idea it took so much upkeep. I also like subsection "experiments" of 21 million euros.
- 21 million still goes to "healthcare for resistance fighters and victims of world war 2", plus 246 million for pensions of the same group (https://rijksfinancien.nl/visuele-begroting/2018/jv/u/volksg... ). We're still paying for the after-effects of war (though the amount went down by 5% relative to the year before).
- 13 million (almost a euro per person) of the government's yearly budget goes towards equal rights for different genders (including LGBT) https://rijksfinancien.nl/visuele-begroting/2018/jv/u/onderw...
- The climate budget section links to this site: http://klimaatagenda.minienm.nl If you scroll down to "Is warmer eigenlijk erg?" ("Is hotter actually bad?") it breaks it down in a way I haven't seen before. It also drives home just how little we can oversee the consequences, e.g. going from "30% of species might go extinct" at 2°C to "many go extinct" at 5°C (I'd say 30% is quite a disaster already, can't imagine what +5 would bring us). The section below that visualizes the options: what if we prevent the issues, or what if we have to adjust to them?
The tables are a little confusing at first, dividing the amounts by 1000 and still having 8 figures, but I got used to it after a bit.
https://www.debtclocks.eu/public-debt-and-budget-deficit-of-...
Take a guess at what you think we spend (dollars and percent of budget) on major categories (defense, Social Security, transportation, education, Medicare/Medicaid, SNAP, interest) and see how close you get.
Wish this UK one was in millions, not billions.
So VAT is all regular VAT, and VAT refunds is VAT that would be collected by countries abroad but is now collected by the British government because of the VAT Reverse Charge.
Petroleum revenue tax just sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole - according to https://www.gov.uk/guidance/oil-gas-and-mining-petroleum-rev... PRT is effectively zero rated for any field approved after March 1993, but because of government vagaries still exists as a concept. Given that I could entirely believe that it costs the government more to adminster the tax than they make in revenue from it.
A few big ones: income tax on state pensions; National Insurance Contributions taken out of NHS salaries; VAT (sales tax) paid on defence spending.
Overall the budget is nicely balanced. I wish the US ran a deficit as small as the UK's.
so you see the Hm treasure.