Comment by dgroshev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dgroshev | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

But what needs to be fixed? Here's a small list of things that different groups think need to be fixed:

- too many immigrants

- too many small boat arrivals

- the existence of billionaires

- too much tax

- too little tax

- UK membership in NATO

- UK being too weak in NATO

- too much smut online that kids can see

- too many attempts to control the web

Agreeing on which of those "need to be fixed" is the essence of politics. There are no universally accepted answers.

The current government, for all its failings, is focusing on fundamentals: get building again; repair public finances to then invest into infrastructure; repair international relationships. To that end, they are calling projects in right and left, pushing the planning bill through the parliament, rising taxes (which is utterly necessary!), reforming the NHS (online appointments are coming), talking to businesses, building nuclear power plants, striking deals with allies (Norway just ordered £10bn worth of frigates, AUKUS is steaming ahead), and forging new alliances (Japan has just deployed their air force to the UK, their first European deployment in 71 years).

This is the opposite of populism, in fact a lot of that is making them unpopular in the short term. Yet it's the first time in more than a decade when we have a government that does those things. We got populists out and let's-do-serious-work-on-fundamentals people in, and now people complain that they aren't populist enough.

> Here's a small list of things that different groups think need to be fixed:

Honestly I think all of them need to be fixed. You might think they are contradicting, but I think that is only a way to make people be angry at each other, and not starting to demand really fixing things.

Raising taxes is only “necessary” because of their total lack of gumption when it comes to reducing spending. For example, 1 car in 3 on the roads in the UK is funded via PIP and that has been meteorically increasing as a proportion in the last few years. Labour bottled it in the face of their own backbench rebellion over very reasonable measures earlier in the year, and now they are coming to pick our pockets.

They’ll say they are making hard, necessary decisions, but the truth is that ramming up taxes is the default mode easy decision for labour.

It seems like it's a conservative fantasy that all public money is being wasted but until I see detailed information on where and why (Chesterton's fence style) it is being wasted, I can't take them seriously

It seems like people are vastly overestimating the amount of money being wasted. If it was that easy, it would have probably been done. In serious circles (outside overt MAGA propaganda ecosystem) I believe DOGE is considered quite a failure.

I'd be much more sympathetic to a tax system reform as it seems that in democracies, there is a vast amount of tax "gerrymandering" in order to favor your voter base... but of course no politician wants to remove that option

> 1 car in 3 on the roads in the UK is funded via PIP

In 2024 there were about 34 million cars registered in the UK and Motability had a fleet of 815,000. Are you telling me that the 3.5 million PIP recipients are using their payments to fund 2-3 cars each outside the Motability scheme?

(Motability buys about 1 in 5 of the new cars registered in the UK.)

Useful factchecking of the "bed wetting boy racer" stories here: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/mar/24/motability-d...

Raising taxes is necessary because the previous governments have decimated the tax base. As of now, a median UK PAYE worker is paying about 13% on their income. A median German worker is paying about 30%.

This remarkable result was achieved by the backdoor: successive conservative governments obscured the stagnation by constantly increasing the personal allowance far in advance of the inflation. This bought them votes [1], but as a result we have a baroque tax system that tries to squeeze tax from less visible, often counter-productive places, and still doesn't collect nearly enough to cover necessary expenses. After a decade of cuts, every public service is cut to the bone, and there's no money to invest into hospitals, roads, or trains to increase the overall productivity.

PIP bullshit is a drop in the bucket compared to that.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/HENRYUK/comments/1jsyzip/tax_rates_...

I mean arguably those are all distractions (except for the tax thing, indirectly); what really need to be fixed are the core, boring issues. The country, fundamentally, needs to keep the lights on; it needs to fix services which have been in decline for some time, it needs a credible route forward on pensions and other funding issues (but pensions are the scariest) and so forth.

A big part of the problem with the UK is exactly that; since 2015, the UK has been lurching from crisis to crisis, and more or less ignoring actually keeping the country running (keeping the country running is boring, Brexit is not boring, and so on).

I agree with you, but if you take an average person, chances are they will name one or the other as THE problem to be fixed.

The government is trying to focus on boring, annoying things and is getting rubbished for it. Doesn't bode well for other governments trying to do the same, does it

I agree with your assessment of the UK government, but I think you overstate the degree to which we are divided, aside from the hysterical rantings of the right wing press.

You are implying division among the public when in fact the division is sown by the billionaire/corporate media agendas, not real people:

- too many immigrants - too many small boat arrivals

All parties and a majority of the public agree on these points (polling shows). The details of how to tackle small boats and relative importance differ, but I don't think anyone wants to see large numbers of people crossing Europe.

- the existence of billionaires

Most of "the left" don't care about billionaires existing, they worry they exert an outside influence on our politics and skew market fairness. There's common ground with many on the populist right here. The only people who don't want us to think about these issues are corporate shills.

- too much tax - too little tax

This is a largely manufactured concern and reflects corporate interests or interests of the rich. The difference between Corbyn' 'wild' taxation plans and Johnson's was much smaller (as a portion of GDP) than that between the UK and France, German, any other northern euro country. Our debate around tax is hugely parochial, and concern largely used as a stick to beat the left with.

- UK membership in NATO - UK being too weak in NATO

I'm not sure how many people are worried about UK being in NATO. Would love to see polling data showing this as anything other than a very fringe concern. In fact Ukraine and Russian threat has made defence spending much _less_ controversial than since the cold war.

- too much smut online that kids can see - too many attempts to control the web

Polling shows the first is a majority concern, the latter not so much (this is a HN bubble). This is not a wedge issue.

The thing you missed is culture war bullshit (who is a 'real woman' etc)... but again, most people are either nonplussed or in the thrall of Russian chatbots and the MAGA trolls infecting uk online discourse. It's not something people really care about.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com