Keir Starmer - and his miserable government

There is talk of extending the freeze to tax thresholds which apparently raises £8bn a year.

^Yep, nice bit of fiscal drag. Slips under the radar but catches people on reasonable salaries who do overtime, call out etc.

Labour plan to provide discounted electricity prices for Artificial Intelligence businesses for their data centres while households still have to pay sky high prices.

https://www.thenational.scot/news/256356...ate=191125 (paywalled)

so much for Reeve saying she plans to help with cost of living

as Royle family would say "My Arse!"

The Budget 2025
I felt Reeves delivered another miserable budget yesterday but one policy stood out for me. This 3p per mile thing for electric cars. (which I think comes in in 2028)

I think this has to be a blow for the electric car industry and I have to view this as a bit of an own goal as the Govt had already committed to banning Petrol/diesel vehicles by 2030 (or 2031?) and there were several people texting into Five live this had made people think twice about buying an electric vehicle.

Not only that they haven't said how they are going to charge drivers this. I have a feeling this something that may be done via a tach style system in the car or payment from bank. If it kills off electric car making are we likely to then see the Government providing families with grants to allow them to buy electric bikes instead??

Also what knock on effect is there now on the UK's Net Carbon policy?

Annoyed shes put 20% vat on uber rides that was a quiet one

annoying because will put an extra fiver on my trips not to mention the rise in duty means my night outs already extortionate will be even more nightlife is already dead but will make this even so

this will effect the young who use them more and could be even dangerous for women travelling home at night if they cant use uber because of price

The mansion tax is going to hit the SE hard.
£2m will be a garden shed in some parts of London

The ev tax isn't going to influence my decision on buying one. I wasn't going to anyway

Hasn't grabbed the headlines, but something that I think will hit a lot of people is the scrapping of the 'de minimis' loophole that allows goods worth less than £135 bought from abroad to get shipped in without any extra duty charge.

Scrapping this is targetting the likes of temu, aliexpress, shein etc, possibly also impacting the fairly new Amazon Haul service.

Tango man did similar in the US and it caused some considerable chaos, for buyers, sellers and couriers. This comes into effect in 2029, so hopefully the time delay will at least allow it to implement more smoothly here.

Nice to see Labour borrowing trump policies though, maybe next budget our Rache will announce some tariffs

The EV tax was obvious... If they'd had something in place at the beginning, how many (normal) people would have actually switched?

There has been loads of videos on youtube even before the budget mentioning this about EV's and it seem to be coing to fruition.

If i remember correctly, when you take your vehicle for an MOT the mileage taken for that year will be used to calculate the tax.

Now of course "clocking", Number plate cloning and such crimes are going to go through the roof. Law of untintended consequences.

The infrastructure is already in place in many towns, cities and motorways such as Clean Air Zones, ANPR cameras and tolls to effectlively charge people in real time for driving.

Many EV cars are also kind of "always on/connected" to the internet with GPS loction, another way they could charge you in real time.

Looking very dystopian for the motoring industry.

Oh and i think the reason mentioned for this tax was for the treasuray to cover the shortfall in Fuel duty they will get with people switching to EV's. So rip off Britain is alive and well.