Its less than five months off and various folk have offered their learned - and not so learned - opinions as to the outcome. So here is your chance to try your hand in the General Election Prediction game. Predict the percentage share for the two big parties. A hundred points on offer for each,you lose ten for each % out Labour 34% Tory 36% Seats won A hundred points on offer,you lose one for each seat out Labour 295 Tory 280 Lib Dems How many lost seats ? 100points 2 lost for each one out (You can go gains if you are totally doolally) Lib Dems 33 losses UKIP How many are won? 100 points,10 lost for each seat out UKIP Gains (Starting at zero 2010 GE) 4 Eventual Make up of Government 100 points Labour Tory Lab Coalition Tory Coalition Other Labour Coalition Maximum 700 points scored Closing date April 1st 2015 All are welcome to try not just Norwich posters.
What a very interesting thread CT and one that I suspect could change dramatically in the coming months. My feeling at the moment is as follows:- Lab 32% Con 35% Seats are very difficult to predict and need not follow overall percentages of course but I will go for Lab 277 Con 299 LibDem to go down to 22 seats UKIP to take maximum of 3 (including Clacton) losing Rochester and Strood but taking Greater Grimsby and one other. Can see Labour forming a coalition with several parties with LibDem being the major partner and also SNP (may even need PC and any SDLP from NI) making a very messy Government as the SNP will drive a ridiculous deal for their support. I reckon that it will be a good election to lose as the cuts will go deeper irrespective of who wins and on the scenario outlined above I would expect the Tories to romp home by a country mile in the following election. Looking at my crystal ball I think that the UKIP standing nationally will fall dramatically from where they are now, the difficult one is the LibDems as their seats tend to be personal and harder to shift. That said, I think that Scotland will not forgive them for going into coalition with the bringers of the poll tax and some high profile casualties are likely. SNP will make sweeping gains from Labour (particularly across Glasgow) and could shift 7 or 8 seats which will make Labour's chances of forming a Govenment difficult. Whatever, it will be a very interesting night come May.
Completely agree with thurnby's analysis to the letter. I won't guess now (is that cheating?) because I think too much can change.
I am going to allow revisions up to the closing date of midnight on March 31st. One word of advice here the crossover point for winning more seats than Labour for Conservatives is somewhere around +5% of the vote share. This is due to the lack of boundary changes that Cameron failed to put through Lab32% Con 35% will leave Labour the larger party.
It was a straightforward reprisal for Cameron not allowing his mates in The Lords not being sorted out.
Thurnby's figures look about right for now, but IMO Labour will gain as the election nears, so for me: Lab 33% Con 34% Seats are very difficult to predict and need not follow overall percentages of course but I will go for Lab 286 Con 290 LibDem to go down to 25 seats UKIP to take maximum of 3
Rick while your percentages look sensible, Cruyff's right that those will give Labour more seats. The boundaries favour Labour. So with your percentages Labour would still get c.30 more seats
That is correct.Individual seats can vary. Current feeling is exactly the opposite to JWM's contention in London. It seems that the Mansion Tax is proving very popular with the vast majority who are probably well sick of the Sloany/Chelsea types so beloved by our own tame Tory Binner. Labour canvass returns in the capital are some of the best in the country. Probably lying cockneys!
Osborne has shot your fox on this issue with a major reform of the Stamp Duty regime which will make the system a lot fairer than just lumping an extra £3,000 per year on the most vulnerable which Labour proposes to do.
My Step Dad bought his house in central Cambridge in 1966 for the princely sum of £7,200 it is now valued at just over £2 Million! He worked as an engineer and was not on big money but paid off the mortgage by the mid 1980s and retired on a relatively modest pension in 1996. How is it fair that he should be made to pay an additional TAX on an asset which he purchased that has gained huge market value through no fault of his own! How is it fair that he would have to stump up an extra £3,000 a year on a fixed pension income or allow the state to take the TAX on death in addition to all the other death duties? There will be huge numbers of people who are asset rich but cash poor who will be locked into this grotesque TAX and as usual with these things the Super Rich will find ingenious ways of getting off paying it. The Squeezed middle will end up footing the bill as usual.
But how on earth is he to be classified amongst the "most vulnerable"??? He might well be within the most vulnerable 85% of the country, but I don't expect he'll be queuing up down the food bank any time soon. Typical Tory twaddle What you're saying is that he lives in a house with no mortgage that is worth £2m, so he could basically sell it, be able to buy himself a very nice property on the outskirts of Cambridge for £500k or so and live out the rest of his life as a cash millionaire. Apologies is this sounds cruel and heartless of me, but my heart certainly ain't bleeding for him!!
With all due respect JWM, £7,200 was a serious amount of money for a house in 1966 - the average house price was under £4,000 at the time so your stepfather must have been doing pretty well for himself. The reason it's fair that he should pay tax on an asset which has gained huge market value is that when you make a huge gain you otherwise tend to expect to pay tax. The fact that he can defer it to payment after death (and note that it reduces his taxable sum for the purpose of IHT) means that this is an entirely affordable method of taxing something from which he and his beneficiaries will benefit from massively anyway. You will forgive me that I have little sympathy for a group of people who, assuming this tax is put in place right now and your stepfather survives 10 years, will inherit (at least - on the house alone) at the bare minimum £1,182,000 instead of £1,200,000 and could be as much as £1,488,000 instead of £1,500,000. They do not sound like the squeezed middle to me. And in fact even if they are in the middle they certainly are not squeezed. Whether the super-rich are avoiding tax or not is an entirely different unrelated question.
We are already in the process of discussing this with our Solicitors and Accountants to see how we can avoid paying this TAX should it become law.
In which case what's your issue with it? If you can use legitimate means to make tax savings then there should be no need for complaint about hardship. As it is, even if you cannot use legitimate means, can you at least see that this is a tax that is very much affordable? Fair is an entirely different question, before you raise that. When beneficiaries stand to inherit £1m (or potentially much, much more), what's an additional £30k in tax?
...especially when there are plenty of people out there who are actually vulnerable and face the difficult decision this winter as whether to eat or turn the heating on. JWM has plummeted to new depths here, dear me
Why should we have to cough up even more in TAX when we have done the right things all of our lives and not been a burden on the state! Why should we keep handing over more and more money to these bastards only for them to waste it on their pet projects. We need lower Taxes in this country to boost incentives not introduce higher or additional Taxes that drain money out of the economy. This TAX is a TAX on aspiration and penalizes those who have worked hard all their lives, paid their dues, saved hard only to be clobbered again! The state should first cut back on spending and all the huge waste before imposing even more onerous Taxes. I really hope and pray that the Tories get elected otherwise we are heading for economic meltdown if Red Ed and Balls get in.
How will a lower tax on a stationary asset like your stepfather's house boost incentives? Your stepfather isn't employing anyone using the value increase to his house. It's untaxed profitability that has no benefit to society at large and is entirely a consequence of the safe country and wealthy area that your stepfather lives in. He should be grateful to the nation that he has gained so much and be happy to pay the piffling sum of £3k per annum, which is small fry compared to the amount he has benefited.
