Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

United Kingdom Budget Visualization

uk.wikibudgets.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 162 posts

Re: United Kingdom Budget Visualization

#151

Post by ben_w »

reallydontask wrote: post #69
monadgonad wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing £1b to the EU GDP per month and not the UK one is a bit disingenuous.

true but even against the UK GDP is not that much really, is it? 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.

> 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.

Re: United Kingdom Budget Visualization

#152

Post by ben_w »

monadgonad wrote: post #58
ben_w wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good for you. Unfortunately, I have encountered quite a lot of people who do care about the money. 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

Comparing £1b to the EU GDP per month and not the UK one is a bit disingenuous.

I should’ve mentioned that the tweet in question demonstrated a belief that the money is of substantial importance to the EU, which in turn is part of a broader meme that the EU is reliant on the UK and would be bankrupted by its departure. My comparison is part of an ongoing frustration I have that so many leavers not only care about the money but also don’t understand the scale difference between the UK budget contributions and the EU economy.

Re: United Kingdom Budget Visualization

#153

Post by 7952 »

ackshually wrote: post #22
frobozz wrote: post #5

There, at the top of "Other Expenditures", Slightly smaller than running the Office of the Secretary of State for Wales. 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

I didn't vote leave because of the money. 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 Brussel…

Of course this lack of nuance is utilised by brexiteer politicians a lot when it suits them. By talking about the "will of the people" they are reducing millions of people to a single constituency who want one thing. When actually leave voters want and care about lots of different things. And the best way to represent those opinions is through the normal democratic system giving equal weight to remainers. Except that isn't allowed to happen because politicians want to use the vote to push their opinion.

But yes the lack of nuance is appalling.

Re: United Kingdom Budget Visualization

#154

Post by Ambele »

I was surprised that £69 billion (9% of the budget) goes to Wales, Scottland, and Northern Ireland. That was until I found out that all three are part of the UK and they contribute to the tax revenue.

Overall the budget is nicely balanced. I wish the US ran a deficit as small as the UK's.

Re: United Kingdom Budget Visualization

#155

Post by lammasass »

mighty_bander wrote: post #23
Reason077 wrote: post #21

It's staggering to me that £46 billion goes to HM Revenue and Customs. So it costs £46 billion to administer £506 billion in tax revenue! That's almost 1/3 the budget of the entire NHS! That doesn't seem like a good ROI at all. A product of an over-complicated tax system?

An 11:1 return seems pretty efficient given the nature of their work.

Oddly enough, your rational comment has been downvoted.

Re: United Kingdom Budget Visualization

#156

Post by Brakenshire »

alecco wrote: post #87
jsmith99 wrote: post #83

The National Audit Office also publish a visualisation of the Whole of Government Accounts (best viewed on desktop) https://www.nao.org.uk/other/whole-of-government-accounts-20... The accounts themselves are very readable https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/whole-of-governme...

In spite of a mostly balanced budget, the growth of non-current liabilites is accelerating. I wonder if this just is due to an aging population and it's effect in pensions or if there are other factors. https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-kingdom/2017/

The UK has shifted many expenditures which used to happen up front (say, building a hospital) onto long term contracts with ongoing payments through the Private Finance Initiative. That could well be the cause.

Re: United Kingdom Budget Visualization

#158

Post by pjc50 »

ackshually wrote: post #123
gutnor wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually a good point and well said ... 3 years ago. 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 w…

Yes, the current government does not have a majority, but this was due to internal strife caused by the leaver/remainer dynamic within the halls of power. 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…

> supreme court were permitted to make walking away from the negotiation table illegal,

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.

Re: United Kingdom Budget Visualization

#159

Post by pjc50 »

ackshually wrote: post #135
onlingyding wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was however a significant amount of misinformation coming from the leave campaign which are hard to ignore and given our current situation are fairly relevant. For example it was repeatedly stated that a vote to leave didn't mean a vote to leave the single market or that Turkey was joining the EU which will 'flood' the UK with Turkish immigrants. The leave campaign was extremely successful because it targeted d…

Didn't intend to imply that the Leave campaign was performed wholly in good faith, I'm not so naive as to think that there are not parties that benefit from the weakness of the pound and instability that the unprepared government has caused scrambling to react to a referendum the majority of MPs were sure would come up remain. However your point on the leave campaign is only one side of the story; The BBC's coverage…

The problem is that so much of the Leave argument is based on easily debunkable misleading news stories in the press, that it's impossible to give it 50/50 coverage without people being (rightly) outraged about the low quality of the coverage. The BBC is not obliged to give airtime to political flat earthers, but it still does anyway.

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.

Re: United Kingdom Budget Visualization

#160

Post by gutnor »

mattmanser wrote: post #143
gutnor wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brexit is not a threat to democracy in the absolute sense. 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 excerci…

You are probabaly a remainer, as am I, but you are using a remainer's justification for a re-run. And pretending leavers believe this. They generally don't. 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 t…

Re-run or no re-run does not change much to the threat I mention.

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.

Post reply on HN