Maybe things can’t only get better for Keir Starmer, as he is shamed with the latest polling just as the Labour conference begins
Less popular than the cabbage?
Lettuce.
I won’t lie, the cabbage was pretty popular. It was Truss who was less than useless as a politician.
There probably wasn’t time to conduct a poll before Truss fucked off.
He’s not unpopular because he’s worse than recent Tory leadership, he’s unpopular because of how much of a disappointment he’s been compared to people’s expectations. Mandatory ID is surely going to improve things in that regard…
Mandatory ID will mean he can do the same thing to naughty citizens as he does to the naughty Labour MPs.
Labour is supposed to help the people they have been actively working against, it’s no surprise he’s wildly unpopular.
Here’s a drinking game if you want to stay sober:
Take a drink every time you see someone who’s working class, at a Labour Party conference.
They’ve long time lost their way.
Angela Rayner, though of course she sold us out for a fucking flat in Brighton.
Oh that all working class were getting over £150,000 a year plus other benefits and expenses paid, and said to be worth nearly £5million.
Have they, though?
- nationalising trains
- nationalising steel
- nationalising a part of our energy sector
- bringing the NHS back under direct public control
- ending various tax-dodging loopholes, such as the IHT for farmers
- windfall tax on energy companies
- charging VAT on private schooling
- expanding free childcare
- restarting SureStart (albeit under a different name)
- expanding free school meals
- expanding school breakfast clubs
- guaranteeing jobs for young people (announced this morning)
- big increases to the minimum wage, especially for the youngest
- expansion of workers rights
- expansion of renters rights
- big increase in infrastructure investment, particularly for renewables
OSA, fair enough. I’m sure plenty of young people especially aren’t happy about that. But overall, how are they actively working against people they’re supposed to be helping?
The trains were nationalised by the Tory government in 2020, and they also abolished franchising later that year. They also began to set up Great British Railways in 2021. All that’s happening now is the contracts are being withdrawn as they reach their break points.
Steel has not been nationalised. The government has taken over the funding of redundancy payments and retraining for the shut down private sector Tata furnaces in Port Talbot, and has taken steps to force the owners of British Steel to keep the idle furnaces in Scunthorpe burning.
There has also been no nationalisation in the energy sector. Great British Energy is set up as a way to subsidise projects created and run by the private sector and other public bodies. It will not generate, distribute or retail energy.
You need to look up the differences between the Tory rail model and Labour’s. It’s not the same.
Steel has not been nationalised. The government has taken over the funding of redundancy payments and retraining for the shut down private sector Tata furnaces in Port Talbot, and has taken steps to force the owners of British Steel to keep the idle furnaces in Scunthorpe burning.
Which is a good short term move. They can’t abruptly nationalise it by force immediately without causing a truss-like market panic. The ball is rolling.
There has also been no nationalisation in the energy sector.
Yes it is. GBE is public.
Great British Energy is set up as a way to subsidise projects created and run by the private sector and other public bodies.
That’s part of the energy sector…
It will not generate, distribute or retail energy.
I never said it will…
It should be noted that The Canary is still fuming that Corbyn didn’t get a third attempt to lose to the Tories.
I didn’t vote for Starmer. I voted for Labour. If he’s ineffective, replace him with somebody better equipped to deal with the threat of Reform.
I live in a shithole town with a migrant hotel, and let me tell you, this place will vote Reform next time. I’m sure sticking them there was cheaper than building proper facilities and hiring an appropriate number of people to process them and handle any needed deportations, but the cost of Reform will dwarf that.
I am sure purging all the leftists and reformers out of the left Center option was the better strategy, on the backs of openly false allegations at that. /s
Labor is a fucking joke and it’s going to hand England to the far right that will fix themselves into Power with the help of the US and Russia, same as macron is going to hand over france, and Europe is going to fall like fucking Domino’s to Fascist governments because we have all allowed conservatives to seize our mainstream political parties and Ratchet privilege to the plutocracy. The only reform option is the far right.
The moderate left fully surrendered to every issue to the right, all in the name of “electability” and “incremental process to socialism”, they chose fascism over being perceived as “pro-russian” and “tankies”
Being pro-Putin or a tankie is the same thing as being a fascist
Ah I forgot where I was.
I think there’s some truth to what I said, right?
Fascist movements are apparently characterised by: “extreme militaristic nationalism, contempt for electoral democracy and political and cultural liberalism, a belief in natural social hierarchy and the rule of elites”. I think Putin’s rule has those characteristics. And tankies are authoritarian, right? They might idolise the USSR or the PRC, both of which have had a focus on militaristic nationalism, contempt for electoral democracy, and a belief in the rule of elites.
Absolutely mental.
Kier is boring, has floated some things that the electorate doesn’t like (e.g. taking WFA away from the wealthy), and has done a very poor job highlighting the good that this government is doing, but is he fuck worse than Boris, Truss, or even Sunak.
People need to get some damn perspective.
His supposedly labour government has also doubled down on censoring wikipedia, calling people pedo-sympathizers for resisting absurd internet control laws that literally affect every digital facing international company, and is now promoting a digital ID straight out every digital era authoritatians or fascist’s wet dreams.
Is he better than sunak? Probably? Kinda? That’s a very low bar though and the fact that we even talk about it is sad. Their actions have been so much unlike what people think about when voting labour parties that it’s surreal.
People reasonably feel cheated on given the party’s supposed focus.
There’s also been:
- nationalising trains
- nationalising steel
- nationalising a part of our energy sector
- bringing the NHS back under direct public control
- ending various tax-dodging loopholes, such as the IHT for farmers
- windfall tax on energy companies
- charging VAT on private schooling
- expanding free childcare
- restarting SureStart (albeit under a different name)
- expanding free school meals
- expanding school breakfast clubs
- guaranteeing jobs for young people (announced this morning)
- big increases to the minimum wage, especially for the youngest
- expansion of workers rights
- expansion of renters rights
- big increase in infrastructure investment, particularly for renewables
And a load more.
No, I’m not a fan of everything, especially not the OSA, but you can’t expect to agree with every single action your government takes.
As for the government ID thing, it’s hardly an authoritarian’s dream when almost every country on planet Earth does it already. You may not realise it, but we’re very much in the minority for not having this already.
Have a look at that list I rattled off the top of my head and try to tell me they aren’t the actions of a Labour party.
You’re letting your judgement be impaired by blindly focussing on a couple of issues you disagree with rather than looking at the whole picture.
E: absolute clowns ignoring reality. You people would rather have Reform in power than a centre-left party.
Copying from Ohulancutash:
The trains were nationalised by the Tory government in 2020, and they also abolished franchising later that year. They also began to set up Great British Railways in 2021. All that’s happening now is the contracts are being withdrawn as they reach their break points.Steel has not been nationalised. The government has taken over the funding of redundancy payments and retraining for the shut down private sector Tata furnaces in Port Talbot, and has taken steps to force the owners of British Steel to keep the idle furnaces in Scunthorpe burning.There has also been no nationalisation in the energy sector. Great British Energy is set up as a way to subsidise projects created and run by the private sector and other public bodies. It will not generate, distribute or retail energy.
There’s no need for you to lie.
As for the government ID thing, it’s hardly an authoritarian’s dream when almost every country on planet Earth does it already. You may not realise it, but we’re very much in the minority for not having this already.
Just have to say, being in the minority for something does not mean it’s all of a sudden a good thing and that everyone else must do it.
That’s true. My point is that people acting like it’s some awful mega authoritarian thing seems to be forgetting that we are one of 8 countries world wide without a unified government ID.
Half of the others being overseas territories or island microstates.
There’s a lot of fear mongering going on surrounding these IDs, as if they’re not an extremely normal thing.
Essentially calling 200+ countries fascist, like the above user is doing, is a pretty extreme reaction.
The problem is not the ID cards that other countries have. That would be reasonable, even if one could argue NINO is sufficient.
The problem is the online/app nature if them which, in conjunction with OSA, makes it dystopian control scenario.
I’m not ignoring those upsides that you mentioned, I just didn’t mention them or wasn’t aware. I like most of them for what it matters.
But I do still consider OSA and digital IDs an authoritarian measures and I do find this to be of high enough importance to potentially overshadow all of the above.
What’s the point of living in a, arguably, more socialist state if your privacy doesn’t exist? I’m not a bloody tanky and I don’t like that angle, like many others.
Other countries have digital IDs. We are abnormal for not having them.
You’re being whipped into a frenzy over something that is extremely normal.
Making it out to be fascist is brain-dead. Only an absolute moron of the highest calibre would believe that the UK is one of only 8 non-fascist states in the world.
The majority of the world considered slavery and women being subservient normal, that didn’t make it right.
You think it’s brain dead to reject a digital ID.
I think it’s braindead to sacrifice privacy for the sake of safety, especially when it’s so transparent that the goal is control and suppression and not “protecting the children”.
To each his own.
Honestly on Sunak, I didnt particularly like him nor his party nor the policies pushed but the guy did give off the impression that he was genuinely trying to improve things and was giving it his all despite his party being a unruly shitshow.
I get the feeling history will wind up treating him as it did May, a kneecapped PM who did genuinely want to do some good in a political enviroment that didnt exactly allow for it.
the guy did give off the impression that he was genuinely trying to improve things and was giving it his all despite his party being a unruly shitshow
Funny, all I saw was a smug time-server who didn’t give a toss about British people who aren’t rich.
Some say that he would have been good if he started when boris started.
I don’t even think boris was the worse policy-wise. It’s just he couldn’t keep his MPs in line.
It’s the expectation.
Boris and Truss were abject morons and Sunak was an insulated, rich Tory. They were expected to be terrible and so we weren’t surprised.
Starmer won in a landslide victory for Labour and went about screwing the poor, arresting old ladies, and presiding over genocide. Conservatives hate him because he’s on the Red Team, and the Left hate him because he acts like a Tory.
If he’d run as a Tory, he’d be scoring higher than everyone since Cameron, but he was supposed to fix the mess, not make it worse.
How has he screwed the poor?
- nationalising trains
- nationalising steel
- nationalising a part of our energy sector
- bringing the NHS back under direct public control
- ending various tax-dodging loopholes, such as the IHT for farmers
- windfall tax on energy companies
- charging VAT on private schooling
- expanding free childcare
- restarting SureStart (albeit under a different name)
- expanding free school meals
- expanding school breakfast clubs
- guaranteeing jobs for young people (announced this morning)
- big increases to the minimum wage, especially for the youngest
- expansion of workers rights
- expansion of renters rights
- big increase in infrastructure investment, particularly for renewables
Is any of that screwing the poor?
arresting old ladies
I didn’t realise that when you’re a certain gender or past a certain age the law should no longer apply?
and presiding over genocide
Huh? He banned weapons exports to Israel, publicly condemned Israel for war crimes, sanctioned a bunch of members of their parliament, ramped up aid for Palestine, committed to arresting Netanyahu if he ever steps foot on British soil, resisted joining the US and Israel with their attacks in Iran, and has recognised Palestine.
He can’t do much more than that. Would you like him to invade Israel? I don’t think that’s realistic.
If he’d run as a Tory, he’d be scoring higher than everyone since Cameron, but he was supposed to fix the mess, not make it worse.
How is he making things worse?
E: sure, just downvote when you see some inconvenient facts. You clearly hate all of the bullet points I’ve just outlined, in which case I’m not sure why you ever supported Labour in the first place. They’ve been a centre-left party for half a century now.
The trains were nationalised by the Tory government in 2020, and they also abolished franchising later that year. They also began to set up Great British Railways in 2021. All that’s happening now is the contracts are being withdrawn as they reach their break points.Steel has not been nationalised. The government has taken over the funding of redundancy payments and retraining for the shut down private sector Tata furnaces in Port Talbot, and has taken steps to force the owners of British Steel to keep the idle furnaces in Scunthorpe burning.There has also been no nationalisation in the energy sector. Great British Energy is set up as a way to subsidise projects created and run by the private sector and other public bodies. It will not generate, distribute or retail energy.
Huh? He banned weapons exports to Israel, publicly condemned Israel for war crimes, sanctioned a bunch of members of their parliament, ramped up aid for Palestine, committed to arresting Netanyahu if he ever steps foot on British soil, resisted joining the US and Israel with their attacks in Iran, and has recognised Palestine.
And still has contracts for the Israeli military to train British troops, and still criminalises the expression of support for Palestinian rights. At best, we’re seeing some mixed messaging here.
They’ve been a centre-left party for half a century now.
Sure, because there’s no difference between Labour under Michael Foot or Corbyn and Labour under Blair or Starmer. /s
FFS, why are you lying? Supporting Palestine is not illegal. The government supports Palestine. Stop the lies.
The only thing that’s illegal is supporting a proscribed violent group.
Sure, because there’s no difference between Labour under Michael Foot or Corbyn and Labour under Blair or Starmer. /s
Obviously they’re different under every leader. They’re still centre left and I just proved it to you. You being too stupid to accept it doesn’t change reality. Go look at my list again.
At least he’s not a supporter of Putin like Corbyn, and could actually win an election unlike Corbyn.
Kier is boring
You’d think he’d at least be a bit more lively, with all that powder up his nose.
Remember the 107th rule of acquisition: Win or lose, there’s always Huyperian Beetle Snuff
Sunak and Kier seem like a wash almost.
Boris’s policies weren’t the worse. He was just absolutely incompetent at actually leading the party/government on a personal level and was prone to slight corruption
Boris’s policies were shit.
He had better immigration attitudes than sunak and kier
Huh? How the fuck did you work that one out? He imported 1 million people per year, most of them non-workers who will need government subsidy their entire lives, mostly from areas of extreme religious fundamentalism.
Is that what you want?
And there’s a lot more to governance than immigration. This is the man with the “oven ready” Brexit deal, thousands of extra unnecessary covid deaths, rampant corruption, shutting down parliament when they were going to vote against him, etc.
My girlfriend got here thanks to his policies
Starmer – 13% satisfied, 79% dissatisfied 
Liz Truss – 16% satisfied, 67% dissatisfiedIt should be linked with average duration or something cos if the lettuce will have stayed longer she will have been minus
Who’s setting up a lettuce stream? If lettuce streams become a tradition of unwelcome politicians I wouldn’t be mad.
Pretty safe to say he’s over-hated. Even like colleagues of mine whom I suspect do not follow politics closely refer to him as things like “Kier Stalin”.
Maybe I’m old fashioned but a PM is essentially an admin role – why do we expect that they be inspirational too.
I feel like people don’t like him because he’s as dull as dishwater. I am not a fan of Kier’s politics, but I think he’s practical and level headed. Following 14 years of a Tory shit show - I’m suprised people aren’t happy with having someone like that in the job and winning some brownie points.
The biggest mistake he’s making is that people expected a bit of a shift to oppose what the Conservatives were offering but instead he’s also trying to appeal to the right of politics through a lurch to the right. He’s not charasmatic or radical enough for that to succeed, so has pushed away the left only to fail to win over the right. Nobody likes him.
I think he’s practical and level headed
He seems to me frightened of the rightwing media and of Reform and twitchily reactive.
You don’t defeat the enemy by becoming them.
The biggest mistake he’s making is that people expected a bit of a shift to oppose what the Conservatives were offering
I think it might be the flip flopping, and not really knowing what direction he needs to take the country.
One minute it’s this, next it’s that. His dilly dallying with raynor when it was obvious her tenure was unsustainable. Then bringing in deeply unpopular policies like the OSA and digital id cards.
We have systems in place to counter illegal working. Why do we need the other id? We don’t. It’s a badly thought out rehash of what Blair was pushing in the naughties.
Then we have what most people perceive to be a two tier justice system, and you can start to see why he’s unpopular.
OSA was brought in by the tories. It’s full name is even the Online Safety Act 2023
He hasn’t rescinded it.
Like a lot of things. Such as the awful financial thresholds for migration that are nonsensical and xenophobic.
OSA was brought in by the tories.
You know that, i know that. But from the publics perception the act came in while labour where in power. And that’s all that matters.
You could make a solid argument that it was done deliberately, to discredit the next government as the tories knew it wouldn’'t be them.
Labour could have turned round and said that the rules where brought in by the last government. But no, they then doubled down on it and started calling opponents of the act nonces.
So from the lay persons perspective, labour bought it in, and then called everyone a nonce.
We have systems in place to counter illegal working. Why do we need the other id? We don’t. It’s a badly thought out rehash of what Blair was pushing in the naughties.
As someone who lives in a country where there is one unique ID number issued to every existing citizen, newborn and every residing citizen, I really do feel the UK needs another ID. There are many people without a British passport (elderly or immigrants), the National Insurance number is only for people aged over 16 and does not contain a photo (and immigrants have to apply for it), and a drivers license is… well, for those that have passed a driving test.
So, have a new unique ID number for every individual born or residing in the country ties each of these bits of data together or works in place of someone who is missing one or all of those. In my country, you can use it to identify yourself at a hospital, or for doing your taxes, opening a bank account - or to log into many services. You even used to have to tell your ID number to a retailer when buying a TV so they could check to see if you had a license (but fortunately the government killed the license fee and bundled it in with our standard income tax).
And I have seen people people say “but what if the police ask me to present my digital card and my phone battery is dead?”. Here most institutions who have permission to look you up can still find you by your name and date of birth - since your unique ID number starts with DDMMYYYY followed by a five-digit number and they just ask you to verbally confirm they got the correct ‘you’ from their system.
That said, I haven’t read through the UK’s proposed plans for the ID card and I know historically the suggestion has been a little too invasive when it comes to adding “biometrics” to the card. All it would need to be is a unique ID number that links together all your other data thats scattered around the place… but clearly most Brits are dead against that.
They are happy to give their personal data away to Facebook and have it stored on servers around the world at the whim of Mark Zuckerberg, but not trust their government enough to store the same info on home soil to make the country run more efficiently.
but clearly most Brits are dead against that.
With the likes of Palantir sniffing about in the lobbies, there’s good reason to be against it.
I haven’t read through the UK’s proposed plans for the ID card
I can see that.
They don’t suggest to create an ID number, but rather a digital version of an ID card. There’s already an NI number that most government services are tied to. There are provisional driving licences that you can get without knowing how to drive.
It doesn’t seem that there’s a problem that this digital ID will solve.
The public didn’t ask for this. The senior civil servants who are the experts didn’t suggest or advise on it. This is coming straight from a politician’s think thank and vested interests, so of course no one is trusting it. It’s the track and trace app all over again.
I wouldn’t oppose a physical ID if they’d offer to print it and give to every citizen for free. But a mandatory app on your personal device is, as you said, a privacy nightmare.
He was funny in parliament when calling out boris
I think Starmer could be considered a reformer analogous to Stolypin, or perhaps Alexander II. In some ways, Starmer would have been considered a fairly radical social democrat able to appease the working classes, in another time. But now is not the time for moderate reformers who ultimately serve the existing ruling classes.
And the people who say to “Give Starmer a chance!” are the same who, in 1910, were bemoaning Alexander II and Stolypin’s assassinations because “We were just starting to get the reforms we’ve been asking for - and you radicals blew it for all of us!”
The time for reform is over. The people demand revolution.
I just want affordable housing, a reliable NHS and for my girlfriend to be let back into the country ಠ_ಠ
Pretty sure voters of one party hates leaders of all other parties. But Keir is additionally also hated by voters of his own party, making him lower than everybody.
I call him that because it’s funny.
Ironically all of the laws he was using to crack down on protests and arrest over Facebook posts were put in place by the tories. The Online Safety Act was also from the tories. He’s just inherited the tools they gave him
Admittedly it is a pretty funny nickname but personally I find it amusing because he’s so non-threatening
I like the YouTube shorts that are like “patch updates” and it’s just like “kier-STALIN”
Speaking in political compass terms, Stalin was around -5,10.
Starmer’s nearer something like 5,8.
Other side of the economic scale.
Maybe if he disregards the will of the people, and institutes the Digital ID, he can get that up to a 5,10.Either way, this is not what freedom looks like.
Oh c’mon, he’s no where near that bad.
I still prefer him to the previous administration. He isn’t really making things much worse except from the digital ID thing. Isn’t making things much better either.
His attacks on trans people are also scummy.
The Internet Wanking License hasn’t been a clear winner either. He voted against that when the Tories were in power, then flipped when they realised they’d be the ones doing all the spying. Wait until Farage gets in and uses that to collect a list of rainbow flag people to bully once he’s done with the brown people.
That was put in place by the tories.
Also, licence*
Yank detected, opinion rejected
I’m with the septics on that one. Having licence instead of license but licensed instead of licenced is asinine.
What do you call making a masterbaitorbase and connecting ip and id and face to every single computer in a place any organized group could access.
Or cancelling the right to protest, forbidding defenses that acquit accused protesters, calling protesyers terrorists and equating the entire protest with the proscribed group?
You think things are fine? Jesus christ.
The second paragraph is using legislation implemented by the tories
Lets once again start telling each other, especially the young, often, the story of the boy who cried wolf.
I don’t really see the issue with digital ID per se. Almost all countries in the world do it. We’re very much an outlier for not having one.
Like seriously, there are ~200 countries with government ID, and only 8 without.
Are all those 200 countries dystopian shitholes, with the UK (right now) one of the only free states worldwide? That’s a wildly nationalist take tbh.
This seems factually incorrect at multiple levels.
Fun fact: no it’s not. You’re either poorly informed or lying.
Your confident reiteration (and ad-hominem) make an uncompelling argument.
A quick ask of the matter with an LLM (Mistral) gave the following answer:
Here’s a concise breakdown as of October 2025: Total Countries There are 195 sovereign states recognized by the UN (193 member states + Vatican City + Palestine as an observer state). Countries with Digital ID Systems Approximately 140+ countries have implemented or are piloting some form of national digital ID (e.g., India’s Aadhaar, Estonia’s e-Residency, or the EU’s eIDAS framework).
Fully operational: ~90–100 (e.g., India, Nigeria, Singapore, EU nations). Pilot/partial rollout: ~40–50 (e.g., Brazil, Canada, parts of Africa).
Countries Without Digital ID Roughly 55–60 countries lack a centralized digital ID system, often due to:
Infrastructure gaps (e.g., small island nations, conflict zones). Privacy concerns (e.g., Germany, parts of Scandinavia resist mandatory schemes). Early-stage planning (e.g., some Pacific or Caribbean nations).
Key Trends (2024–2025):
Africa/Asia: Rapid adoption (e.g., Ghana’s Ghana Card, Philippines’ PhilSys). Europe: EU-wide expansion of eIDAS 2.0 (digital wallets for all citizens by 2026). Americas: Slower uptake (U.S. has state-level initiatives like Mobile Driver’s Licenses; Latin America is mixed).
Why the range? Definitions vary—some count any government-issued digital credential (e.g., e-passports), while others require biometric-linked systems.
As of October 2025, there are at least 15–20 countries with all-purpose, mandatory digital ID systems that block access to work, banking, healthcare, or essential services if you refuse or lack enrollment. These systems are biometric-linked, government-enforced, and designed to exclude non-compliant individuals from formal life.
Strictly Mandatory (No Work/Services Without ID)
India (Aadhaar) – Blocks bank accounts, SIM cards, welfare, and formal jobs. Nigeria (NIN) – No SIM, passports, or salaries without it. China (Social Credit + Digital ID) – Required for travel, loans, and government jobs. Saudi Arabia (Absher/Tawakkalna) – Needed for employment, subsidies, and legal residency. Kenya (Huduma Namba) – Mandatory for SIMs, taxes, and state services. Pakistan (NADRA Smart CNIC) – No voting, banking, or property transactions. Bangladesh (National ID) – Blocks SIMs, salaries, and welfare. Indonesia (e-KTP) – Required for voting, healthcare, and formal contracts. Philippines (PhilSys) – Increasingly enforced for social benefits and jobs. Egypt (Biometric National ID) – Needed for subsidies and legal transactions. Ethiopia (Fayda) – Blocks SIMs, banking, and public-sector work. Peru (DNI Electrónico) – Mandatory for voting, healthcare, and contracts. Uganda (Ndaga Muntu) – SIM and land transactions frozen without it. Turkey (e-Devlet) – Required for healthcare, banking, and legal processes. Morocco (Carte d’Identité Électronique) – Excludes from formal economy. Tanzania (NIDA) – SIM and voting restrictions for non-compliance. Ghana (Ghana Card) – Blocks SIMs, pensions, and passports. Malaysia (MyKad) – Needed for voting, healthcare, and financial services.
De Facto Mandatory (Not Legally Forced but Impossible to Function Without)
Estonia (e-Residency) Singapore (SingPass) Rwanda (Irembo)
Key Trends
Africa/Asia lead enforcement (Nigeria, India, Pakistan). Middle East (Saudi Arabia, UAE) ties IDs to residency and employment. Latin America (Peru, Brazil) increasingly links IDs to social programs.
Notable Exceptions (No Mandatory Digital ID)
United States: No federal system; state-level REAL ID is required for domestic flights but not all services. Germany/France: Strong privacy laws block mandatory biometric IDs (though EU’s eIDAS 2.0 is pushing digital wallets). Canada/Australia: Pilot projects exist, but no nationwide mandatory scheme (yet). Nordic Countries: Digital IDs (e.g., Sweden’s BankID) are widespread but not legally enforced for all services.
Controversies & Workarounds
India: Supreme Court ruled Aadhaar cannot be mandatory for private services (e.g., schools, hospitals), but loopholes remain. Nigeria: Courts temporarily halted SIM-ID linkage in 2021, but enforcement resumed in 2023. China: Rural areas sometimes bypass strict enforcement, but urban centers face full exclusion.
Why the Push? Governments cite fraud reduction, welfare efficiency, and security, but critics argue it enables mass surveillance and exclusion of marginalized groups (e.g., refugees, the elderly).
I for one welcome our new racist overlords in 2029… 😞🤢
I’m not even British (I’m Canadian) and I don’t like him. Why’d he go after family farmers with aggressive inheritance taxes? That seems like a political dead end. Absolute foolishness.
Farmers usually have a lot of money invested in capital equipment but their lifestyles are anything but lavish. They live a working class life but get taxed (on inheritance) like millionaires, preventing them from handing down the family farm through generations (and allowing wealthy corporate farming operations to consolidate them).
Farmers usually have a lot of money invested in capital equipment but their lifestyles are anything but lavish.
They often hide it, but the farmers I know are far from poor. Like a lot of us, they’re rich in illiquid assets but not in terms of cashflow. That’s my situation too, though I’m not a farmer, and I don’t whinge about it.
Inheritance tax is a tax on unearned wealth. There’s no reason to distinguish one asset from all others. Those inheriting almost invariably did nothing to earn it; it’s almost always an accident of birth that puts them in line for an inheritance. That, and the whims of some elderly person. A steeply progressive inheritance tax, with no exceptions besides spouses, would be ideal. And if you’re concerned about corporations grabbing all the arable land, regulate them to prevent any firm directly or indirectly owning more than, say, 10 hectares of land. A similar rule should apply to housing.
Providing for one’s own children, passing on family traditions and ways of working, preserving the spaces where childhood memories are created; these are among the most fundamental of human desires. Take those away and your society gives way to nihilism. You make an enemy of every parent in the country.
On the other hand, a strong society understands this at a cultural level and the preservation of family traditions is deeply rooted in the society. This is where you get family farms, family restaurants, family workshops and small businesses that last for hundreds of years and produce some of the best products life has to offer. Japan, France, Italy, and Spain are some examples of countries where this is the case.
As for arbitrary restrictions on corporations: ad-hoc solutions like that rarely work. People find ways of circumventing and undermining such efforts. Instead of one corporation, people will have hundreds, each with its 10 hectares of land.
The more regulations you create, the more you reward people with the money to hire accountants and lawyers to navigate them. On the other hand, traditional farmers and other small family businesses will simply give up trying to navigate the red tape and bail out.
If you want to tax unearned wealth, you should implement land value tax which taxes the increase in value of a piece of land, not inheritance. A child who grows up on a farm and helps with all of the farm tasks their parents do every day has earned their inheritance. A suburbanite who has watched their house go from $200k to $2m in 20 years has not.
If I’m a parent in the twilight of my life and I own a big farm or a factory or some other productive asset and I’m facing steep inheritance taxes do you think I’m going to just accept them? No. I’d rather sell off all the equipment, burn the factory to the ground, treat the family to lavish vacations and parties for the rest of my life, and have them inherit nothing. If there’s no future to plan for, then live like there’s no future.
Rich ass farmers paying tax? Not against that in the slightest
I prefer farmers being rich ass than bankers honestly. Farmers deserve to be rich, they rarely get a day off.
If they have that much wealth, they need to be taxed. If you’ve got knobheads like Clarkson supporting them, you just know they’re in the wrong.
I’m sure the animals would like a day off from being raped too.
Clarkson went into farming as a tax dodge.
What’s wrong with clarkson?
Right, because if (guy I don’t like) supports something, I’m obliged to hate it and fight against it!
This really tells me all I need to know about your politics. You’re not interested in making life better for anyone. You’re filled with bitterness and resentment and you just want to watch the world burn. You don’t see taxes as a tool to bring prosperity to more people. For you, taxes are a weapon to bludgeon your enemies with. Enemies you’ve never met that a man on the television taught you to hate.
My, what a lot of conclusions you just drew on zero evidence. Almost impressive.
I mean, jump on that one part rather than the actual argument.
Really tells me all I need to know about your politics.
So you support the consolidation of small family farms into large corporate farming operations. Interesting take.
If that’s how you want to infer it
Infering or not, that is what’s happening.
Huh? You’re pro rich people dodging tax?
Shit loads of multi-millionaires/billionaires were buying farmland as an asset so they didn’t have to pay inheritance taxes out on it, too.
It’s absolutely right that Labour started making them pay tax again (yes, again, they used to do it and family farms still thrived back before Thatcher gave a Tory-voting demographic a tax exception)
No, I’m pro-actual-farmer keeping their family farm in the family. People dodging taxes need to be taxed but catching real farmers in the crossfire is not good. It’s very bad.
We had the more family run farms when we had the inheritance tax on them.
In England, farms under 100 hectares have halved in number in the last 60 years, and the number of small holdings has also plummeted from around 160,000 in 1950 to less than 30,000 (2020 figure
It’ll still be in the family. They’ll just be paying some tax.
Not enough by a long shot, mind you, but some.
What a strange take. I definitely think that we should support farmers, but not by exempting them from inheritance taxes. We should incentivise the correct things - If they work the land give them subsidies.
If you don’t tax inheritance you’re creating a generational wealth hoarding. Let’s take Jeremy Clarkson for example - he openly stated that the reason he bought farmland was so that his children can inherit it tax free. If he didn’t have a farming tv show, he would lease that land to actual farmers.
It might be different in other parts of the world, but in the UK, that has relatively high population density, sitting on farm land for generations can be very very lucrative. Most of the richest pieces of real estate in this country were farmland a century or two ago.
My parents sold the farm, I think, largely, on accountant’s advice, to avoid the inheritance tax, or something.
So now I don’t have the farm I grew up presuming was to be mine (or other relatives’) one day, and instead see it get eaten up in consolidation by the rich, like all the other small farms around, merging.
This is not good.
Yay for sensible subsidies. Nay for tax ploys to feed agribusiness monopolies.
Sorry that your parents had to sell, but it sounds like you’re blaming the wrong people.
If the inheritance taxes are the reason his parents had to sell then it stands to reason that the people who introduced the inheritance taxes in parliament are to blame, no?
I don’t see how inheritance tax is to blame. You’d pay less on inheritance tax than paying income/capital gains tax on selling your land. I suspect other reasons were at play.
Inheritance taxes for real farmers (as opposed to people who just buy farmland to live in the country) are much higher because they include capital expenditures. Modern tractors, harvesters, ploughs, seed drills, sprayers, barns, equipment sheds, silos, fences, irrigation systems… all of this can add up to millions of pounds. Having to suddenly pay a large inheritance tax for a cash-strapped (high leverage) working farmer because their parent died could absolutely force the sale of everything.
How is that different from any other family that inherits a business? The nominal amount might be different, but it’s the same situation. If they can’t afford to keep it, they need to sell - it’s a frustrating situation for everyone, I don’t see why farmers need to be special. As I said before, to protect society from wealth hoarding, inheritance tax is a necessity and should be properly enforced.
Who do you think it sounds like I’m blaming?
I was not aware of playing the blame game at all.
How are you enjoying Mark Carney? The Governor of the Bank of England during (what I call) “a very British genocide”, (or what others call) “the fit-to-work scandal”, culling >130,000 of the disabled and poor in a decade. Seems to love being appointed, but could he be elected fairly? Carney, Starmer, same “big club”. They do these things to seize power, to maximally extract wealth, and to soft-kill. Because they were told to.
