HMRC claim that only 5% of UK don't pay their taxes.
That 5% is worth £36 billion a year!
I've got my suspicions about who that 5% are. Damn you you single-parent, new trainer-wearing, work-shy benefit claimants! Damn you!
Do dentists in other countries have the same sense of prestige as British ones? I used to work with a guy whose wife was a dentist and he constantly talked about being a dentist as being on the same level as a doctor. Said that entry requirements for dentistry at university is the same as medical doctors.
This table was in an article discussing benefits including pensions from across Europe. I’ll see if I can locate it. I think the data comes from this calculator: https://www.oecd.org/els/soc/benefits-and-wages/tax-benefit-web-calculator/#d.en.500997
Britain’s benefits system is rated as the meanest in Western world, according to OECD. And yet there’s a misconception in UK that those on benefits live the life of Riley.
I’m happy with having a “nanny state” if it means my sons can get dental treatment. The only NHS dentist in our area won’t take appointments (unless you go private) and say that if children are in pain to call 111. As a child I went for a check up every 6 months. That’s now not possible since Tory austerity.
Great timing. The (supposed) tax cuts will pay for the electricity bosses’ new porsches.
so crushingly dull that it destroys any natural curiosity that kids have
You are right. Children have a much earlier start to school in the UK compared to other countries. This cuts short the time of their “play-based” development. By Year 1 (about 5-6) children in UK primary schools are sat at desks and taught in quite bizarre ways. From Reception (ages 4-5) they are tested continuously to a point where UK children are the most tested children in the Western World. Other, more successful countries (educationally and economically) don’t do this. We have a weird, damaging obsession with testing children and placing them into hierarchies in this country. When testing becomes the purpose and goal of an education system it is, as you say “so crushingly dull”.
Our local big Sainsbury's supermarket has installed airport-style barriers everywhere and you now have to queue and scan your receipt to get out.
As a kid, I always wanted to live in some science fiction futuristic society. I never thought that I'd actually grow up to live somewhere where I had to scan to get out a supermarket only to be under threat of attack by ravaging killer dogs.
You are on to something.
If you are careful and observant, you''ll notice that things that we think "only happen here" seem to happen across Western countries at the same time.
It only seems to take someone like capitalist edgelord, Tim Gurner to reveal things are often coordinated.
It's not surprising. Reading for pleasure was phased out of schools a long time ago and replaced by "Literacy" and Accelerated Reader where kids are tested on the books they read and have to finish them as fast as they can.
We have a neo-liberal school curriculum in the UK that only sees reading as a function of employment or cultural indoctrination (in the case of the statutory requirement to teach Shakespeare and that no non-UK writers are allowed to be studied at GCSE).
Wonder if Apple are running the numbers and seeing whether pulling out the UK altogether wouldn’t lose them much money.
Nanny state etc. What do people want? A government that looks after them? The freedom to vote means the freedom to die of chicken-egg-poisoning. Dying of food poisoning is a fundamental British value that woke experts will have to rip from my stinking hands. (or something like that.)