adelwharfelabour Labour Party

Fairer Deficit reduction: Cameron’s tax cut for those on over £150,000 to go + 10p tax rate restored, Ed Balls announces


Yesterday’s speech by Ed Balls was an important milestone in Labour’s progress towards 2015. You can read a summary – and link to the whole speech – here.

Leeds North West Constituency

Yesterday [Saturday 25 Jan] Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls announced that the next Labour government will reverse David Cameron and George Osborne’s tax cut for people earning over £150,000 for the next Parliament to help get the deficit down more fairly.
Be0m_tFIAAA4PYA

In a speech to the Fabian Society Annual Conference, Ed Balls said that fairer deficit reduction meant that the top rate of tax would need to be raised from 45p back to 50p.
 


Ed Balls also announced a binding fiscal commitment that the next Labour government will balance the books, deliver a surplus on the current budget and get the national debt falling in the next Parliament
.


Latest figures from HMRC show that – in the three years when the 50p top rate introduced by Labour was in place -people earning over £150,000 paid almost £10 billion more in tax, than was estimated when the government conducted its…

View original post 381 more words

adelwharfelabour Labour Party, Local Labour Events

A party that works for working people, which has learnt from the lessons of the past: Jon Trickett’s speech to Leeds NW Labour

Many Adel and Wharfedale members had a great evening at Leeds NW CLP’s annual dinner. You can read about Jon Trickett’s speech here.

Leeds North West Constituency

Learning from the lessons of the past, making Labour truly the people’s party – these were the themes of Jon Trickett’s speech at Leeds NW Labour’s hugely successful annual dinner and 2015 campaign launch on Sunday evening.IMG_2553

He was eloquent about Ed Miliband’s style of leadership:
– His strength – standing up to Murdoch, where some might have kept quiet; one of the first politicians prepared to do that
– – ready to take a principled stand on Syria, to give diplomacy a chance.
– In general his readiness to listen and learn – but also his courage to act when his mind was made up.

Jon reminded us of the successes of the last Labour government – and especially about its rescue of the NHS from the crisis situation of 1997
– the contrast with the failures of this LibDem/Tory Coalition
– a government which had created an A…

View original post 427 more words

adelwharfelabour Labour Party, National Politics

David Cameron is worst PM for living standards on record as working people set to lose £6,660 by 2015

Labour is today revealing the full scale of the cost of living crisis under David Cameron. Analysis of historical figures from the Office for National Statistics shows that David Cameron has been in Downing Street for 36 months of falling real wages – more than any Prime Minister on record. And no Prime Minister has … Continue reading David Cameron is worst PM for living standards on record as working people set to lose £6,660 by 2015

adelwharfelabour National Politics

The Tories, the City – and all of us.

Leeds North West Constituency

In the next of our series on Tory party funding, we turn the spotlight on the Tories and the financial sector.

Not that that’s easy – in fact it isn’t easy to discover the real picture of Tory financial donations at all.
You may think that all party funding is open and accessible. And in one sense it is. But the publicly available figures only tell part of the story.
Donations are often made by family members, company directors will donate alongside partners at the same business, groups of wealthy people have even banded together to make political contributions. The result is that the real concentrations of donations are obscured.

Revealing the truth is time-consuming and laborious – and as a result most figures are a couple of years out of date. But academics like Stuart Wilks-Heeg of the University of Liverpool, and journalists like those in the Bureau of…

View original post 770 more words

adelwharfelabour Labour Party

Tax dodging, workers’ rights, Coalition diverting EU funding from Yorkshire – Linda McAvan MEP’s bulletin

Leeds North West Constituency

Highlights include

Government gives EU funding for Yorkshire to Scotland.

‘Leave our workers’ rights alone!’
Join with Labour and the trade unions to sign a letter to Cameronhome_content_header_image

Labour MEPs send warning to ‘tax dodgers’
Linda joined with fellow Labour MEPs to vote for a package of measures that would tackle tax dodging, to stem the 850 billion pounds loss across Europe to public finances due to tax fraud and avoidance. According to HMRC figures, in the UK alone £9 billion is lost every year which could pay for the construction of more than 600 new schools or over 50 new hospitals or pay the annual salaries of over 330,000 police officers. The measures will include the creation of an EU wide black list of tax havens, and a ban on companies who are ‘dodging’ taxes from being awarded public contracts.

And, as usual, you can count on UKIP for…

View original post 41 more words

adelwharfelabour Labour Party

Osborne’s axe – it’s cutting most deeply in the North, in cities like Leeds

Leeds North West Constituency

Councils across Yorkshire & Humber recently joined others – of all political persuasions – to lobby the Chancellor on the dire consequences of further deep cuts. But they had been bracing themselves for further axing – which is exactly what they got yesterday from our part-time Chancellor.L_560e5310-b3fd-c6b4-7d6b-fbbce8453bd2

The suffering is general, but it’s not evenly shared.
The combined axes of Osborne and Pickles have not been falling equally across all Councils. Instead there has been bare-faced political, regional bias – in ways which make nonsense of any idea that this is a ‘national’ government.

Across the Yorkshire and Humberside region, councils were already dealing with previously announced cuts of around 34% to their budgets – for services from social care and waste collection to libraries and pot- hole repairs.

Further grant reductions of approximately 10 per cent for local government were announced yesterday for the period leading up to…

View original post 734 more words

adelwharfelabour Labour Party

Enough food for everyone IF – if the tax havens can be made to cough up

Leeds North West Constituency

‘18,857 businesses registered at 1 address in Cayman Islands ‘ [Oxfam]

‘In 2011, 45 newly incorporated companies in the British Virgin Islands acquired mining assets in the Democratic Republic of Congo at a loss, it was claimed, to the DRC’s economy of US$5.5bn. The identity of those behind the companies remains secret.

In the same year the British Virgin Islands alone was the fourth largest investor to developing countries, with the amount involved US$388bn. Globally it provides investment more than 860 times the size of its own GDP.’ [Christian Aid]8637_525116647552871_1970987532_n

Why do these facts and figures matter?

Because the Cayman Islands and British Virgin Islands are tax havens – and money is often channeled through them deliberately to avoid tax in poor countries. The losses to poor countries and their economies are enormous.

The umbrella organization – IF enoughfoodif –
has produced a detailed report on tax havens and their…

View original post 417 more words

adelwharfelabour Labour Local Elections, Labour Party

One nation – new ideas. What would be in Labour’s Queen’s speech next week

Ed Miliband is today setting out six of the key economic Bills that would appear in a Labour Queen’s Speech next week: a One Nation programme with new ideas to begin turning Britain’s economy around.
 
Labour’s economic plans include:
 
• A Jobs Bill to put in place a Compulsory Jobs Guarantee. 
• A Finance Bill … Continue reading One nation – new ideas. What would be in Labour’s Queen’s speech next week

adelwharfelabour Labour Local Elections, Labour Party, Leeds Labour Council

Oppose the bedroom tax – and watch the video now

This Saturday is  a day of action against the Tory/LibDem Coalition's Bedroom tax - see our previous post. Labour's spokesman, Liam Byrne, writes - 'David Cameron is getting this so wrong because he and his ministers are completely out of touch. His Government is preparing to give 13,000 millionaires a tax cut worth an average … Continue reading Oppose the bedroom tax – and watch the video now

adelwharfelabour Labour Local Elections, Labour Party

A Fairer Britain with One Nation Labour

The kind of Britain the next Labour government will offer is beginning to take shape. And it's a fairer Britain for all, not just a hand-out Britain for the rich. Ed Miliband has backed a mansion tax on home worth over £2million. That will pay for the restoration of a 10p starting tax rate, which … Continue reading A Fairer Britain with One Nation Labour