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London has more VAT registered businesses (288,400) than Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland combined (271,800) Thats possibly 288,400 votes.
what i want to know is if you have a business in London but dont live in London should you be able to vote in the elections ?
I think you should be able to after all business does pay business rate council tax which starts at about £2500 in most cases for the smallest of companies and the mayor is quite happy to spend £721,000,000 a year it raises.Perhaps BP and Shell (amongst other global British companies) should be allowed to vote in the many, many countries they do the same as you explain above. Afraid your argument is really a matter of ‘where would it all end?’
@chickenman wrote:
London has more VAT registered businesses (288,400) than Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland combined (271,800) Thats possibly 288,400 votes.
what i want to know is if you have a business in London but dont live in London should you be able to vote in the elections ?
I think you should be able to after all business does pay business rate council tax which starts at about £2500 in most cases for the smallest of companies and the mayor is quite happy to spend £721,000,000 a year it raises.Yes, businesses pay “Business rates” but these are levied by central Government and distributed back to the Local Authorities according to a Government formula. (More accurately the actual amount or rate of Business Tax is sent by central Governemt and is collected by the LA acting on behalf of central Governement).
In other words Local Authorities do not and cannot levy any “local taxes” on a business themselves in this sense.
This was done precisely because Local Authorities at one time used to charge businesses hugely disproportionate amounts of tax (in the form of rates) but at the same time they weren’t allowed a vote as to how it should be spent. They were seen as a sitting duck to be ripped off any time the LA’s chose to do so. (Thank you Margaret Thatcher for introducing this long needed change).
The Mayor of London is entitled to levy a charge on Council Tax payers individually (as the Greater London Authority) but does not levy any tax on businesses in the same way. The GLA does however receive grants from central Government to offset some areas of its infrastructure and capital spending.
So basically businesses don’t get to have a vote in local elections because they don’t pay taxes directly to those LA’s and nor do their employees (unless the employees live in “London” of course).
Your right PB but i do think its a bit of a cop out. £8,640,0000 is what it cost London business the a year just to have the Mayor and thats not including the congestion charge and all the other bits n peices, and i just think he does very little for business in London and they should get a bigger say. :D
Fact is that the (current) Mayor seems to do very little for London …. full stop.
We are bombarded with dozens of ”initiatives” weekly, the latest of which is some sort of clean air zone in the Greather London Area.
This is simply another excuse to sneakily raise taxes only this time it is the motorists that are being hit. Most of these taxes seem to be spent on further ”initiatives” aimed at the so-called poor and underprivileged. Amazingly enough they are all concentrated in the inner city areas that consistently votes Labour / far left….. not that I would dream of suggesting that the Labour administration is buying their votes year in and year out.
Remember the Congestion Charge??? Only £5 a day and only in the heavily congested inner area. Now this area has more than doubled to include most of West and South West London and the charge has been increased from £5 to £8 per day – an increase of 60% !!!!
Yeah … thanks Ken !!!
The money raised was supposed to be spent on improving public transport. Yeah Right – ha ha very funny.
What we now have is TfL or Transport for London – an extremely expensive GLCA body that ”administrates” London’s transport ans generally buggers it up.
The trains and busses are still as bloody awful and overcrowded as they ever were, and rarely if ever run on time.Oh Christ …. stop me somebody ‘cos I’m ranting !!!
well said f.h. ken livingstone does buy votes from the like of the punjabi section and the muslim sect. he and his council of toadies supply money to pakistani madrassar schools in pakistan where they chain small children to desks and force feed them the qoran for years until they can repeat it word for word in arabic. how this enriches our nation exactly is beyond me. mr livingstone is also in bed with lybian terrorist supporters and saudi oil companies who support beheading for adultery. [as long as its the woman] so thats ok. the poor in london are treated with more respect than the rich as long as they vote labour…
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm wonder why that is, could it be that the poor are are almost all immigrants and asylum seekers….Another thing that utterly pisses me off about ‘Red’ Ken is his constant need to grandstand by taking “fact finding” trips at the taxpayer’s expense to touch base with an assortment of foreign dictators. What the effing hell this has to do with being the mayor of London God only knows.
All we get is massive tax hikes that yield few if any visible results.
As for the lovely and fragrant Brian Paddick – a self confessed bummer. when he was Chief Super at Brixton nick he instituted a local policy of not arresting anybody for possession of marijuana – even though it was a Class B drug at the time.
Net result is that the entire Afro Caribbean population of Brixton was stoned out of their minds 24/7…. massive pot parties were held continuosly and the local crime rate shot up.
He got ”promoted” and transferred away from Brixton…. now he is promising to cut crime by 20% across all of London – if elected. With 9% in the polls he doesn’t stand a chance – which will disappoint all the poofters who fancy a man in uniform !!!
You could have quite simply said he’s just a sleezeball.
Even I couldnt drink whisky in the morning… worra wierdo!
Well drunk he may be …. womaniser he seems to be …. far lefty he almost certainly is …. but in all his political career this is the closest he has gotten to being defeated in an election.
Remember “Red” Ken organised a coup against Andrew Mackintosh on the day after Labour won the then GLC back in 1981 and got himself nominated the leader.
Since then he has been in ”power” almost continuosly and has, for the last quarter of a century or so, presided over some of the most disasterous and divisive left wing policies ever.
Please God let him lose on May 1st.
way way way before my time PB….. :wink:
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