Question Time 21st November 2024
The Panel:
Nick Thomas-Symonds (Labour)
Harriett Baldwin (Conservative)
Daisy Cooper (LibDem)
Minette Batters (former NFU president)
Venue: Trowbridge
Nick Thomas-Symonds, not his real name (not double-barrelled; Thomas was his mother’s maiden name), is the Labour MP for Torfaen and current Paymaster General. A PPE graduate of St Edmund Hall, Oxford, (where he tutored), the 44-year-old was called to the bar in 2004 and pursued a career in chancery and commercial law before entering parliament 11 years later.
As further proof that MPs are venal rip-off artists, Nick lines his pockets bigly during his appearances on BBC panel programmes.
Astonishingly, in his member’s lists of interests quoted on theyworkforyou.com, Nick declares £250 given to him by the BBC licence fee payer to drive to a previous edition of Question Time. This covered the distance from Chipping Camden to his constituency in Torfaen, a total of 83 miles. That’s five tanks of petrol for a 166-mile round trip. What does he drive? A Hummer towing a truck?
When Any Questions was broadcast from Haverfordwest, the Hummer was pulling one of those Australian road trains. For ‘car travel to and from my constituency’ the thief claimed £400 – for a round trip of 220 miles. And so on and so forth through his declared interests. What a ****.
Privately educated Daisy Cooper (£48,000 inc VAT a year Framlingham College) studied Law at Leeds University and gained a master’s at Nottingham University. Afterwards, she did nothing other than a procession of non-jobs in charidee and Qunagoland. Her experience of the mean streets in the real life of work includes:
Project Officer for UN reform at the Commonwealth Policy Studies Unit, Strategic Planning Officer at the Commonwealth Secretariat, Consultant to the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group, Director of the Commonwealth Advisory Bureau and Stakeholder Manager (DfID) with Voluntary Service Overseas.
What a waste of time.
And who thinks up these daft titles? My local hospital – excuse me, Integrated Care NHS Foundation Trust – is currently advertising for an ICC Hub Admin Assistant, a Bank Facilities Domestic Assistant, an Onboarding Officer and a PRIMIS Information Facilitator. At least they aren’t short of doctors and nurses!
Elected to parliament as the LibDem MP for St Albans at the 2019 general election, Daisy belongs to a string of pointless parliamentary all-party committees, including Chalk Streams and The Night Time Economy.
As well as troubling the airwaves, Daisy’s earlier media appearances have ruffled the Members Register of Interests Previously, she received £432 for ‘travel associated with appearing’ on QT from Winchester, £113.16 for QT from London, and £517.50 for travel associated with appearing on Radio 4’s Any Questions. As if Tito about to cross the Jovian Alps in the 1960s, one imagines a private train – all chandeliers and with a pianist in the lounge car – backing into the sidings at St Albans, destination Hove Women’s Institute Memorial Hall.
One also can’t help but notice Suffolk-born Daisy’s interests include a third share ‘owned with family members’ in a Suffolk cottage. The cynical might presume this to be an Inheritance Tax dodge. Surely not.
So far this year, Daisy has taken so much free money that the donors are too numerous to list. A Mr Ahmed Hindawi stands out, as does Ramesh Dewan.
Minette Batters, not her real name, Minette Bridget Batters, Baroness Batters of Downton in the County of Wiltshire, Deputy Lieutenant (Wiltshire), is a former president of the National Farmers Union, who was elevated to the peerage earlier this year.
The 57-year-old farms a 300-acre mixed farm that includes 300 pedigree Hereford cattle, grows flowers commercially and also runs a catering business cum wedding barn. Privately educated at the Godolphin School (£48,000 PA ex-VAT), Ms Batters is a former jockey with 30 winners under her belt.
Harriett Baldwin, not her real name – Dame Harriett Mary Morison Baldwin, Most Excellent Order of the British Empire – is a public school headmaster’s daughter and herself an old girl of the exclusive Marlborough College (£51,000 PA) whose former pupils include Kate, Princess of Wales. Woman of the people Dame Harriett also graduated from St Edmond Hall, Oxford, with a First in French and Russian before further study at Montreal’s McGill University Desautels Faculty of Management. Armed with an MBA, the 64-year-old embarked upon a two-decade-long career with the honest helpers of proletariate at JPMorgan Chase.
Elected to parliament in 2010, Mrs Baldwin represents West Worcestershire on behalf of the Conservative Party. Present husband, James Stanley Balwin (yes, Stanley Baldwin) is a businessman and television producer.
****
Question one. Why do some farmers believe they shouldn’t pay inheritance tax? Minette Batters mentioned there’s been such an exception for 40 years, with this Budget change being aimed at farmers financially in the middle. Hobby farms, though she didn’t use the term, are valued below the threshold. Land-owning big businesses are taxed as corporations. Therefore, it is the productive mid-sized farmers that are stuck. Good point. QT Review’s obvious solution would be to not tax any inheritance and, if you must, tax personal wealth rather than that invested in the farm.
Nick waffled on, preferring to use the phrase ‘sustainable food production’ rather than farming. He disputed the numbers and claimed few would have to pay because of the various reliefs available. How many actual farms will be affected per year, wondered La Bruce, what is the government figure? In among a rich harvest of contradictory statistics, I think he decided 27% of the overall total number of farms would be affected, which comes to five hundred a year. In order to ‘Fix the public finances.’
An audience member got it all wrong. He thought the inheritors are being taxed. No so, the estate is taxed. Another audience member wondered why the farmer’s estate is worth so much given that the income from it is so low. Nobody present had the gumption to say that this is because owning agricultural land is, until now, a way to minimise inheritance tax.
Daisy can’t decarbonise food without the farmer. She mentioned climate change and pandemics. Daisy was going to close loopholes for the super-rich. The super-rich who, she claimed, still won’t be paying extra tax under the new regime but will be able to buy up even more land as estates are forced to sell to pay the tax.
Nobody suggested taxing less and spending less.
Why not go after the new purchasers, big corporations who are buying land and planting trees with tax-payers money to offset their carbon emissions, wondered Minette. What’s the point of investing in the farm if the resulting increase in value adds to the tax to pay?
Question two. With the US and UK authorising the use of long-range Atacms and Stormshadow missiles into Russia, are we closer to World War Three? Nick wouldn’t answer the question for operational reasons, as though what he says actually matters. On a more serious note, the decision-making process has nothing to do with us. It is up to the US to decide whether or not British Stormshadow missiles can be used as they contain American components. Keep that in mind when contemplating our ‘independent’ nuclear deterrent.
La Bruce mentioned the possibility of Ukraine losing territory under The Donald’s 24-hour war-ending solution, but Nick waffled through that as well.Daisy referenced a cross-party approach thus far. She wanted to confiscate Russian assets in the West and direct them to Ukraine. If we capitulate, Putin won’t stop. An audience member preferred negotiation to save lives. In effect, ceding land to Russia.
Minette thought things were being ramped up. Exports of fertiliser have been affected. In the Ukraine, cows had been burnt alive. Farms had been deliberately targeted. The fields were mined, she claimed. Appeasement is wrong. The Russian agenda is there for all to see.
Question three was about reforms in adult social care, especially regarding the recuperating blocking beds in hospital.
Harriett mentioned the slow-moving car crash of the Budget, especially with employers’ National Insurance contributions affecting care industry employers. Daisy is passionate about the subject. The Conservatives have left social care on its knees. The LibDems put such things front and centre. There is a plan. Number one: free personal care. How much will this cost, wondered La Bruce. If you invest in social care, it saves money. Ah. Number two, higher wages for care workers. No doubt saving more money. Number three, a Royal College of Care Workers. Which, we assume, given the precedent, will cost less than nothing. And the money? Fully costed in the LibDem manifesto. Perhaps deliberately, she spoke so quickly I couldn’t make out the blizzard of numbers.
There were all these strategies from the panellists. One loses the will to live. An obvious solution would be to cut costs, make it cheap and cheerful and do it on a bigger scale. Rememeber the old convalescent homes? Often run by companies or industrial societies to get their workers back on their feet. The Post Office had one at Coniston. The railway companies often had them at the end of seaside branch lines. Older Puffins will be able to recall more. Better still, Singapore’s Street of The Dead and Greece’s Island of the Old.
Minette spotted, as with the land, the emergence of foreign-based venture capital in the sector – bleeding the patient (in this case, the taxpayer) dry with ridiculous charges. An audience member observed all these strategies will just add more quangos and bureaucracy that the taxpayer or the care home resident will have to pay for.
Harriett blamed the pandemic for the previous government’s care sector failings. The audience, perhaps harshly, groaned.
A representative of a hospice spoke. The employer’s National Insurance changes were going to cost their hospice the best part of £500,000 a year. Hospices do a fantastic job, said Nick. We don’t charge them business rates, he added. At which point, La Bruce thanked everybody and brought the programme to a close with this humble reviewer shuffling up his very own stairs of the old towards his bed of the not quite dead.
© Always Worth Saying 2024
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