Authoritarian MADNESS! transcript

This has got to be one of the most authoritarian things I've ever heard. Imagine this. There's a knock at the door and you open it. Standing there is a government inspector who wants to come inside your house, walk through your home, put a value on it, and then tax you for it based on the value of your home. And if you say, "No, thanks. You're not coming in." then, apparently, you will have committed a criminal offense and you'll be fined for it for not letting a government inspector inside your house.

This is not a dystopian novel. This is an actual policy now being looked at under Andy Burnham's new government. So, those who thought it was nice have spoken too soon and we're going to look at what they really are planning under this government. And if you're new to me, I'm Daniel Shensmith. I am a barrister and a qualified mortgage advisor. I run the Black Belt Barrister channel. I've been in business for over 30 years now.

I've bought and sold dozens of properties. I've had lots of business success. I've had lots of business failures. I can tell you about both and hopefully you can learn from them and we can create some wealth together. If that sounds of interest to you, please do hit that subscribe button. More than half of you don't do that. I'd love it if you did. We are so close to 100,000 subscribers. Thank you so much indeed. So, these tax inspectors, right?

They are calling them mansion tax police and that's just the start of what I want to talk about today because your energy bills are also going to go up despite all of the promises that they said they would come down. And there's a raid being lined up on the one thing that you've spent your whole life building, that is your pension. So, let's talk about it because this is your money here. And this government, these successive governments, but particularly Labour, seem to want to take that away.

And it's all under threat right now. So, let's start with the front door one, the mansion tax police, because I genuinely thought this was a bit of a joke when I first read it. But under plans being pursued by Andy Burnham's government, HMRC valuation [snorts] inspectors would visit homes in person to assess whether they are worth £2 million or more. A new higher value property tax. Now, £2 million might sound a lot to a lot of people, but there are two problems with it.

One is it will catch a lot more houses than a lot of people realize, and two, once a policy like this is in place, it will creep and the value will creep downwards and then suddenly you might find that you're in for this higher value property tax. There might be another band below it whereby you're then paying this extra tax for absolutely no reason. But let's look at this from a legal perspective as well, because this is the bit that really does bother me.

The principle that an Englishman's home is his castle is indeed one of the oldest principles that we have. The idea that the state can send someone to your door, demand entry, and inspect your private home, and criminalize you for saying no, is genuinely a significant shift in the relationship between the citizen and the state. It is unacceptable, it is outrageous, and we absolutely should not stand for it. And here's the real kicker on the money side of things, once they've valued your home above whatever threshold they say it is at the requisite time, you don't get anything for that.

You haven't sold it. You haven't even borrowed money against it. You've not made a penny from before to after they force entry to your home, figuratively speaking, under threat of prosecution if you refuse. You simply get told that your house is too big or too valuable, and then you are charged an annual levy on top of everything else you already pay, have already paid, and particularly for those of you who've worked hard to pay it off, etc.

They are now saying you're going to pay this extra money just for continuing to own your own home. Now reports suggest that these annual charges could run into several thousand pounds a year depending on the band. And this is the point. These bands can be arbitrary, they can be moved around, and they're decided by someone who has a fundamentally different mindset and political ideology than you or perhaps me, and they are going to try to decide that you should pay this amount of money.

But think about who this actually hits. It is not just the super-rich mansions worth tens of millions. In parts of London, say for example the southeast, 2 million pounds buys you a relatively ordinary family house just with London shiftings in the pricing. People have bought these houses decades ago before they went up in value and whose homes have simply risen in value around them are dragged into this so-called asset-rich band but often usually not cash-rich and many of whom are pensioners who are in the family home they've lived there for 40 years or so and they will end up in the firing line for these bands of these thousands of pounds of extra tax just to keep their own home.

It is absolutely outrageous. In other news, and I hate to say I told you so, but here is another reason why digital ID should absolutely not move forward as a universal digital ID for everybody because as I said there would be, there has been another data hack which has compromised the details, which is full names and contact details of more than 100,000 police staff. That is on top of the hack of the Department for Education last week, which has led to more than half a million bits of information being compromised, and so so many people's data is all over the place.

If you know anyone or any of your family are connected in any way, your data might be at risk. And so, with your data all over the internet and being scraped together by hackers and even marketers and other fraudsters, you absolutely now need to take proactive steps to remove your information from across the internet because it is out there and it will continue to be out there and spread about until you remove it. And so, to that end, I strongly urge you to sign up with the company I work with called Incogni who specializes in removing your data from the internet because it is no longer about just this hack anymore.

Your data will be all over the place and it's their job to get it removed. They use UK and US law to require that all different servers and companies and websites remove your data from their systems, helping to keep you safe because there's a strong possibility that your data is already at risk, especially if you are the subject of one of these hacks. And as they're a partner to my channel here, you will get 60% off the annual plan if you use my code Daniel Shvetsky which you'll put on screen and in the description below.

You'll get access to a dashboard which will show you, you won't believe how many companies will confirm they've got your data and then they start removing it because they just hoover it up from the dark web, whether it's from these hackers or anywhere else. So, you need to take proactive steps to get it removed. So, use my code Daniel Shvetsky for 60% off. It's an absolute no-brainer. I'll link that below. Now, for the second story in this short video and this is one about yet another broken promise.

I don't know how many times they've promised this and how many times they've gone back on it, but both Keir Starmer and Andy Burnham told this country again and again and again that energy bills would come down. Even the same with council tax, but particularly with the energy bills. They made a big point of promising you exactly that. So, what's happening now? Well, the Ofgem price cap is being criticized because to me a cap means it will not go beyond this point, but it's not much of a cap if they just move the cap upwards every now and again, is it?

So, that's exactly what's happening. Ofgem has now confirmed that this price cap is going up. So, it's not really a cap, is it? This This arbitrary number that Ofgem says it won't go beyond is going up. So, now it is going up. It's going up by at least 60 pounds a year to 1,723 pounds. Let's just say that again. 1,723 pounds for a typical household using gas and electricity. That's going up, not down, contrary to all the promises.

Now, to be fair and accurate, as I always try to be, there has been a VAT cut on electricity from 5% to 0, which softens the blow by around 45 pounds a year for a typical home. But, overall, these are still going up. Now, quite obviously, the reason that this is so important, particularly as we are just about to head back into winter, I hesitate to say, but energy is a non-negotiable for most people. And for some people, as we read last year and the year before, people were choosing between eating and heating, because that is just utterly unacceptable.

You know, you can cut back on holidays, you can cut back on eating out, you can cut back on clothes, you can cut back on most things, frankly, but you cannot cut back on the heating when it is absolutely sub-zero temperatures through British winter. Well, not really, anyway, and certainly not safely. So, when energy prices go up, it eats straight into every other part of the family finances. And this is one of the most regressive cost increases there possibly is.

Comparing it with China, for argument's sake, China is vastly cheaper for energy than it is in the UK, just as many other parts of the world. And the worst bit of all this is the super whammy effect, which I think is a new term, which means I've just copyrighted it, which means that the lower income households are going to be hit the hardest in terms of a share of what they earn. And that means they are once again going to be choosing between what they eat and whether they heat the house.

And the third big story for this video is another egregious attack on those who work hard, save hard, save sensibly, plan for the future, and all the rest of it, because heaven forbid that they should get to pension age and actually be able to use the money that they've put into a pension to take care of themselves when they retire. Oh, no, not under this government, not under this Labour government, because now this is the one for me that really is probably the most serious of all these things, because it strikes at the very heart of everything we talk about on this channel, which is building financial independence, saving and planning for the future, and taking care of yourselves.

So, this is what's going on now. There is growing pressure now and growing signals that it might happen that Andy Burnham is now looking at a tax raid on private pensions to help balance the books for everybody else. In other words, Andy Burnham is going to be looking at those people who've worked hard all their lives, saved hard, planned for the future, reached retirement, and take from them and give it to someone else who perhaps isn't working or perhaps more of the influx of illegal migration into this country, which he seems to be a huge fan of, because he wants to spread everybody around the country.

Now, let me explain why this is so infuriating for me from a personal finance point of view. Because the entire deal with the pension is this. The government encourages you to lock your money away for decades, money that you cannot touch until you are older, and in return you get a tax relief on the way in. That tax relief is not a gift. It is the incentive to put that money away for retirement, so you take care of yourselves, instead of the state taking care of you when you reach that age.

And that is the reason that the system works. It is the reward for being sensible, for deferring your own consumption, your own spending, for taking responsibility for your own retirement, so you are not a burden on the state later. So, again, Andy Burnham is going to look at all those people who've done that, made that sacrifice to take care of themselves later, and now the plan appears to be to punish exactly those people.

Take the money off the person who's worked hard, saved hard, invested for decades and sensibly and wisely, done everything right, and then redistribute it to someone who hasn't. And I really don't mean to be rude when I say this, but that is exactly what they are going to do. And I know this because I can infer this, because the welfare bill is bigger than the income tax receipts. So, they can't pay for it. So, they need to look at paying for it some other way.

So, they are literally going to take that money off somebody who has worked for it to give it to somebody who hasn't. And in my view, I will be so bold as to say, this is profoundly anti-growth, anti-aspiration, and certainly anti-wealth. Now, wealth is not a dirty word. It is nothing wrong with being wealthy, to try to aspire to become wealthy. Because the big problem here is what it teaches the next generation. It teaches them, why bother?

Why bother locking your money away for 40 years? Why be disciplined? Why sacrifice today for tomorrow if the government's just going to take it off you and move the goalposts and grab it at the end, just when you're about to enjoy it? You destroy the incentive to save. You destroy the incentive to work hard and be sensible and invest for later. And a country that stops saving, stops investing, is a country that stops investing in itself.

It is a country that is going to start to fall apart. And there's also a very basic issue of trust here, trust between the state and the citizen. Pensions are a decade-long promise, a decades-long commitment. You make decisions in your 20s, hopefully, your 30s, I would certainly hope, and at the very least at your 40s and beyond, based on the rules as they stand, and when a government retrospectively changes those rules, because make no mistake, that is what it would be, it would be a retrospective change in the rules if they take it off you at the end when they said there was an incentive to put it in at the beginning.

It doesn't just cost people money, it corrodes the entire trust and the foundation of the long-term financial planning in this country. How can anyone possibly plan for 40 years ahead if the terms are going to be changed whenever the Treasury runs out of money because it's giving it away to people who don't work, who come here illegally, or sending hundreds of millions to other countries when we cannot take care of ourselves.

And the final story for this video, if you've still got the bandwidth to listen to it, is this push for the EU. Now, every time I mention this, I do say for full transparency that I voted remain for the main reason that I knew that we would screw it up. And the second reason that there were probably good reasons to stay in the EU rather than to leave. But all that aside, as a country, we voted leave. And ever since then, politicians have screwed it up, and they've argued about going back in.

And now, here's the direction of travel from Andy Burnham. We've got Andy Burnham now saying that we must be bold and move closer to the EU, which, whatever your view on Brexit, is clearly an attempt to walk back the very settled decision on the referendum to leave the EU. We should absolutely ring-fence ourselves as a sovereign nation-state and cut ties with any laws, such as ECHR, that is tying our hands on so many different legal cases that I've explained on my BlackBelt Barrister channel.

So, I'm not here to tell you what to think about Brexit, and I'm certainly not here to relitigate Brexit in one short video. But, from a money perspective, what businesses and investors crave above everything else, and if you run a business or you're an investor or anything else, let me know in the comments if you agree with me, is certainty. So, reopening the entire EU question just creates years and years of more uncertainty, trade rules, regulations, misalignments, and most definitely uncertainty when it comes to investments, because uncertainty is the enemy of investment.

So, when our country keeps flip-flopping back and forth, shall we, shan't we, and what are we going to do, this is just devastating for businesses, for wages, for investments, for planning, and everything else. And so, once again, a very frustrated monologue for myself just here. Let me know your thoughts and comments in the box below, because we are all here fighting to get some little bit of success for ourselves, for our businesses, for our family, and everything else.

Let me know your thoughts in the comment section below. Please do make sure you subscribe to the channel. More than half of you don't do that on this channel. I'd really love it if you did. Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next one.