Best Of

Tears, Sarah-Jane

‘A tear just rolled down the Chancellor’s cheek at #PMQs as the PM refuses to answer whether or not she’ll stay in her job.

Hayfever, or something else?’

https://x.com/paulbranditv/status/1940369217574101264?s=61

On a human level, leaving aside the politics, I hope she is OK.

Yes, these are all human beings at the end of the day.

I don’t rate her as a chancellor but, as with any MP of whatever colour, I don’t wish her personally any ill.

Too many people, especially on the extreme left and right, get very personal and start wishing people ill.

It ends up with Jo Cox and David Amess, it starts with calling your political opponents scum or worse.

From the past thread, I'm interested in what the actual tax impact of these people "fleeing London" will have. How much tax were they paying in the first place? Do they actually spend a significant proportion of their time in London?

My lazy assumption is the kind of person with that level of immediate international mobility has they income protected from HMRC; indeed, that the reason they live in London in the first place is because they can avoid tax here, no property taxes etc etc.

Think about it from the perspective of, for the sake of argument, 5,000 people who are multimillionaires (the type I’m dealing with who are worth mid tens of millions to billions) who leave London.

Let’s assume they have structured their taxes so well they aren’t paying any personal tax on income, cap gains. Your thought process is that they aren’t paying taxes so no loss.

These people buy, regularly, new expensive cars. Say just half of them pay £10k in VAT to underestimate, that’s £25m gone. Yes it’s small in terms of the tax take but how many nurses or teachers salaries is that?

They aren’t obviously just buying cars each year. They are buying ordinary goods and luxury goods. Think of how much VAT 5000 very wealthy people spend in the shops of London each year.

It’s not just the VAT, if you remove 5,000 customers from a focussed area of London there are certain shops that will close because they don’t have the custom to justify the rent, staff etc. so the UK loses, on top of the VAT, the corporate tax from those businesses and the income tax paid by the staff.

These 5000 people also don’t need their cleaner anymore, they don’t need the gardener, they don’t need their London tax planner or solicitor and many other service personnel.

I haven’t even bothered to go into property taxes lost as they buy and sell properties.

Again, in the big picture these aren’t huge amounts of money in the big scheme of things but it’s all money that pays for things the country needs/uses.

Whilst I started out from the basis that they have organised their finances so they don’t pay personal taxes, this just isn’t the case so you do lose those taxes but the worst thing isn’t just the taxes lost, it’s the fact that these people often control existing businesses and when they decide that the UK isn’t a wealth friendly environment and their senior employees are also finding it unfriendly, they move key parts of their business so the UK loses the jobs and the tax take.

These people are also often investors in new business or creators and so, as they are leaving London they are less likely to place new businesses in the UK so we lose potential new industries and the tax takes.

It’s not just rude oligarchs and obnoxious Middle Eastern princes, its business people who are a key part of the organism that is wealth creation and they are being removed for ideological not economic reasons.

The UK is a good place to be super-rich. Expecting such people to make an income tax contribution is hardly unreasonable.

If people feel so little connection to this country that they resent making such a contribution, well maybe they had better go elsewhere.

Bank of England to redesign banknotes

Banknotes issued by the Bank of England are about to get their first major redesign in more than 50 years.

Notable historical figures, such as Sir Winston Churchill on the current fiver, have featured on these banknotes since 1970 but could be on the way out.

The public are being asked for their views on new themes, such as nature, innovation, or key events in history.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy4nn1d2vzxo

May the gods preserve us from no-marks wanting to make their little bit of history.

£5 Clarkson
£10 Diana
£20 Captain Tom
£50 a JCB

🇬🇧

The next season of Clarkson's farm is no doubt going to feature the impact of this Labour Government on the future of the UK food producing farming community after that PM Keir Starmer and Chancellor Rachel Reeves Autumn budget last year as the credits on the last episode of the last series hinted..

I live in a rural farming community so I know how tough it has been for years for family farms passed down the generations and how they struggle to survive and keep going and how little reward they get because of the dominance of the supermarkets. Take sheep farmers, it was at the point where it didn't make any financial sense for them to keep going and feed and raise a herd of sheep over a year when the market price was so low they were making a loss! But at the same time lamb prices in the supermarket were pricing the product out of the reach of most families, and it will only get worse if we keep losing farming land that produces key home produce for our UK market.

One thing I remember about David Cameron's premiership, he got the importance of promoting home food security and the need to support our farming community to sustain it. Sadly, this urban run Labour Government under Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves doesn't even get the basic economics far less the wider implications of their lazy class driven prejudices towards our supposed land 'asset' rich but poor farmers who barely manage a sustainable income to live on while they battle the elements weather wise and this omnishambles of a Labour government to put food on our tables.