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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.

Massive, if true.


Ailbhe Rea
@PronouncedAlva
·
7m
It was Angela Rayner who pushed for today's major U-turn to be made, when it became clear the govt was going to lose the vote.

Extraordinary that a govt with a working majority of 165 was on course to lose - and that it only stopped it two and a half hours before the vote

Like I said. Rayner is good at politics.

She's good at a small part of politics - she understands the internal dynamics and neuroses of the Labour Party. Like Prescott under Blair. But also like Prescott under Blair, she's utterly crap at anything else - she doesn't understand the other parties, calling them scum, and has no clue about anything necessary to be in government - economics, foreign affairs, social policy, etc., etc.

Of course, Starmer is so totally clueless about any part of politics that even her bit of insight makes her necessary to this clown show of a government.

I have a memory of my parents shipping me off to my Aunt's for an end of the Sixties Party on New year's Eve.
I would have been three and a month.
The same thing happened when our kid was born. Three and a half.

But what's your first memory of a non-personal event? Something in the news? Or something that happened in your town, but not personally witnessed? Perhaps discussed in front of you

For me, as I say, it is Apollo 11. Age 6

My dad always claimed he could remember his Dad and a friend discussing Peace in Our Time, and Munich, when he was 4

Yes, that too.
I was thinking of overtly political events, so had excluded that.

I had an Airfix kit of the Lunar module.
I think my older brother got the Saturn V...

I was born in 1975.
I certainly had no memory of male Prime Ministers before Major and remember thinking the concept an musing oddity when it was pointed out to me aged about 6 that such things were possible.
I think I remember the party on the playing field at the back of the estate for the silver jubilee when I had just turned two, though I am probably conflating it with the same thing for the ChazzleDizzle in 1981, which I definitely remember.
I certainly remember the Falklands War.
My first political memory is off Michael Foot's wife being knocked over by a low-hanging branch in an open-topped bus.
My first sporting memory is of the foul by Harald Schumacher on Patrick Battison in the 1982 Football World Cup. Even then, I remember thinking it a fundamentally stupid sport.
My first cultural memory is of my parents listening to Abba in the car, though my first I would claim of my own is my fondness for the Vapor's 'Turning Japanese'. I can't imagine how I accessed this. Not necessarily a massively appropriate song for a five year old.
I have numerous snippets of memories from 2, 3, 4 years old - but they are like tiny context-free vignettes, viewed through a keyhole: seeing a thunderstorm, sitting in the paddling pool on a hot day (probably in the summer of 77), arguing over the lyrics to 'all things bright and beautiful' (I was right, btw), children's television, playgroups. Toys. Trains (and suddenly, unbidden, the smell of trains in the 70s...)

If, as a writer or moviemaker, one could capture that weird "keyhole" effect of super-early childhood memories, it would be a powerful thing

We are actually getting something close to that with this scattergun of very small children's views of life in the 60s, 70s and 80s right now. I am enjoying it.

I find most of them profoundly moving

Eg “walking to school in the snow and putting my feet in my father’s snowy footprints”

These memories are intrinsically poetic. Focused on tiny but poignant and immortal details. Perhaps we are all born poets but then lose the knack over time…

Always moving when we remember our childhood. Even gnarled and ruined wretches like me long to glimpse back through the mists to when Dad was as big as the fiercest of bears and Mum could perform miracles before breakfast. It was safe and warm because they made it safe and warm.
I guess when we have the chance to remember that we are lucky, we had the ones to protect us who made it worth looking back longingly.
Its funny, whenever I look back and remember Mum I can hear her telling me I need to go forward, and somewhere there I'll see her again.
Now I'm all wistful