Best Of

Tice pitches that people should pay the minimum possible Tax, to cover up his own nefarious activities.

Whether they break the Law or not, Tax avoidance is as bad as Tax evasion in my eyes and always has been.

Tice may need to explain to his core vote the C and D categories who will rely more on public services than most, that by choice he will be destroying any concept of public services

That in part defines a reason why well off and wealthy do lean left and vote left. It is because we believe in equality of opportunity irrespective of what we were born in to, the polar opposite of the silver spoon brigade, but that wealth earned should be distributed via tax to the less well off, and inherited wealth should certainly be more equally distributed.

That does not allow the NEET state Boris, Truss and Sunak created however.

I will take to my grave my time spent in Sweden when Olaf Palme was in power, a high tax, world class public service system that rewarded enterprise and deliver hope and prosperity. A generation who glady contributed to the wonderful services provided by the State for the benefit of everyone.

One assumes you don't have an ISA then.

No never had one, never will have one.

Some of us have ethics

(FPT) OK, I now believe this is a wind up account.

Of course it is! The account has done nothing else but trash talk Kemi Badenoch for weeks on end. No-one can be that single minded, (our dear Hyufd excluded of course).

OT - There are few Lab politicians markedly LESS able at communication than Ed - but Yvette Cooper is certainly one of them.

I'd be worried for the Lab Party's sanity but the story is in the Mail so its probably been planted by No 10 (assuming its not just made up whole cloth). So that's one issue sorted of the thousands upon which to question the Lab Party's sanity

Yes, Cooper is basically a UK Julia Gillard or Hillary Clinton or another Theresa May

Yvette Cooper may well be better than Starmer in the narrow sense of seeming more competent, more grounded and less eerily focus-grouped. But that is still a very low bar.

As an answer to Labour’s current malaise, she feels like thin gruel: more administrative than inspirational, more capable than compelling. A tidier manager of decline is still managing decline.

If Labour’s problem is lack of clarity, energy and purpose, replacing Starmer with Cooper feels less like renewal and more like changing accountants halfway through an audit.

Yours is a very good comment.

Tice pitches that people should pay the minimum possible Tax, to cover up his own nefarious activities.

Whether they break the Law or not, Tax avoidance is as bad as Tax evasion in my eyes and always has been.

Tice may need to explain to his core vote the C and D categories who will rely more on public services than most, that by choice he will be destroying any concept of public services

That in part defines a reason why well off and wealthy do lean left and vote left. It is because we believe in equality of opportunity irrespective of what we were born in to, the polar opposite of the silver spoon brigade, but that wealth earned should be distributed via tax to the less well off, and inherited wealth should certainly be more equally distributed.

That does not allow the NEET state Boris, Truss and Sunak created however.

I will take to my grave my time spent in Sweden when Olaf Palme was in power, a high tax, world class public service system that rewarded enterprise and deliver hope and prosperity. A generation who glady contributed to the wonderful services provided by the State for the benefit of everyone.

Tax avoidance is legal.
Tax evasion is a crime.

Legal behaviour is not as bad as criminal behaviour and never has been.

If you don't want tax avoidance to happen, then change the law.

If taxes are complicated with exemptions then people will minimise tax by engaging in lawful avoidance, which is the system the politicians have created.

Flatter, simpler taxes without exemptions paid equitably by all are the way to go, but that requires simplifying our tax code.

Tax avoidance and tax evasion are plainly not the same thing. One is legal use of rules Parliament wrote, the other is breaking them. Pretending they are morally identical is just sloganeering for people who can’t be bothered with detail.

That said, “legal” is not the same as “defensible”, especially for politicians who like to wrap themselves in flag, family and ordinary taxpayer cosplay while using structures most ordinary taxpayers will never see in their lives.

So the right test is fairly simple:
if Tice acted lawfully, then it isn’t evasion;
if the structure was artificial and didn’t meet the rules, HMRC should flatten him;
and if he wants to preach about how everyone should minimise tax, he can also explain which services he’d cut for the voters he claims to represent.

When the Tax Gap clowns got going, one was to get banned from Murphy’s blog was to point out that about 90% of the Tax Gap is

- the personal tax allowance
- Saving for pensions
- ISAs

For even more fun, Gordon Brown introduced rules making it obligatory for Financial Advisor to advocate pensions and ISAs to their clients.

The personal allowance, pensions and ISAs are not the issue. They are explicit, mass-market reliefs built into the system on purpose.

Aggressive avoidance through specialist vehicles is a different matter entirely, even if it remains lawful unless HMRC knocks it over.

So “people use ISAs” is not a rebuttal. It’s just an attempt to blur the line between ordinary tax planning and behaviour that is technically legal but politically and morally grubby.

If Tice did nothing beyond the equivalent of using an ISA, fine. If he used contrived structures beyond the reach of normal taxpayers while selling himself as their tribune, then criticism is entirely fair.

OT - There are few Lab politicians markedly LESS able at communication than Ed - but Yvette Cooper is certainly one of them.

I'd be worried for the Lab Party's sanity but the story is in the Mail so its probably been planted by No 10 (assuming its not just made up whole cloth). So that's one issue sorted of the thousands upon which to question the Lab Party's sanity

Yes, Cooper is basically a UK Julia Gillard or Hillary Clinton or another Theresa May

Yvette Cooper may well be better than Starmer in the narrow sense of seeming more competent, more grounded and less eerily focus-grouped. But that is still a very low bar.

As an answer to Labour’s current malaise, she feels like thin gruel: more administrative than inspirational, more capable than compelling. A tidier manager of decline is still managing decline.

If Labour’s problem is lack of clarity, energy and purpose, replacing Starmer with Cooper feels less like renewal and more like changing accountants halfway through an audit.

The question facing Labour is how to avoid the same fate as the Parti Socialiste after Francois Hollande. Their VI poll ratings could take another big hit after May as their voters abandon the sinking ship.