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Off topic, will Jaguar’s rebrand go down as one of the all time marketing catastrophes?

https://x.com/jlr_news/status/1858802707781316739

Is that a parody?

I checked and followed the links. I even assumed a different company of the same name. Nope.

What the hell are they playing at?

Someone asked them where the car is, and they replied:

https://x.com/jaguar/status/1858851562883256748

The story’s still unfolding – stay tuned.

Off topic, will Jaguar’s rebrand go down as one of the all time marketing catastrophes?

https://x.com/jlr_news/status/1858802707781316739

Is that a parody?

I checked and followed the links. I even assumed a different company of the same name. Nope.

What the hell are they playing at?

Someone asked them where the car is, and they replied:

https://x.com/jaguar/status/1858851562883256748

The story’s still unfolding – stay tuned.

Even with all the semi racist ranting, the most controversial thing in the subsequent thread:

‘JLR used to stand for reliability, quality, craftsmanship and superb engineering’

WRT business property relief, you do get organisations like St. James Place, marketing investments that attract it, and which ought not. The people making those investments play no role, working in the business.

OTOH, the estates of people who actually work in SME’s ought not to be hit by the IHT charge, as that’s just an incentive to sell out to a big corporation.

(Amusingly, my former colleagues knew St James's Place *extremely* well.)

It seems to me that the distinction that needs to be drawn - for IHT - is between owners/managers of farms and SME’s, and those who are simply investors.

For the former, a charge of 20% on the assets needed to work the business can be a real burden. For the latter, anything that gets inherited is a windfall, and 20% is affordable.

Dan Neidle’s going for it on APR. I suspect his TwiX follower count is taking a hit.

Here’s what he’s just posted on LinkedIn.

The Country Land and Business Association says the new £1m cap on agricultural inheritance tax relief will "harm 70,000 farms". That's 1/3 of all farms.

What does the actual data show? Less than 500 farms/year will pay more tax as a result of this change every year. Possibly as few as 100.

Why 500? Because this table shows only 500 farm estates claimed agricultural property relief (APR) of more than £1m in 2022.

But that overstates the issue. Married couples can easily claim the £1m cap twice. Small farmers without other assets can use their nil rate band. So for a married couple running a farm, it could be worth £2.65m before the restriction on the relief costs them a penny.

That could mean as few as 100 farms per year are affected. And the 20% tax is only on the excess over the threshold, so for most of the 100, the additional tax will be reasonably small. Insure against it when you're young(ish). Give some/all to your kids when you get older.

And the data shows that most of the cost of the tax increase will be borne by a few very large estates. In 2022 2% of agricultural estates - just 37 - claimed an average of £6m.

That's what this is really about - not 70,000 farms. So let's drop the hyperbolic fake stats.

All of which means, of course, that it won’t raise much money either. Whereas BPR…

Neidle is talking bollocks - and of course doing so on behalf of the Labour Party as he sits on their National Constitutional Committee. The idea he is some sort of independent expert is garbage.

Which bit is bollocks? The numbers seem plausible enough and are taken from recent historical data, rather than hypotheticals.

Dan’s analysis on most topics in the last year or so has been pretty objective and usually technically spot on. He also makes use of a large range of tax specialists who prefer to keep out of the limelight when he’s commenting on areas he’s not an expert in. He has both publicly rubbished various allegations of tax avoidance or evasion against Tory MPs, and been extremely critical of the NI changes, so the evidence he’s just spouting Labour propaganda is pretty thin.

Yep, Tyndall is being an arse.

If that is the sum total of your contribution to this debate then probably best if you just admit it and fuck off now.

You are being an arse. Unless you want to actually say why Neidle's claims are wrong and not just call bias?

I already explained why but you are clearly too dumb to understand.

Let me give you one example where he is wrong.

He claims that "Small farmers without other assets can use their nil rate band". Except they can't. If the Estate is worth more than £2 million then the nil rate band tapers off to zero.

In addition the NFU - who should be in a position to know - state that the average farm size is just over 250 acres. That is around £2.5 million in land value alone without equipment. plant, livestock or the house. The average value of a farm business is well over £3 million.

Mind you I am not surprised that he is confused when even the Government can't get their numbers straight.

The Treasury has said 73% of APR claims are below £1 million and so would be unaffected by this policy. However, Defra’s figures show that only 34% of farms are under £1 million net worth.

It might be nice if the Government itself could at least get its figures straight.

Cheers, I'll stop being arse now...

Small seems to be in the eye of the beholder is a < 2 mill farm small, probably... but if 34% are below a million it might be easier to say less than a million is a 'small-farm' . They should easily stay under the threshold with all the allowances in play. But its all semantics, yes?

On the average farm size the UK gov reports it to be ~200 acres this seems to be heavily skewed by high acreage holdings, more than 25% are > 400 acre and a big wedge of those above 1000. Most the farmed UK land is pastoral so £10k an acre is a big assumption its much closer to £7.5k. But yes with all the farming paraphernalia the average farm is probably drawing close to the threshold but the median farm seems unlikely to exceed it.

I don't see where Neidle is talking bollocks.

Farms are quite a bit more than their land value

Carole Cadwalladr
@carolecadwalla
·
6h
NEW: Guardian & Observer journalists overwhelming vote in favour of strike action in protest at proposed sale of the Observer to Tortoise media.

How do Tortoise have the money to buy the Observer? Or rather who is giving them money to do such a deal, when literally nobody reads their "slow news" approach. Even here, I don't think it ever gets linked to and we must be on the absolute bullseye of their target market.

Used to get linked a bit here during the late Corbyn years, Tortoise and Novara were the pet channels of the Jeremy fans who thought the Guardian was way too right-wing for their tastes.

Presumably the Observer is losing money hand over fist, as most of the separate Sundays now do, thanks to paying the likes of Ms Cadwalladr six-figure salaries for one piece per week? So the ‘purchase price’ is likely to be almost nothing, with some vague commitment to preserving most of the jobs. The only real IP is the name.

Their editor is James Harding, formerly of Times, and they appear to have some private funding having raised £500k from a Kickstarter six years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortoise_Media