Beth Rigby, so what you are saying Prime Minster (when it wasn't exactly what they said), is pathetic gotcha making. No idea why nobody watches Sky News anymore.
I remember when they had people like Tim Marshall, Sam Kiley, Jeff Randall....
One feature of the Budget is how few of the different predictions re tax increases actually happened - instead Reeves got the vast majority of additional tax from Employers NI.
This was a smart move - as we've seen with farmers as soon as you do something specific that really hits a particular group then a massive row follows.
This suggests to me that if she has to put up taxes again in future years she'll just put it all on Employers NI. The public don't see it on their payslip, they don't really understand it and nobody takes a really substantial hit.
Other than it is horrifically anti-business and anti-growth measure....politically it might be short term better, its another form of fiscal drag, but long term this is a terrible approach. Tax income, tax profits, don't tax turn-over and growth, and also its most effects lower paid end of the jobs spectrum.
One thing worth emphasising about this budget is that the Tax changes removed any incentive for employees to keep workers only doing 16 hours a week.
Now to avoid tax the worker has to do 8 hours and that doesn't work for them or their part time employees.
Re farming what happens if those inheriting land can’t raise the IHT liability ?
It’s not like property which would generally be easier to sell .
Farmland is easy enough to sell. Phone the local auctioneers, cash lands in the bank about a month later.
There are lots of reasons why this policy is bad, but this isn't one.
Scenario: Farm is valued at 10k/acre for inheritance tax purposes. Farm is lets say 300 acres, so the bill is £200k (We'll assume the lad owns all the equipment and/or it's all depreciated for the sake of argument). The old Farmer's son sticks 20 acres up for sale, and only gets 5k/acre. A bit extreme, but just putting it out there for the sake of argument... Does the farm now get revalued to 1.5 million so the 200k isn't due ?
If the land is sold in open auction that is the value. It is really a bad idea but totally expected. It will also trash other businesses where succession is important. My ex MP says the first suicide has happened, not sure if that is true. We really have a vile incompetent government with a vile incompetent Prime Minister. But we knew that.
We seem to have a lot of press writing half baked incorrect stories to scare farmers.
It's been badly announced but I don't actually think there are many people at all who understand what the changes are yet alone the actual impact it has on people.
There is a story going around (no idea if it's true) on a supposed farmers' fb page describing a suicide which is getting everyone enraged.
I think farmers generally (can) have a very rough time and the suicide rate is very high. That said, governments of the past decades have prioritised mass market affordability of farm produce over farmers' well-being and it is difficult to argue that that has been the wrong policy.
Also it has long been known that buying agricultural land is a good tax avoidance wheeze but, a situation affecting 0.0n% of the farmers, still less of the population is not I believe good grounds for policy-making.
Removing a good tax avoidance wheeze is something that a sensible Government should be doing.
The suicide could be caused by a lot of things with this being the final one of a lot of straws. Farmer suicide is scarily high anyway as it's a lonely business that can feeling never ending..
I don't doubt but it is getting everyone agitated. Plus ISAs are a good tax avoidance wheeze.
An ISA is not tax avoidance.
“Tax avoidance is bending the rules of the tax system to gain a tax advantage, that parliament never intended.” (HMRC, 2015)
"It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law".
So in other words it is perfectly legal and this description is designed a) to give The State more power over you at their sole discretion and whim; and b) scare you. Which latter it appears to have done.
Or an understandable reaction by the revenue to rich people's accountants regularly taking the piss.
Nothing in that link (which both Mighty Alex and I used) says anything about it not being legal.
By "do not work" I presume they mean they aren't tax avoidance but are, rather, illegal.
You've clearly not followed all those stories about tax advisers who sold tax avoidance schemes as 'perfectly legal', only for their clients to loses court cases against HMRC... and have to repay millions ?
The guidance was intended to prevent more such embarrassments. Accountants (reputable ones, at least) now tend to run such schemes by the revenue, before marketing them to innocent punters.
Tax avoidance is legal; tax evasion is illegal. Sometimes it is not clear which a particular scheme is because it's pushing the line on something where the law is unclear or open to interpretation. That lack of clarity does not imply legality.
That's the point, though. A financial adviser simply describing something as "tax avoidance" doesn't make it legal. Where the boundaries lie is often unclear - but it's usually pretty obvious to a taxpayer if they're entering into a scheme with the intention of avoiding tax. All the revenue is saying (albeit somewhat forcefully) is that honest belief that you're entering into a legal avoidance scheme doesn't exempt you from potential penalties if it's not legal.
If it's pre-approved by them then you're in the clear.
Exactly. No one is saying all tax advisors have it right. I am saying that tax avoidance is legal, that tax evasion is illegal, and that the HMRC has weasel words on its website designed to scare people.
Buying agricultural land as a tax avoidance wheeze is just the same as gifting possessions hoping to live for another seven years, or taking out an ISA.
I think it was @Mexicanpete who said that the govt should close down "tax avoidance wheezes".
And I disagreed with this.
Taking out an ISA is doing exactly what legislation intended.
Being 'paid' via a loan (so not incurring tax) that you are told never needs to be paid back, isn't.
If people want to get involved in complex "avoidance" schemes that promoters charge handsomely for, they should be under no illusion who HMRC will come after for the cash.
Are there odds on him calling Kamala a c*** by next Tuesday? You just know he does it in private anyway.
I don't think he is that vulgar. Non-drinking, non-smoking/drug-taking.
Plus of that age. I don't think it is in his vernacular.
But we can have a bet if you would like.
Lol, a man who calls his opponents stupid bastards, scum and garbage, mentions the size of a famous sportsman's cock & does an impersonation of a disabled journalist during speeches, and boasts about grabbing women by the pussy isn't 'that vulgar'. A judgment for the ages.
His musings about executing Liz Cheney by firing squad is quite startling. I do wonder whether Trump will enact his wet dreams and take the ultimate action against anyone he believes have dimished him over the years. The list, I suspect will be incredibly long.
Are we at peak derangement yet? He's not literally calling to shoot people by firing squad, in the same way he's not literarily having a fascist rally in Maddison square garden, or going to literally have a bloodbath.
This is bonkers stuff. But, once you have convinced yourself the man is a fascist you can convince yourself all his utterances can be interrelated in the worse possible bad faith way.
It is an interesting phenomenon to see many/most of PB so deranged.
I can't really understand it. Don't like his policies on immigration by all means, but going off on one because he says he wants to deport illegal immigrants (while no doubt sipping their chai latte from one of *those* mugs) is super strange.
I think it's fear. Some people need to channel their otherwise illogical and unfounded fears into a concrete form. That way they can rail against Trump, who in this case is the manifestation of their fears and take comfort, either in his eventual defeat, or in the solidarity they find from others who think the same.
Otherwise the whole nazi/fascist/sending troops to kill Americans thing is not really fathomable.
If you think most of PB is deranged; perhaps they're the 'normal' ones and it is your view on matters that is 'deranged' ?
Yes could be. I mean my - well-documented on here - position is that I don't think that Trump is a nazi, nor that he is a threat to "American democracy", nor that he will do very much damage in office beyond at the margin because the paraphernalia of the US state and constitution is powerful and has those famous checks and balances which would prevent any individual from subverting it or them.
Any egregious example of what he has done or what he is feared as doing has been done countless times in other democracies the world over from time immemorial.
I have also said he is a laugh at, not laugh with kind of guy whose pronouncements are just extraordinary, but then that's America.
What I do respect is almost half (perhaps more) of the American voting public have decided that he's their man and it irritates me that people on PB in their typical bien pensant, Guardian letter-writing, oh aren't they all ghastly way, seem to think they know better.
And every time someone does call him a nazi or whatnot (not on PB, obvs, because no one cares) it serves to solidify the support he has.
Re farming what happens if those inheriting land can’t raise the IHT liability ?
It’s not like property which would generally be easier to sell .
Farmland is easy enough to sell. Phone the local auctioneers, cash lands in the bank about a month later.
There are lots of reasons why this policy is bad, but this isn't one.
Scenario: Farm is valued at 10k/acre for inheritance tax purposes. Farm is lets say 300 acres, so the bill is £200k (We'll assume the lad owns all the equipment and/or it's all depreciated for the sake of argument). The old Farmer's son sticks 20 acres up for sale, and only gets 5k/acre. A bit extreme, but just putting it out there for the sake of argument... Does the farm now get revalued to 1.5 million so the 200k isn't due ?
If the land is sold in open auction that is the value. It is really a bad idea but totally expected. It will also trash other businesses where succession is important. My ex MP says the first suicide has happened, not sure if that is true. We really have a vile incompetent government with a vile incompetent Prime Minister. But we knew that.
We seem to have a lot of press writing half baked incorrect stories to scare farmers.
It's been badly announced but I don't actually think there are many people at all who understand what the changes are yet alone the actual impact it has on people.
There is a story going around (no idea if it's true) on a supposed farmers' fb page describing a suicide which is getting everyone enraged.
I think farmers generally (can) have a very rough time and the suicide rate is very high. That said, governments of the past decades have prioritised mass market affordability of farm produce over farmers' well-being and it is difficult to argue that that has been the wrong policy.
Also it has long been known that buying agricultural land is a good tax avoidance wheeze but, a situation affecting 0.0n% of the farmers, still less of the population is not I believe good grounds for policy-making.
Removing a good tax avoidance wheeze is something that a sensible Government should be doing.
The suicide could be caused by a lot of things with this being the final one of a lot of straws. Farmer suicide is scarily high anyway as it's a lonely business that can feeling never ending..
I don't doubt but it is getting everyone agitated. Plus ISAs are a good tax avoidance wheeze.
An ISA is not tax avoidance.
“Tax avoidance is bending the rules of the tax system to gain a tax advantage, that parliament never intended.” (HMRC, 2015)
"It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law".
So in other words it is perfectly legal and this description is designed a) to give The State more power over you at their sole discretion and whim; and b) scare you. Which latter it appears to have done.
Or an understandable reaction by the revenue to rich people's accountants regularly taking the piss.
Nothing in that link (which both Mighty Alex and I used) says anything about it not being legal.
By "do not work" I presume they mean they aren't tax avoidance but are, rather, illegal.
You've clearly not followed all those stories about tax advisers who sold tax avoidance schemes as 'perfectly legal', only for their clients to loses court cases against HMRC... and have to repay millions ?
The guidance was intended to prevent more such embarrassments. Accountants (reputable ones, at least) now tend to run such schemes by the revenue, before marketing them to innocent punters.
Tax avoidance is legal; tax evasion is illegal. Sometimes it is not clear which a particular scheme is because it's pushing the line on something where the law is unclear or open to interpretation. That lack of clarity does not imply legality.
The HMRC website is saying that some schemes are legal but not "within the spirit of the law". Whatever tf that means, legally.
Link please? that doesn't sound like the thing HMRC says...
A council is considering a city centre ban on cyclists to protect pedestrians, with fines for people who do not comply.
Birmingham City council has become the latest local authority to discuss barring cyclists from pedestrian-only areas to curb anti-social cycling.
A report by the council’s regulation and community safety executives has raised concerns that food and parcel couriers on e-bikes, travelling “at speed and without care for pedestrians”, pose a particular danger to the public in areas of high footfall.
The report, published earlier this month, proposes extending the city’s public spaces protection order to encompass cycling. The move would add it to a list of anti-social behaviours that includes graffiti, street drinking, large gatherings, and excessive noise.
The report said cycling could be “restricted by time periods” or banned outright, with the issue being put to a public consultation.
I'm surprised that this has taken so long to hit the national media. Telegraph article in the Telegraph; more rounded piece in the Groan; I have not checked the Daily Wail. Disabled charities on my network (TBF this is focused on active travel, of course) have been contacting Birmingham Council with their concerns for 2-3 weeks, as it will impact their members / supporters / clients who use cycles or adapted cycles as their mobility aid, and cannot walk, who will be targeted for harassment by Council or BID officers (this happens routinely), who are never trained properly. This is Council Officers as Jesus: Pick up your Mobility Aid and Walk.
TLDR: I don't see this happening, because BCCs evidence does not support the claims. Cycling has been normal in Brum City Centre for 50-70 years, and the Council Report specifically - as mentioned by @Big_G_NorthWales - talks about food delivery and parcel couriers travelling at high speed, probably on mopeds not pedal-cycles, and mini van style cargo bikes (think Postman Pat)also at speed.
The former are a problem of supply chain and business regulation, with laws in place that can manage it, and the latter can be regulated. The way Scotland does it is by treating delivery riders as Street Traders needing a licence. The current UK Govt, unlike the last one, will get onto that. As a PSPO it needs one against ASB, not a ban on things that the Council's evidence do not identify as a problem.
One problem is the PSPO process, which legally requires evidence, but practically they can be pushed though with none, and are set up to be almost impossible to stop. The only one I have ever seen stopped was the Mansfield one about 5 years ago, where 5 locals targeted by it threatened a High Court legal action and forced them to moderate it. The Mansfield one was in reaction to a couple of occasions where kids had been wheelying around the outdoor market, and Captain Mainwaring jerked his knee.
The PSPO process needs reform to address problems and not address prejudices. At present these style of PSPO tend to exist in Reform type, or Blue Rinse type, coastal towns, or in fairly leafy country places. And one or two places where LD or Lab have gone local populist.
There already exist good inclusive models in Leicester, and to an extent Coventry, which Brum can follow. If they try and persist, I think they are big enough to get a challenge - but we shall see. I think they will take a via media.
I was part of a group that seriously curtailed a PSPO trying to regulate all public speaking and bring under civil law what was supposed to be criminal public order issues. It was mainly (entirely) done at the behest of some activist lgbt groups who couldn't cope with a Christian preacher saying things they disliked. Anyway the flaccid council dropped it when it hit resistance and a threat of judicial review.
The problem is the lack of interest in enforcement.
In my view, as a start, there needs to be a crackdown on the illegal eBikes. The local cycle lanes are becoming unusable due to people doing 30mph+ with electric motorcycles.
To start with, the batteries are nearly always unsafe.
Then there's the thuggish behaviour towards actual cyclists - I've sen them blast past children on bikes, missing them by millimetres.
Almost always unlawful motorcycles. Some police forces have become quite good and can spot and confiscate these bikes routinely. Most certainly a police matter, the unlocked unlawful ones are pretty easy to spot.
Indeed. But in many areas there has been a definite unwillingness to deal with it.
I've have been told that the Reasons Why Not include
- "The Community wouldn't like it." - as in targeting minority communities. - "Potential for violence, requires excessive resources" - "Unclear regulation' - aka we don't want to know.
Personally, I would have a unit out - testing and removing the batteries from non-compliant bikes. They can pedal home....
There is a widespread assumption that the type of individual using e-bicycles (or illegal e-motorcycles) for food delivery are some of the people coming across on the small boats. Hence the intense hostility from some quite unpleasant individuals, and therefore well-meaning lefties are instinctively defensive about the issue.
My local police have been pro-active about illegal e-motorcycles, which is good. But there is an inevitable tension here because there so relaxed about the danger posed by the unlawful behaviour of drivers of conventional vehicles, who tend to be richer (and whiter). Purely on the collision stats, it does feel like discrimination tbh.
One issue I have with electric vehicles in general is the combination of speed and silence (or at least either near silence or a noise one doesn’t associate with traffic). There needs to be an international standard to fix that, or else we should go back to a man with a red flag.
I think this a big reason for the antipathy from pedestrians towards conventional cyclists too. Noisy freehubs, normalising pre-emptive use of the bell and well segregated cycle lanes should help - we use our ears far more than we realise.
Re farming what happens if those inheriting land can’t raise the IHT liability ?
It’s not like property which would generally be easier to sell .
Farmland is easy enough to sell. Phone the local auctioneers, cash lands in the bank about a month later.
There are lots of reasons why this policy is bad, but this isn't one.
Scenario: Farm is valued at 10k/acre for inheritance tax purposes. Farm is lets say 300 acres, so the bill is £200k (We'll assume the lad owns all the equipment and/or it's all depreciated for the sake of argument). The old Farmer's son sticks 20 acres up for sale, and only gets 5k/acre. A bit extreme, but just putting it out there for the sake of argument... Does the farm now get revalued to 1.5 million so the 200k isn't due ?
If the land is sold in open auction that is the value. It is really a bad idea but totally expected. It will also trash other businesses where succession is important. My ex MP says the first suicide has happened, not sure if that is true. We really have a vile incompetent government with a vile incompetent Prime Minister. But we knew that.
We seem to have a lot of press writing half baked incorrect stories to scare farmers.
It's been badly announced but I don't actually think there are many people at all who understand what the changes are yet alone the actual impact it has on people.
There is a story going around (no idea if it's true) on a supposed farmers' fb page describing a suicide which is getting everyone enraged.
I think farmers generally (can) have a very rough time and the suicide rate is very high. That said, governments of the past decades have prioritised mass market affordability of farm produce over farmers' well-being and it is difficult to argue that that has been the wrong policy.
Also it has long been known that buying agricultural land is a good tax avoidance wheeze but, a situation affecting 0.0n% of the farmers, still less of the population is not I believe good grounds for policy-making.
Removing a good tax avoidance wheeze is something that a sensible Government should be doing.
The suicide could be caused by a lot of things with this being the final one of a lot of straws. Farmer suicide is scarily high anyway as it's a lonely business that can feeling never ending..
I don't doubt but it is getting everyone agitated. Plus ISAs are a good tax avoidance wheeze.
An ISA is not tax avoidance.
“Tax avoidance is bending the rules of the tax system to gain a tax advantage, that parliament never intended.” (HMRC, 2015)
"It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law".
So in other words it is perfectly legal and this description is designed a) to give The State more power over you at their sole discretion and whim; and b) scare you. Which latter it appears to have done.
Or an understandable reaction by the revenue to rich people's accountants regularly taking the piss.
Nothing in that link (which both Mighty Alex and I used) says anything about it not being legal.
By "do not work" I presume they mean they aren't tax avoidance but are, rather, illegal.
You've clearly not followed all those stories about tax advisers who sold tax avoidance schemes as 'perfectly legal', only for their clients to loses court cases against HMRC... and have to repay millions ?
The guidance was intended to prevent more such embarrassments. Accountants (reputable ones, at least) now tend to run such schemes by the revenue, before marketing them to innocent punters.
Tax avoidance is legal; tax evasion is illegal. Sometimes it is not clear which a particular scheme is because it's pushing the line on something where the law is unclear or open to interpretation. That lack of clarity does not imply legality.
The HMRC website is saying that some schemes are legal but not "within the spirit of the law". Whatever tf that means, legally.
Presumably refers to the inevitable changing of tax rules to close loopholes. Some of these avoidance schemes can be very expensive to unwind, if the law changes. If your tax advisers have been taking the piss, you're taking that risk.
Also true but doesn't alter my point that tax avoidance is legal. ISAs are tax avoidance. Film investment schemes were then they weren't.
Doesn't affect the status of genuine tax avoidance.
A council is considering a city centre ban on cyclists to protect pedestrians, with fines for people who do not comply.
Birmingham City council has become the latest local authority to discuss barring cyclists from pedestrian-only areas to curb anti-social cycling.
A report by the council’s regulation and community safety executives has raised concerns that food and parcel couriers on e-bikes, travelling “at speed and without care for pedestrians”, pose a particular danger to the public in areas of high footfall.
The report, published earlier this month, proposes extending the city’s public spaces protection order to encompass cycling. The move would add it to a list of anti-social behaviours that includes graffiti, street drinking, large gatherings, and excessive noise.
The report said cycling could be “restricted by time periods” or banned outright, with the issue being put to a public consultation.
I'm surprised that this has taken so long to hit the national media. Telegraph article in the Telegraph; more rounded piece in the Groan; I have not checked the Daily Wail. Disabled charities on my network (TBF this is focused on active travel, of course) have been contacting Birmingham Council with their concerns for 2-3 weeks, as it will impact their members / supporters / clients who use cycles or adapted cycles as their mobility aid, and cannot walk, who will be targeted for harassment by Council or BID officers (this happens routinely), who are never trained properly. This is Council Officers as Jesus: Pick up your Mobility Aid and Walk.
TLDR: I don't see this happening, because BCCs evidence does not support the claims. Cycling has been normal in Brum City Centre for 50-70 years, and the Council Report specifically - as mentioned by @Big_G_NorthWales - talks about food delivery and parcel couriers travelling at high speed, probably on mopeds not pedal-cycles, and mini van style cargo bikes (think Postman Pat)also at speed.
The former are a problem of supply chain and business regulation, with laws in place that can manage it, and the latter can be regulated. The way Scotland does it is by treating delivery riders as Street Traders needing a licence. The current UK Govt, unlike the last one, will get onto that. As a PSPO it needs one against ASB, not a ban on things that the Council's evidence do not identify as a problem.
One problem is the PSPO process, which legally requires evidence, but practically they can be pushed though with none, and are set up to be almost impossible to stop. The only one I have ever seen stopped was the Mansfield one about 5 years ago, where 5 locals targeted by it threatened a High Court legal action and forced them to moderate it. The Mansfield one was in reaction to a couple of occasions where kids had been wheelying around the outdoor market, and Captain Mainwaring jerked his knee.
The PSPO process needs reform to address problems and not address prejudices. At present these style of PSPO tend to exist in Reform type, or Blue Rinse type, coastal towns, or in fairly leafy country places. And one or two places where LD or Lab have gone local populist.
There already exist good inclusive models in Leicester, and to an extent Coventry, which Brum can follow. If they try and persist, I think they are big enough to get a challenge - but we shall see. I think they will take a via media.
I was part of a group that seriously curtailed a PSPO trying to regulate all public speaking and bring under civil law what was supposed to be criminal public order issues. It was mainly (entirely) done at the behest of some activist lgbt groups who couldn't cope with a Christian preacher saying things they disliked. Anyway the flaccid council dropped it when it hit resistance and a threat of judicial review.
The problem is the lack of interest in enforcement.
In my view, as a start, there needs to be a crackdown on the illegal eBikes. The local cycle lanes are becoming unusable due to people doing 30mph+ with electric motorcycles.
To start with, the batteries are nearly always unsafe.
Then there's the thuggish behaviour towards actual cyclists - I've sen them blast past children on bikes, missing them by millimetres.
Almost always unlawful motorcycles. Some police forces have become quite good and can spot and confiscate these bikes routinely. Most certainly a police matter, the unlocked unlawful ones are pretty easy to spot.
Indeed. But in many areas there has been a definite unwillingness to deal with it.
I've have been told that the Reasons Why Not include
- "The Community wouldn't like it." - as in targeting minority communities. - "Potential for violence, requires excessive resources" - "Unclear regulation' - aka we don't want to know.
Personally, I would have a unit out - testing and removing the batteries from non-compliant bikes. They can pedal home....
There is a widespread assumption that the type of individual using e-bicycles (or illegal e-motorcycles) for food delivery are some of the people coming across on the small boats. Hence the intense hostility from some quite unpleasant individuals, and therefore well-meaning lefties are instinctively defensive about the issue.
My local police have been pro-active about illegal e-motorcycles, which is good. But there is an inevitable tension here because there so relaxed about the danger posed by the unlawful behaviour of drivers of conventional vehicles, who tend to be richer (and whiter). Purely on the collision stats, it does feel like discrimination tbh.
One issue I have with electric vehicles in general is the combination of speed and silence (or at least either near silence or a noise one doesn’t associate with traffic). There needs to be an international standard to fix that, or else we should go back to a man with a red flag.
I think this a big reason for the antipathy from pedestrians towards conventional cyclists too. Noisy freehubs, normalising pre-emptive use of the bell and well segregated cycle lanes should help - we use our ears far more than we realise.
Yes I agree. Also cyclists going on the pavement and sometimes coming from the “wrong” direction with respect to traffic. We like to know what to expect and you are right, we use our ears a lot.
His musings about executing Liz Cheney by firing squad is quite startling. I do wonder whether Trump will enact his wet dreams and take the ultimate action against anyone he believes have dimished him over the years. The list, I suspect will be incredibly long.
We know he already asked about using American troops against American citizens...
He could be the American Harold Wilson.
You'll have to explain.
The coup plot of 1967? Rhodesia? Or something else?
I am genuinely insulted that you dare compare Harold to Trump.
Tax evasion is a crime; you can be sent to prison. Successful tax avoidance is legal. Unsuccessful tax avoidance is illegal but not generally criminal on the basis you inform HMRC about what you have done. One subset of tax avoidance is stuff like ISAs, within the intention of the legislation and parliament. It can be unclear what the relevant intention should be. This can be viewed as tax mitigation.
The thing that’s frustrating about Rigby is that she sometimes can ask quite good questions. It’s just she then defaults to “don’t let interviewee get a word in edgeways and start putting words in their mouth.”
One feature of the Budget is how few of the different predictions re tax increases actually happened - instead Reeves got the vast majority of additional tax from Employers NI.
This was a smart move - as we've seen with farmers as soon as you do something specific that really hits a particular group then a massive row follows.
This suggests to me that if she has to put up taxes again in future years she'll just put it all on Employers NI. The public don't see it on their payslip, they don't really understand it and nobody takes a really substantial hit.
Other than it is horrifically anti-business and anti-growth measure....politically it might be short term better, its another form of fiscal drag, but long term this is a terrible approach. Tax income, tax profits, don't tax turn-over and growth, and also its most effects lower paid end of the jobs spectrum.
One thing worth emphasising about this budget is that the Tax changes removed any incentive for employees to keep workers only doing 16 hours a week.
Now to avoid tax the worker has to do 8 hours and that doesn't work for them or their part time employees.
Except it isn't true.
The incentive was never on the employer to do that.
The incentive is on the employee who can get over ten grand per annum in benefits if they only do 16 hours and faces a roughly 80% tax rate if they do any more.
And the state places upon employers a legal responsibility to accept such "flexible working" unless they've got a good reason not to.
Re farming what happens if those inheriting land can’t raise the IHT liability ?
It’s not like property which would generally be easier to sell .
Farmland is easy enough to sell. Phone the local auctioneers, cash lands in the bank about a month later.
There are lots of reasons why this policy is bad, but this isn't one.
Scenario: Farm is valued at 10k/acre for inheritance tax purposes. Farm is lets say 300 acres, so the bill is £200k (We'll assume the lad owns all the equipment and/or it's all depreciated for the sake of argument). The old Farmer's son sticks 20 acres up for sale, and only gets 5k/acre. A bit extreme, but just putting it out there for the sake of argument... Does the farm now get revalued to 1.5 million so the 200k isn't due ?
If the land is sold in open auction that is the value. It is really a bad idea but totally expected. It will also trash other businesses where succession is important. My ex MP says the first suicide has happened, not sure if that is true. We really have a vile incompetent government with a vile incompetent Prime Minister. But we knew that.
We seem to have a lot of press writing half baked incorrect stories to scare farmers.
It's been badly announced but I don't actually think there are many people at all who understand what the changes are yet alone the actual impact it has on people.
There is a story going around (no idea if it's true) on a supposed farmers' fb page describing a suicide which is getting everyone enraged.
I think farmers generally (can) have a very rough time and the suicide rate is very high. That said, governments of the past decades have prioritised mass market affordability of farm produce over farmers' well-being and it is difficult to argue that that has been the wrong policy.
Also it has long been known that buying agricultural land is a good tax avoidance wheeze but, a situation affecting 0.0n% of the farmers, still less of the population is not I believe good grounds for policy-making.
Removing a good tax avoidance wheeze is something that a sensible Government should be doing.
The suicide could be caused by a lot of things with this being the final one of a lot of straws. Farmer suicide is scarily high anyway as it's a lonely business that can feeling never ending..
I don't doubt but it is getting everyone agitated. Plus ISAs are a good tax avoidance wheeze.
An ISA is not tax avoidance.
“Tax avoidance is bending the rules of the tax system to gain a tax advantage, that parliament never intended.” (HMRC, 2015)
"It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law".
So in other words it is perfectly legal and this description is designed a) to give The State more power over you at their sole discretion and whim; and b) scare you. Which latter it appears to have done.
Or an understandable reaction by the revenue to rich people's accountants regularly taking the piss.
Nothing in that link (which both Mighty Alex and I used) says anything about it not being legal.
By "do not work" I presume they mean they aren't tax avoidance but are, rather, illegal.
You've clearly not followed all those stories about tax advisers who sold tax avoidance schemes as 'perfectly legal', only for their clients to loses court cases against HMRC... and have to repay millions ?
The guidance was intended to prevent more such embarrassments. Accountants (reputable ones, at least) now tend to run such schemes by the revenue, before marketing them to innocent punters.
Tax avoidance is legal; tax evasion is illegal. Sometimes it is not clear which a particular scheme is because it's pushing the line on something where the law is unclear or open to interpretation. That lack of clarity does not imply legality.
The HMRC website is saying that some schemes are legal but not "within the spirit of the law". Whatever tf that means, legally.
Presumably refers to the inevitable changing of tax rules to close loopholes. Some of these avoidance schemes can be very expensive to unwind, if the law changes. If your tax advisers have been taking the piss, you're taking that risk.
I think a good rule o thumb if you're going to chance your arm with one of these schemes, umbrella companies or whatever is to make sure the fees aren't too high and keep the tax for a bit should you have to pay it back.
Keep the tax for a bit ?
The employee benefit trust loan wheeze went back almost 20 years before the Supreme Court ruled in favour of HMRC
What about the interest on the unpaid tax ? What about the penalty charges ? What about the accountancy / legal fees that you will need for someone to argue your case ?
Surely better to just pay your tax in the first place.
Re farming what happens if those inheriting land can’t raise the IHT liability ?
It’s not like property which would generally be easier to sell .
Farmland is easy enough to sell. Phone the local auctioneers, cash lands in the bank about a month later.
There are lots of reasons why this policy is bad, but this isn't one.
Scenario: Farm is valued at 10k/acre for inheritance tax purposes. Farm is lets say 300 acres, so the bill is £200k (We'll assume the lad owns all the equipment and/or it's all depreciated for the sake of argument). The old Farmer's son sticks 20 acres up for sale, and only gets 5k/acre. A bit extreme, but just putting it out there for the sake of argument... Does the farm now get revalued to 1.5 million so the 200k isn't due ?
If the land is sold in open auction that is the value. It is really a bad idea but totally expected. It will also trash other businesses where succession is important. My ex MP says the first suicide has happened, not sure if that is true. We really have a vile incompetent government with a vile incompetent Prime Minister. But we knew that.
We seem to have a lot of press writing half baked incorrect stories to scare farmers.
It's been badly announced but I don't actually think there are many people at all who understand what the changes are yet alone the actual impact it has on people.
There is a story going around (no idea if it's true) on a supposed farmers' fb page describing a suicide which is getting everyone enraged.
I think farmers generally (can) have a very rough time and the suicide rate is very high. That said, governments of the past decades have prioritised mass market affordability of farm produce over farmers' well-being and it is difficult to argue that that has been the wrong policy.
Also it has long been known that buying agricultural land is a good tax avoidance wheeze but, a situation affecting 0.0n% of the farmers, still less of the population is not I believe good grounds for policy-making.
Removing a good tax avoidance wheeze is something that a sensible Government should be doing.
The suicide could be caused by a lot of things with this being the final one of a lot of straws. Farmer suicide is scarily high anyway as it's a lonely business that can feeling never ending..
I don't doubt but it is getting everyone agitated. Plus ISAs are a good tax avoidance wheeze.
An ISA is not tax avoidance.
“Tax avoidance is bending the rules of the tax system to gain a tax advantage, that parliament never intended.” (HMRC, 2015)
"It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law".
So in other words it is perfectly legal and this description is designed a) to give The State more power over you at their sole discretion and whim; and b) scare you. Which latter it appears to have done.
Or an understandable reaction by the revenue to rich people's accountants regularly taking the piss.
Nothing in that link (which both Mighty Alex and I used) says anything about it not being legal.
By "do not work" I presume they mean they aren't tax avoidance but are, rather, illegal.
You've clearly not followed all those stories about tax advisers who sold tax avoidance schemes as 'perfectly legal', only for their clients to loses court cases against HMRC... and have to repay millions ?
The guidance was intended to prevent more such embarrassments. Accountants (reputable ones, at least) now tend to run such schemes by the revenue, before marketing them to innocent punters.
Tax avoidance is legal; tax evasion is illegal. Sometimes it is not clear which a particular scheme is because it's pushing the line on something where the law is unclear or open to interpretation. That lack of clarity does not imply legality.
The HMRC website is saying that some schemes are legal but not "within the spirit of the law". Whatever tf that means, legally.
Presumably refers to the inevitable changing of tax rules to close loopholes. Some of these avoidance schemes can be very expensive to unwind, if the law changes. If your tax advisers have been taking the piss, you're taking that risk.
I think a good rule o thumb if you're going to chance your arm with one of these schemes, umbrella companies or whatever is to make sure the fees aren't too high and keep the tax for a bit should you have to pay it back.
The film schemes (huge ongoing I think legal battles) were different because HMRC decided they were against the rules and then claimed back the implied amount (or something) that you would otherwise have paid something something resulting in not just the tax you avoided having to be paid back but a huge amount more.
Lots of discussion on IHT; one of the questions I keep pondering is why it still exists.
It's absolutely hated, and raises very little revenue; 0.7% of government income.
For example, Jeremy Hunt used £10bln to cut NI by 2%. He could have abolished IHT instead and had £2.5bln left to play with.
Surely the smart politics would have been to ditch IHT entirely, rather than a modest reduction in NI which virtually everyone forgot about 24hrs later.
There are lots of advantages to wiping out a tax entirely rather than changing rates - the government would save the cost revenue collection, lots of people would save the cost of employing the tax planning parasites*, it would knock the bottom out of all the known dodges like buying farmland (with the amusing side effect of burning the fingers of those most egregiously attempting to tax dodge in this way as asset values drop back to their true levels).
Why on earth didn't he do it? If nothing else, he would have gone down in history as the chancellor who abolished IHT, and it's hard to imaging that would be an unpopular legacy.
*Maybe they could become social care workers, instead of us having to import millions of Nigerians
Remove IHT and when the next Government comes along do you tax the money as income received or a capital gain.
That's why you leave IHT because with it removed other options become available that would be worse...
Those options exist now, Reeves may yet come back to them next year when she's trying to fill in the massive black holes she created this time round.
The difference is that once you've nuked IHT, any form of reinstatment will be massively unpopular, and politicians tend not to survive introducing or raising really unpopular taxes (see also the Poll Tax or the way that fuel duty has been flat for years). If Hunk had killed IHT, I don't think Reeves would have survived introducing IT or CGT for benificaries of Estates, and so she wouldn't have done it.
Re farming what happens if those inheriting land can’t raise the IHT liability ?
It’s not like property which would generally be easier to sell .
Farmland is easy enough to sell. Phone the local auctioneers, cash lands in the bank about a month later.
There are lots of reasons why this policy is bad, but this isn't one.
Scenario: Farm is valued at 10k/acre for inheritance tax purposes. Farm is lets say 300 acres, so the bill is £200k (We'll assume the lad owns all the equipment and/or it's all depreciated for the sake of argument). The old Farmer's son sticks 20 acres up for sale, and only gets 5k/acre. A bit extreme, but just putting it out there for the sake of argument... Does the farm now get revalued to 1.5 million so the 200k isn't due ?
If the land is sold in open auction that is the value. It is really a bad idea but totally expected. It will also trash other businesses where succession is important. My ex MP says the first suicide has happened, not sure if that is true. We really have a vile incompetent government with a vile incompetent Prime Minister. But we knew that.
We seem to have a lot of press writing half baked incorrect stories to scare farmers.
It's been badly announced but I don't actually think there are many people at all who understand what the changes are yet alone the actual impact it has on people.
There is a story going around (no idea if it's true) on a supposed farmers' fb page describing a suicide which is getting everyone enraged.
I think farmers generally (can) have a very rough time and the suicide rate is very high. That said, governments of the past decades have prioritised mass market affordability of farm produce over farmers' well-being and it is difficult to argue that that has been the wrong policy.
Also it has long been known that buying agricultural land is a good tax avoidance wheeze but, a situation affecting 0.0n% of the farmers, still less of the population is not I believe good grounds for policy-making.
Removing a good tax avoidance wheeze is something that a sensible Government should be doing.
The suicide could be caused by a lot of things with this being the final one of a lot of straws. Farmer suicide is scarily high anyway as it's a lonely business that can feeling never ending..
I don't doubt but it is getting everyone agitated. Plus ISAs are a good tax avoidance wheeze.
An ISA is not tax avoidance.
“Tax avoidance is bending the rules of the tax system to gain a tax advantage, that parliament never intended.” (HMRC, 2015)
"It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law".
So in other words it is perfectly legal and this description is designed a) to give The State more power over you at their sole discretion and whim; and b) scare you. Which latter it appears to have done.
Or an understandable reaction by the revenue to rich people's accountants regularly taking the piss.
Nothing in that link (which both Mighty Alex and I used) says anything about it not being legal.
By "do not work" I presume they mean they aren't tax avoidance but are, rather, illegal.
You've clearly not followed all those stories about tax advisers who sold tax avoidance schemes as 'perfectly legal', only for their clients to loses court cases against HMRC... and have to repay millions ?
The guidance was intended to prevent more such embarrassments. Accountants (reputable ones, at least) now tend to run such schemes by the revenue, before marketing them to innocent punters.
Tax avoidance is legal; tax evasion is illegal. Sometimes it is not clear which a particular scheme is because it's pushing the line on something where the law is unclear or open to interpretation. That lack of clarity does not imply legality.
That's the point, though. A financial adviser simply describing something as "tax avoidance" doesn't make it legal. Where the boundaries lie is often unclear - but it's usually pretty obvious to a taxpayer if they're entering into a scheme with the intention of avoiding tax. All the revenue is saying (albeit somewhat forcefully) is that honest belief that you're entering into a legal avoidance scheme doesn't exempt you from potential penalties if it's not legal.
If it's pre-approved by them then you're in the clear.
Exactly. No one is saying all tax advisors have it right. I am saying that tax avoidance is legal, that tax evasion is illegal, and that the HMRC has weasel words on its website designed to scare people.
Buying agricultural land as a tax avoidance wheeze is just the same as gifting possessions hoping to live for another seven years, or taking out an ISA.
I think it was @Mexicanpete who said that the govt should close down "tax avoidance wheezes".
And I disagreed with this.
Taking out an ISA is doing exactly what legislation intended.
Being 'paid' via a loan (so not incurring tax) that you are told never needs to be paid back, isn't.
If people want to get involved in complex "avoidance" schemes that promoters charge handsomely for, they should be under no illusion who HMRC will come after for the cash.
Couldn't agree more. You yourself put the word avoidance in quotes because they aren't avoidance. They are illegal. ISAs are avoidance. As is gifting possessions and buying agricultural land.
The other stuff is not avoidance it is illegal, or evasion, or whatever the HMRC wants to call it (there used to be a category of "aggressive tax avoidance").
On its own website it says Tax Avoidance is legal (then blah blah letter of the law).
Re farming what happens if those inheriting land can’t raise the IHT liability ?
It’s not like property which would generally be easier to sell .
Farmland is easy enough to sell. Phone the local auctioneers, cash lands in the bank about a month later.
There are lots of reasons why this policy is bad, but this isn't one.
Scenario: Farm is valued at 10k/acre for inheritance tax purposes. Farm is lets say 300 acres, so the bill is £200k (We'll assume the lad owns all the equipment and/or it's all depreciated for the sake of argument). The old Farmer's son sticks 20 acres up for sale, and only gets 5k/acre. A bit extreme, but just putting it out there for the sake of argument... Does the farm now get revalued to 1.5 million so the 200k isn't due ?
If the land is sold in open auction that is the value. It is really a bad idea but totally expected. It will also trash other businesses where succession is important. My ex MP says the first suicide has happened, not sure if that is true. We really have a vile incompetent government with a vile incompetent Prime Minister. But we knew that.
We seem to have a lot of press writing half baked incorrect stories to scare farmers.
It's been badly announced but I don't actually think there are many people at all who understand what the changes are yet alone the actual impact it has on people.
There is a story going around (no idea if it's true) on a supposed farmers' fb page describing a suicide which is getting everyone enraged.
I think farmers generally (can) have a very rough time and the suicide rate is very high. That said, governments of the past decades have prioritised mass market affordability of farm produce over farmers' well-being and it is difficult to argue that that has been the wrong policy.
Also it has long been known that buying agricultural land is a good tax avoidance wheeze but, a situation affecting 0.0n% of the farmers, still less of the population is not I believe good grounds for policy-making.
Removing a good tax avoidance wheeze is something that a sensible Government should be doing.
The suicide could be caused by a lot of things with this being the final one of a lot of straws. Farmer suicide is scarily high anyway as it's a lonely business that can feeling never ending..
I don't doubt but it is getting everyone agitated. Plus ISAs are a good tax avoidance wheeze.
An ISA is not tax avoidance.
“Tax avoidance is bending the rules of the tax system to gain a tax advantage, that parliament never intended.” (HMRC, 2015)
"It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law".
So in other words it is perfectly legal and this description is designed a) to give The State more power over you at their sole discretion and whim; and b) scare you. Which latter it appears to have done.
Or an understandable reaction by the revenue to rich people's accountants regularly taking the piss.
Nothing in that link (which both Mighty Alex and I used) says anything about it not being legal.
By "do not work" I presume they mean they aren't tax avoidance but are, rather, illegal.
You've clearly not followed all those stories about tax advisers who sold tax avoidance schemes as 'perfectly legal', only for their clients to loses court cases against HMRC... and have to repay millions ?
The guidance was intended to prevent more such embarrassments. Accountants (reputable ones, at least) now tend to run such schemes by the revenue, before marketing them to innocent punters.
Tax avoidance is legal; tax evasion is illegal. Sometimes it is not clear which a particular scheme is because it's pushing the line on something where the law is unclear or open to interpretation. That lack of clarity does not imply legality.
The HMRC website is saying that some schemes are legal but not "within the spirit of the law". Whatever tf that means, legally.
Presumably refers to the inevitable changing of tax rules to close loopholes. Some of these avoidance schemes can be very expensive to unwind, if the law changes. If your tax advisers have been taking the piss, you're taking that risk.
Also true but doesn't alter my point that tax avoidance is legal. ISAs are tax avoidance. Film investment schemes were then they weren't.
Doesn't affect the status of genuine tax avoidance.
Tax avoidance, and terms such as the spirit of the law or the "intent" of the drafter are all established in caselaw and have a meaning in the UK context. There's a long history of cases starting with House of Lords in W T Ramsay Ltd v IRC ([1981] STC 174) that have progressively sought to define and ring-fence artificial tax avoidance from acceptable tax planning. Since 2013 we've also had a general anti-abuse rule (GAAR), which uses the term "abuse" which is more common in European civil law settings, alongside our DOTAS (disclosure of tax avoidance) rules.
Re farming what happens if those inheriting land can’t raise the IHT liability ?
It’s not like property which would generally be easier to sell .
Farmland is easy enough to sell. Phone the local auctioneers, cash lands in the bank about a month later.
There are lots of reasons why this policy is bad, but this isn't one.
Scenario: Farm is valued at 10k/acre for inheritance tax purposes. Farm is lets say 300 acres, so the bill is £200k (We'll assume the lad owns all the equipment and/or it's all depreciated for the sake of argument). The old Farmer's son sticks 20 acres up for sale, and only gets 5k/acre. A bit extreme, but just putting it out there for the sake of argument... Does the farm now get revalued to 1.5 million so the 200k isn't due ?
If the land is sold in open auction that is the value. It is really a bad idea but totally expected. It will also trash other businesses where succession is important. My ex MP says the first suicide has happened, not sure if that is true. We really have a vile incompetent government with a vile incompetent Prime Minister. But we knew that.
We seem to have a lot of press writing half baked incorrect stories to scare farmers.
It's been badly announced but I don't actually think there are many people at all who understand what the changes are yet alone the actual impact it has on people.
There is a story going around (no idea if it's true) on a supposed farmers' fb page describing a suicide which is getting everyone enraged.
I think farmers generally (can) have a very rough time and the suicide rate is very high. That said, governments of the past decades have prioritised mass market affordability of farm produce over farmers' well-being and it is difficult to argue that that has been the wrong policy.
Also it has long been known that buying agricultural land is a good tax avoidance wheeze but, a situation affecting 0.0n% of the farmers, still less of the population is not I believe good grounds for policy-making.
Removing a good tax avoidance wheeze is something that a sensible Government should be doing.
The suicide could be caused by a lot of things with this being the final one of a lot of straws. Farmer suicide is scarily high anyway as it's a lonely business that can feeling never ending..
I don't doubt but it is getting everyone agitated. Plus ISAs are a good tax avoidance wheeze.
An ISA is not tax avoidance.
“Tax avoidance is bending the rules of the tax system to gain a tax advantage, that parliament never intended.” (HMRC, 2015)
"It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law".
So in other words it is perfectly legal and this description is designed a) to give The State more power over you at their sole discretion and whim; and b) scare you. Which latter it appears to have done.
Or an understandable reaction by the revenue to rich people's accountants regularly taking the piss.
Nothing in that link (which both Mighty Alex and I used) says anything about it not being legal.
By "do not work" I presume they mean they aren't tax avoidance but are, rather, illegal.
You've clearly not followed all those stories about tax advisers who sold tax avoidance schemes as 'perfectly legal', only for their clients to loses court cases against HMRC... and have to repay millions ?
The guidance was intended to prevent more such embarrassments. Accountants (reputable ones, at least) now tend to run such schemes by the revenue, before marketing them to innocent punters.
Tax avoidance is legal; tax evasion is illegal. Sometimes it is not clear which a particular scheme is because it's pushing the line on something where the law is unclear or open to interpretation. That lack of clarity does not imply legality.
The HMRC website is saying that some schemes are legal but not "within the spirit of the law". Whatever tf that means, legally.
Link please? that doesn't sound like the thing HMRC says...
It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law.
Its basically a warning shot to contractors (and others) not to be gulled into bogus tax avoidance schemes. The Loan charge legislation should be enough to put people off.
Commonsense should have been enough for Contractors not to have got involved in IOM EBT payroll schemes in the first place. You sell yourself as a competent professional but then sign up to have your invoices paid to a company in the IOM on the understanding that they'll take their cut and return the balance as a "loan" free from tax.
One feature of the Budget is how few of the different predictions re tax increases actually happened - instead Reeves got the vast majority of additional tax from Employers NI.
This was a smart move - as we've seen with farmers as soon as you do something specific that really hits a particular group then a massive row follows.
This suggests to me that if she has to put up taxes again in future years she'll just put it all on Employers NI. The public don't see it on their payslip, they don't really understand it and nobody takes a really substantial hit.
Other than it is horrifically anti-business and anti-growth measure....politically it might be short term better, its another form of fiscal drag, but long term this is a terrible approach. Tax income, tax profits, don't tax turn-over and growth, and also its most effects lower paid end of the jobs spectrum.
One thing worth emphasising about this budget is that the Tax changes removed any incentive for employees to keep workers only doing 16 hours a week.
Now to avoid tax the worker has to do 8 hours and that doesn't work for them or their part time employees.
Except it isn't true.
The incentive was never on the employer to do that.
The incentive is on the employee who can get over ten grand per annum in benefits if they only do 16 hours and faces a roughly 80% tax rate if they do any more.
And the state places upon employers a legal responsibility to accept such "flexible working" unless they've got a good reason not to.
So nothing has been fixed.
Universal credit at least ensures not all benefits are lost if doing part time work
Tax evasion is a crime; you can be sent to prison. Successful tax avoidance is legal. Unsuccessful tax avoidance is illegal but not generally criminal on the basis you inform HMRC about what you have done. One subset of tax avoidance is stuff like ISAs, within the intention of the legislation and parliament. It can be unclear what the relevant intention should be. This can be viewed as tax mitigation.
You sound like you know what you are talking about.
What do you make of HMRC's now famous (on PB): "[Tax Avoidance] involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law."
One feature of the Budget is how few of the different predictions re tax increases actually happened - instead Reeves got the vast majority of additional tax from Employers NI.
This was a smart move - as we've seen with farmers as soon as you do something specific that really hits a particular group then a massive row follows.
This suggests to me that if she has to put up taxes again in future years she'll just put it all on Employers NI. The public don't see it on their payslip, they don't really understand it and nobody takes a really substantial hit.
Other than it is horrifically anti-business and anti-growth measure....politically it might be short term better, its another form of fiscal drag, but long term this is a terrible approach. Tax income, tax profits, don't tax turn-over and growth, and also its most effects lower paid end of the jobs spectrum.
One thing worth emphasising about this budget is that the Tax changes removed any incentive for employees to keep workers only doing 16 hours a week.
Now to avoid tax the worker has to do 8 hours and that doesn't work for them or their part time employees.
Except it isn't true.
The incentive was never on the employer to do that.
The incentive is on the employee who can get over ten grand per annum in benefits if they only do 16 hours and faces a roughly 80% tax rate if they do any more.
And the state places upon employers a legal responsibility to accept such "flexible working" unless they've got a good reason not to.
So nothing has been fixed.
Universal credit at least ensures not all benefits are lost if doing part time work
No, only about 80% real marginal tax rate.
Hands up who here wants to do more work when they won't receive 80% of the extra income earned . . .
Re farming what happens if those inheriting land can’t raise the IHT liability ?
It’s not like property which would generally be easier to sell .
Farmland is easy enough to sell. Phone the local auctioneers, cash lands in the bank about a month later.
There are lots of reasons why this policy is bad, but this isn't one.
Scenario: Farm is valued at 10k/acre for inheritance tax purposes. Farm is lets say 300 acres, so the bill is £200k (We'll assume the lad owns all the equipment and/or it's all depreciated for the sake of argument). The old Farmer's son sticks 20 acres up for sale, and only gets 5k/acre. A bit extreme, but just putting it out there for the sake of argument... Does the farm now get revalued to 1.5 million so the 200k isn't due ?
If the land is sold in open auction that is the value. It is really a bad idea but totally expected. It will also trash other businesses where succession is important. My ex MP says the first suicide has happened, not sure if that is true. We really have a vile incompetent government with a vile incompetent Prime Minister. But we knew that.
We seem to have a lot of press writing half baked incorrect stories to scare farmers.
It's been badly announced but I don't actually think there are many people at all who understand what the changes are yet alone the actual impact it has on people.
There is a story going around (no idea if it's true) on a supposed farmers' fb page describing a suicide which is getting everyone enraged.
I think farmers generally (can) have a very rough time and the suicide rate is very high. That said, governments of the past decades have prioritised mass market affordability of farm produce over farmers' well-being and it is difficult to argue that that has been the wrong policy.
Also it has long been known that buying agricultural land is a good tax avoidance wheeze but, a situation affecting 0.0n% of the farmers, still less of the population is not I believe good grounds for policy-making.
Removing a good tax avoidance wheeze is something that a sensible Government should be doing.
The suicide could be caused by a lot of things with this being the final one of a lot of straws. Farmer suicide is scarily high anyway as it's a lonely business that can feeling never ending..
I don't doubt but it is getting everyone agitated. Plus ISAs are a good tax avoidance wheeze.
An ISA is not tax avoidance.
“Tax avoidance is bending the rules of the tax system to gain a tax advantage, that parliament never intended.” (HMRC, 2015)
"It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law".
So in other words it is perfectly legal and this description is designed a) to give The State more power over you at their sole discretion and whim; and b) scare you. Which latter it appears to have done.
Or an understandable reaction by the revenue to rich people's accountants regularly taking the piss.
Nothing in that link (which both Mighty Alex and I used) says anything about it not being legal.
By "do not work" I presume they mean they aren't tax avoidance but are, rather, illegal.
You've clearly not followed all those stories about tax advisers who sold tax avoidance schemes as 'perfectly legal', only for their clients to loses court cases against HMRC... and have to repay millions ?
The guidance was intended to prevent more such embarrassments. Accountants (reputable ones, at least) now tend to run such schemes by the revenue, before marketing them to innocent punters.
Tax avoidance is legal; tax evasion is illegal. Sometimes it is not clear which a particular scheme is because it's pushing the line on something where the law is unclear or open to interpretation. That lack of clarity does not imply legality.
The HMRC website is saying that some schemes are legal but not "within the spirit of the law". Whatever tf that means, legally.
Presumably refers to the inevitable changing of tax rules to close loopholes. Some of these avoidance schemes can be very expensive to unwind, if the law changes. If your tax advisers have been taking the piss, you're taking that risk.
Also true but doesn't alter my point that tax avoidance is legal. ISAs are tax avoidance. Film investment schemes were then they weren't.
Doesn't affect the status of genuine tax avoidance.
Tax avoidance, and terms such as the spirit of the law or the "intent" of the drafter are all established in caselaw and have a meaning in the UK context. There's a long history of cases starting with House of Lords in W T Ramsay Ltd v IRC ([1981] STC 174) that have progressively sought to define and ring-fence artificial tax avoidance from acceptable tax planning. Since 2013 we've also had a general anti-abuse rule (GAAR), which uses the term "abuse" which is more common in European civil law settings, alongside our DOTAS (disclosure of tax avoidance) rules.
So for a layman, what does this mean, as defined in caselaw: "It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law."
Re farming what happens if those inheriting land can’t raise the IHT liability ?
It’s not like property which would generally be easier to sell .
Farmland is easy enough to sell. Phone the local auctioneers, cash lands in the bank about a month later.
There are lots of reasons why this policy is bad, but this isn't one.
Scenario: Farm is valued at 10k/acre for inheritance tax purposes. Farm is lets say 300 acres, so the bill is £200k (We'll assume the lad owns all the equipment and/or it's all depreciated for the sake of argument). The old Farmer's son sticks 20 acres up for sale, and only gets 5k/acre. A bit extreme, but just putting it out there for the sake of argument... Does the farm now get revalued to 1.5 million so the 200k isn't due ?
If the land is sold in open auction that is the value. It is really a bad idea but totally expected. It will also trash other businesses where succession is important. My ex MP says the first suicide has happened, not sure if that is true. We really have a vile incompetent government with a vile incompetent Prime Minister. But we knew that.
We seem to have a lot of press writing half baked incorrect stories to scare farmers.
It's been badly announced but I don't actually think there are many people at all who understand what the changes are yet alone the actual impact it has on people.
There is a story going around (no idea if it's true) on a supposed farmers' fb page describing a suicide which is getting everyone enraged.
I think farmers generally (can) have a very rough time and the suicide rate is very high. That said, governments of the past decades have prioritised mass market affordability of farm produce over farmers' well-being and it is difficult to argue that that has been the wrong policy.
Also it has long been known that buying agricultural land is a good tax avoidance wheeze but, a situation affecting 0.0n% of the farmers, still less of the population is not I believe good grounds for policy-making.
Removing a good tax avoidance wheeze is something that a sensible Government should be doing.
The suicide could be caused by a lot of things with this being the final one of a lot of straws. Farmer suicide is scarily high anyway as it's a lonely business that can feeling never ending..
From the Samaritans’ guidance on reporting suicide: “Speculation about the ‘trigger’ or cause of a suicide can oversimplify the issue and should be avoided. Suicide is extremely complex and most of the time there is no single event or factor that leads someone to take their own life.”
Perhaps the government should have thought twice before bringing pension funds into IHT from April 2027 - a proper Dick Turpin measure which will result in suicides ahead of that date I guarantee it.
What part of “Speculation about the ‘trigger’ or cause of a suicide can oversimplify the issue and should be avoided. Suicide is extremely complex and most of the time there is no single event or factor that leads someone to take their own life.” do you not understand?
I don't care. I don't share societies' stigma about it. The terminology should change for one thing; committing suicide implies wrongdoing and is a religious hangover.
This isn’t about stigma. This is about understanding that suicide is extremely complex and talking about “triggers” is misleading.
Re farming what happens if those inheriting land can’t raise the IHT liability ?
It’s not like property which would generally be easier to sell .
Farmland is easy enough to sell. Phone the local auctioneers, cash lands in the bank about a month later.
There are lots of reasons why this policy is bad, but this isn't one.
Scenario: Farm is valued at 10k/acre for inheritance tax purposes. Farm is lets say 300 acres, so the bill is £200k (We'll assume the lad owns all the equipment and/or it's all depreciated for the sake of argument). The old Farmer's son sticks 20 acres up for sale, and only gets 5k/acre. A bit extreme, but just putting it out there for the sake of argument... Does the farm now get revalued to 1.5 million so the 200k isn't due ?
If the land is sold in open auction that is the value. It is really a bad idea but totally expected. It will also trash other businesses where succession is important. My ex MP says the first suicide has happened, not sure if that is true. We really have a vile incompetent government with a vile incompetent Prime Minister. But we knew that.
We seem to have a lot of press writing half baked incorrect stories to scare farmers.
It's been badly announced but I don't actually think there are many people at all who understand what the changes are yet alone the actual impact it has on people.
There is a story going around (no idea if it's true) on a supposed farmers' fb page describing a suicide which is getting everyone enraged.
I think farmers generally (can) have a very rough time and the suicide rate is very high. That said, governments of the past decades have prioritised mass market affordability of farm produce over farmers' well-being and it is difficult to argue that that has been the wrong policy.
Also it has long been known that buying agricultural land is a good tax avoidance wheeze but, a situation affecting 0.0n% of the farmers, still less of the population is not I believe good grounds for policy-making.
Removing a good tax avoidance wheeze is something that a sensible Government should be doing.
The suicide could be caused by a lot of things with this being the final one of a lot of straws. Farmer suicide is scarily high anyway as it's a lonely business that can feeling never ending..
I don't doubt but it is getting everyone agitated. Plus ISAs are a good tax avoidance wheeze.
An ISA is not tax avoidance.
“Tax avoidance is bending the rules of the tax system to gain a tax advantage, that parliament never intended.” (HMRC, 2015)
"It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law".
So in other words it is perfectly legal and this description is designed a) to give The State more power over you at their sole discretion and whim; and b) scare you. Which latter it appears to have done.
Or an understandable reaction by the revenue to rich people's accountants regularly taking the piss.
Nothing in that link (which both Mighty Alex and I used) says anything about it not being legal.
By "do not work" I presume they mean they aren't tax avoidance but are, rather, illegal.
You've clearly not followed all those stories about tax advisers who sold tax avoidance schemes as 'perfectly legal', only for their clients to loses court cases against HMRC... and have to repay millions ?
The guidance was intended to prevent more such embarrassments. Accountants (reputable ones, at least) now tend to run such schemes by the revenue, before marketing them to innocent punters.
Tax avoidance is legal; tax evasion is illegal. Sometimes it is not clear which a particular scheme is because it's pushing the line on something where the law is unclear or open to interpretation. That lack of clarity does not imply legality.
The HMRC website is saying that some schemes are legal but not "within the spirit of the law". Whatever tf that means, legally.
Presumably refers to the inevitable changing of tax rules to close loopholes. Some of these avoidance schemes can be very expensive to unwind, if the law changes. If your tax advisers have been taking the piss, you're taking that risk.
Also true but doesn't alter my point that tax avoidance is legal. ISAs are tax avoidance. Film investment schemes were then they weren't.
Doesn't affect the status of genuine tax avoidance.
Tax avoidance, and terms such as the spirit of the law or the "intent" of the drafter are all established in caselaw and have a meaning in the UK context. There's a long history of cases starting with House of Lords in W T Ramsay Ltd v IRC ([1981] STC 174) that have progressively sought to define and ring-fence artificial tax avoidance from acceptable tax planning. Since 2013 we've also had a general anti-abuse rule (GAAR), which uses the term "abuse" which is more common in European civil law settings, alongside our DOTAS (disclosure of tax avoidance) rules.
So for a layman, what does this mean, as defined in caselaw: "It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law."
It means that you're doing something technically legal but not intended to be legal so don't be surprised if the law changes.
Which if its difficult to unwind if the law does change then can leave you considerably out of pocket.
Yes could be. I mean my - well-documented on here - position is that I don't think that Trump is a nazi, nor that he is a threat to "American democracy", nor that he will do very much damage in office beyond at the margin because the paraphernalia of the US state and constitution is powerful and has those famous checks and balances which would prevent any individual from subverting it or them.
With respect your opinion on the matter is a worth a hell of lot less than the likes of Esper, Milley, Mattis, McMaster and so on. The defence and security big-wigs that worked with Trump are warning everyone of the danger Trump represents. I'm going to side with them until someone more credible presents evidence that it's a storm in a teacup.
Lots of discussion on IHT; one of the questions I keep pondering is why it still exists.
It's absolutely hated, and raises very little revenue; 0.7% of government income.
For example, Jeremy Hunt used £10bln to cut NI by 2%. He could have abolished IHT instead and had £2.5bln left to play with.
Surely the smart politics would have been to ditch IHT entirely, rather than a modest reduction in NI which virtually everyone forgot about 24hrs later.
There are lots of advantages to wiping out a tax entirely rather than changing rates - the government would save the cost revenue collection, lots of people would save the cost of employing the tax planning parasites*, it would knock the bottom out of all the known dodges like buying farmland (with the amusing side effect of burning the fingers of those most egregiously attempting to tax dodge in this way as asset values drop back to their true levels).
Why on earth didn't he do it? If nothing else, he would have gone down in history as the chancellor who abolished IHT, and it's hard to imaging that would be an unpopular legacy.
*Maybe they could become social care workers, instead of us having to import millions of Nigerians
Remove IHT and when the next Government comes along do you tax the money as income received or a capital gain.
That's why you leave IHT because with it removed other options become available that would be worse...
Those options exist now, Reeves may yet come back to them next year when she's trying to fill in the massive black holes she created this time round.
The difference is that once you've nuked IHT, any form of reinstatment will be massively unpopular, and politicians tend not to survive introducing or raising really unpopular taxes (see also the Poll Tax or the way that fuel duty has been flat for years). If Hunk had killed IHT, I don't think Reeves would have survived introducing IT or CGT for benificaries of Estates, and so she wouldn't have done it.
Reeves lacked the resolve to increase fuel duty and blame Hunt for it. She could have announced in the budget that the nation's finances were so parlous that she had no option but to stick to Hunt's planned increase in fuel duty. "The Tory tax rise they didn't want to tell you about."
She flunked it. The idea that she would have dared to reintroduce a form of IHT is not supported by experience.
Yes could be. I mean my - well-documented on here - position is that I don't think that Trump is a nazi, nor that he is a threat to "American democracy", nor that he will do very much damage in office beyond at the margin because the paraphernalia of the US state and constitution is powerful and has those famous checks and balances which would prevent any individual from subverting it or them.
With respect your opinion on the matter is a worth a hell of lot less than the likes of Esper, Milley, Mattis, McMaster and so on. The defence and security big-wigs that worked with Trump are warning everyone of the danger Trump represents. I'm going to side with them until someone more credible presents evidence that it's a storm in a teacup.
The reaction to Trump’s comments about Liz Cheney seems to be classic TDS. He’s asking how war hawks would feel if they were the ones having guns pointed at them.
One feature of the Budget is how few of the different predictions re tax increases actually happened - instead Reeves got the vast majority of additional tax from Employers NI.
This was a smart move - as we've seen with farmers as soon as you do something specific that really hits a particular group then a massive row follows.
This suggests to me that if she has to put up taxes again in future years she'll just put it all on Employers NI. The public don't see it on their payslip, they don't really understand it and nobody takes a really substantial hit.
Other than it is horrifically anti-business and anti-growth measure....politically it might be short term better, its another form of fiscal drag, but long term this is a terrible approach. Tax income, tax profits, don't tax turn-over and growth, and also its most effects lower paid end of the jobs spectrum.
One thing worth emphasising about this budget is that the Tax changes removed any incentive for employees to keep workers only doing 16 hours a week.
Now to avoid tax the worker has to do 8 hours and that doesn't work for them or their part time employees.
Except it isn't true.
The incentive was never on the employer to do that.
The incentive is on the employee who can get over ten grand per annum in benefits if they only do 16 hours and faces a roughly 80% tax rate if they do any more.
And the state places upon employers a legal responsibility to accept such "flexible working" unless they've got a good reason not to.
So nothing has been fixed.
Universal credit at least ensures not all benefits are lost if doing part time work
No, only about 80% real marginal tax rate.
Hands up who here wants to do more work when they won't receive 80% of the extra income earned . . .
Liz Cheney issues a response on X to Trump's comments: “This is how dictators destroy free nations. They threaten those who speak against them with death. We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant.”
Now that inheritance tax - and the risk of more assets being dragged into scope - is back in everyone's mind, I expect it's going to be a good Christmas for family jewellery to make it's way quietly from mother to daughter.
Yes could be. I mean my - well-documented on here - position is that I don't think that Trump is a nazi, nor that he is a threat to "American democracy", nor that he will do very much damage in office beyond at the margin because the paraphernalia of the US state and constitution is powerful and has those famous checks and balances which would prevent any individual from subverting it or them.
With respect your opinion on the matter is a worth a hell of lot less than the likes of Esper, Milley, Mattis, McMaster and so on. The defence and security big-wigs that worked with Trump are warning everyone of the danger Trump represents. I'm going to side with them until someone more credible presents evidence that it's a storm in a teacup.
Yep good call you do that.
Presumably you agree with this description of Trump and fascism:
“a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy,”
I mean if that's what you and the good general believe then you should take all appropriate action to guard against it.
Lots of discussion on IHT; one of the questions I keep pondering is why it still exists.
It's absolutely hated, and raises very little revenue; 0.7% of government income.
For example, Jeremy Hunt used £10bln to cut NI by 2%. He could have abolished IHT instead and had £2.5bln left to play with.
Surely the smart politics would have been to ditch IHT entirely, rather than a modest reduction in NI which virtually everyone forgot about 24hrs later.
There are lots of advantages to wiping out a tax entirely rather than changing rates - the government would save the cost revenue collection, lots of people would save the cost of employing the tax planning parasites*, it would knock the bottom out of all the known dodges like buying farmland (with the amusing side effect of burning the fingers of those most egregiously attempting to tax dodge in this way as asset values drop back to their true levels).
Why on earth didn't he do it? If nothing else, he would have gone down in history as the chancellor who abolished IHT, and it's hard to imaging that would be an unpopular legacy.
*Maybe they could become social care workers, instead of us having to import millions of Nigerians
Remove IHT and when the next Government comes along do you tax the money as income received or a capital gain.
That's why you leave IHT because with it removed other options become available that would be worse...
Those options exist now, Reeves may yet come back to them next year when she's trying to fill in the massive black holes she created this time round.
The difference is that once you've nuked IHT, any form of reinstatment will be massively unpopular, and politicians tend not to survive introducing or raising really unpopular taxes (see also the Poll Tax or the way that fuel duty has been flat for years). If Hunk had killed IHT, I don't think Reeves would have survived introducing IT or CGT for benificaries of Estates, and so she wouldn't have done it.
Reeves lacked the resolve to increase fuel duty and blame Hunt for it. She could have announced in the budget that the nation's finances were so parlous that she had no option but to stick to Hunt's planned increase in fuel duty. "The Tory tax rise they didn't want to tell you about."
She flunked it. The idea that she would have dared to reintroduce a form of IHT is not supported by experience.
Why should she have increased fuel duty? Its a bloody stupid tax to increase now.
Its a hateful tax that is the most regressive tax of all, taking a considerable share of the poorest income but taking considerably less (to none at all) of the wealthiest incomes. Those who can afford a new EV don't pay a penny, while those who rely on their old banger to work are out of pocket.
Its also a stupid tax to increase as its being eliminated. HMRC was making a fortune from drivers via fuel duty but need to diversify away from that as the golden goose is losing its feathers and won't be consuming fuel anymore - HMRC needs to find some other source of revenue instead for general taxation rather than fleecing drivers.
Its also one of the most inflationary taxes to raise.
Why increase a tax today that is being phased out? Its pointless.
There is not a single good reason to increase fuel duty. So well done Reeves for not being so stupid as to do it.
Re farming what happens if those inheriting land can’t raise the IHT liability ?
It’s not like property which would generally be easier to sell .
Farmland is easy enough to sell. Phone the local auctioneers, cash lands in the bank about a month later.
There are lots of reasons why this policy is bad, but this isn't one.
Scenario: Farm is valued at 10k/acre for inheritance tax purposes. Farm is lets say 300 acres, so the bill is £200k (We'll assume the lad owns all the equipment and/or it's all depreciated for the sake of argument). The old Farmer's son sticks 20 acres up for sale, and only gets 5k/acre. A bit extreme, but just putting it out there for the sake of argument... Does the farm now get revalued to 1.5 million so the 200k isn't due ?
If the land is sold in open auction that is the value. It is really a bad idea but totally expected. It will also trash other businesses where succession is important. My ex MP says the first suicide has happened, not sure if that is true. We really have a vile incompetent government with a vile incompetent Prime Minister. But we knew that.
We seem to have a lot of press writing half baked incorrect stories to scare farmers.
It's been badly announced but I don't actually think there are many people at all who understand what the changes are yet alone the actual impact it has on people.
There is a story going around (no idea if it's true) on a supposed farmers' fb page describing a suicide which is getting everyone enraged.
I think farmers generally (can) have a very rough time and the suicide rate is very high. That said, governments of the past decades have prioritised mass market affordability of farm produce over farmers' well-being and it is difficult to argue that that has been the wrong policy.
Also it has long been known that buying agricultural land is a good tax avoidance wheeze but, a situation affecting 0.0n% of the farmers, still less of the population is not I believe good grounds for policy-making.
Removing a good tax avoidance wheeze is something that a sensible Government should be doing.
The suicide could be caused by a lot of things with this being the final one of a lot of straws. Farmer suicide is scarily high anyway as it's a lonely business that can feeling never ending..
I don't doubt but it is getting everyone agitated. Plus ISAs are a good tax avoidance wheeze.
An ISA is not tax avoidance.
“Tax avoidance is bending the rules of the tax system to gain a tax advantage, that parliament never intended.” (HMRC, 2015)
"It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law".
So in other words it is perfectly legal and this description is designed a) to give The State more power over you at their sole discretion and whim; and b) scare you. Which latter it appears to have done.
Or an understandable reaction by the revenue to rich people's accountants regularly taking the piss.
Nothing in that link (which both Mighty Alex and I used) says anything about it not being legal.
By "do not work" I presume they mean they aren't tax avoidance but are, rather, illegal.
You've clearly not followed all those stories about tax advisers who sold tax avoidance schemes as 'perfectly legal', only for their clients to loses court cases against HMRC... and have to repay millions ?
The guidance was intended to prevent more such embarrassments. Accountants (reputable ones, at least) now tend to run such schemes by the revenue, before marketing them to innocent punters.
Tax avoidance is legal; tax evasion is illegal. Sometimes it is not clear which a particular scheme is because it's pushing the line on something where the law is unclear or open to interpretation. That lack of clarity does not imply legality.
The HMRC website is saying that some schemes are legal but not "within the spirit of the law". Whatever tf that means, legally.
Presumably refers to the inevitable changing of tax rules to close loopholes. Some of these avoidance schemes can be very expensive to unwind, if the law changes. If your tax advisers have been taking the piss, you're taking that risk.
Also true but doesn't alter my point that tax avoidance is legal. ISAs are tax avoidance. Film investment schemes were then they weren't.
Doesn't affect the status of genuine tax avoidance.
Tax avoidance, and terms such as the spirit of the law or the "intent" of the drafter are all established in caselaw and have a meaning in the UK context. There's a long history of cases starting with House of Lords in W T Ramsay Ltd v IRC ([1981] STC 174) that have progressively sought to define and ring-fence artificial tax avoidance from acceptable tax planning. Since 2013 we've also had a general anti-abuse rule (GAAR), which uses the term "abuse" which is more common in European civil law settings, alongside our DOTAS (disclosure of tax avoidance) rules.
So for a layman, what does this mean, as defined in caselaw: "It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law."
It means that you're doing something technically legal but not intended to be legal so don't be surprised if the law changes.
Which if its difficult to unwind if the law does change then can leave you considerably out of pocket.
Sounds weird. Interested in what the law says. Are people in danger of being charged with acting outside the spirit of the law?
It's reached the point that if the popular vote is 50-50ish IRL I'll be surprised. I think they are just taking the piss at this point "Yeah, 50/50 mate. Don't forget the 100k fee, yeah. In cash".
One feature of the Budget is how few of the different predictions re tax increases actually happened - instead Reeves got the vast majority of additional tax from Employers NI.
This was a smart move - as we've seen with farmers as soon as you do something specific that really hits a particular group then a massive row follows.
This suggests to me that if she has to put up taxes again in future years she'll just put it all on Employers NI. The public don't see it on their payslip, they don't really understand it and nobody takes a really substantial hit.
Other than it is horrifically anti-business and anti-growth measure....politically it might be short term better, its another form of fiscal drag, but long term this is a terrible approach. Tax income, tax profits, don't tax turn-over and growth, and also its most effects lower paid end of the jobs spectrum.
One thing worth emphasising about this budget is that the Tax changes removed any incentive for employees to keep workers only doing 16 hours a week.
Now to avoid tax the worker has to do 8 hours and that doesn't work for them or their part time employees.
Except it isn't true.
The incentive was never on the employer to do that.
The incentive is on the employee who can get over ten grand per annum in benefits if they only do 16 hours and faces a roughly 80% tax rate if they do any more.
And the state places upon employers a legal responsibility to accept such "flexible working" unless they've got a good reason not to.
So nothing has been fixed.
Universal credit at least ensures not all benefits are lost if doing part time work
No, only about 80% real marginal tax rate.
Hands up who here wants to do more work when they won't receive 80% of the extra income earned . . .
Was 100% real marginal tax rate before
I know, which was worse, but doesn't make today's situation acceptable.
Nobody should ever face a real tax rate over 50%, let alone 80%.
One feature of the Budget is how few of the different predictions re tax increases actually happened - instead Reeves got the vast majority of additional tax from Employers NI.
This was a smart move - as we've seen with farmers as soon as you do something specific that really hits a particular group then a massive row follows.
This suggests to me that if she has to put up taxes again in future years she'll just put it all on Employers NI. The public don't see it on their payslip, they don't really understand it and nobody takes a really substantial hit.
Other than it is horrifically anti-business and anti-growth measure....politically it might be short term better, its another form of fiscal drag, but long term this is a terrible approach. Tax income, tax profits, don't tax turn-over and growth, and also its most effects lower paid end of the jobs spectrum.
One thing worth emphasising about this budget is that the Tax changes removed any incentive for employees to keep workers only doing 16 hours a week.
Now to avoid tax the worker has to do 8 hours and that doesn't work for them or their part time employees.
Except it isn't true.
The incentive was never on the employer to do that.
The incentive is on the employee who can get over ten grand per annum in benefits if they only do 16 hours and faces a roughly 80% tax rate if they do any more.
And the state places upon employers a legal responsibility to accept such "flexible working" unless they've got a good reason not to.
So nothing has been fixed.
Universal credit at least ensures not all benefits are lost if doing part time work
No, only about 80% real marginal tax rate.
Hands up who here wants to do more work when they won't receive 80% of the extra income earned . . .
Was 100% real marginal tax rate before
Would you be prepared to work in a shitty job for about £1 an hour?
Re farming what happens if those inheriting land can’t raise the IHT liability ?
It’s not like property which would generally be easier to sell .
Farmland is easy enough to sell. Phone the local auctioneers, cash lands in the bank about a month later.
There are lots of reasons why this policy is bad, but this isn't one.
Scenario: Farm is valued at 10k/acre for inheritance tax purposes. Farm is lets say 300 acres, so the bill is £200k (We'll assume the lad owns all the equipment and/or it's all depreciated for the sake of argument). The old Farmer's son sticks 20 acres up for sale, and only gets 5k/acre. A bit extreme, but just putting it out there for the sake of argument... Does the farm now get revalued to 1.5 million so the 200k isn't due ?
If the land is sold in open auction that is the value. It is really a bad idea but totally expected. It will also trash other businesses where succession is important. My ex MP says the first suicide has happened, not sure if that is true. We really have a vile incompetent government with a vile incompetent Prime Minister. But we knew that.
We seem to have a lot of press writing half baked incorrect stories to scare farmers.
It's been badly announced but I don't actually think there are many people at all who understand what the changes are yet alone the actual impact it has on people.
There is a story going around (no idea if it's true) on a supposed farmers' fb page describing a suicide which is getting everyone enraged.
I think farmers generally (can) have a very rough time and the suicide rate is very high. That said, governments of the past decades have prioritised mass market affordability of farm produce over farmers' well-being and it is difficult to argue that that has been the wrong policy.
Also it has long been known that buying agricultural land is a good tax avoidance wheeze but, a situation affecting 0.0n% of the farmers, still less of the population is not I believe good grounds for policy-making.
Removing a good tax avoidance wheeze is something that a sensible Government should be doing.
The suicide could be caused by a lot of things with this being the final one of a lot of straws. Farmer suicide is scarily high anyway as it's a lonely business that can feeling never ending..
I don't doubt but it is getting everyone agitated. Plus ISAs are a good tax avoidance wheeze.
An ISA is not tax avoidance.
“Tax avoidance is bending the rules of the tax system to gain a tax advantage, that parliament never intended.” (HMRC, 2015)
"It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law".
So in other words it is perfectly legal and this description is designed a) to give The State more power over you at their sole discretion and whim; and b) scare you. Which latter it appears to have done.
Or an understandable reaction by the revenue to rich people's accountants regularly taking the piss.
Nothing in that link (which both Mighty Alex and I used) says anything about it not being legal.
By "do not work" I presume they mean they aren't tax avoidance but are, rather, illegal.
You've clearly not followed all those stories about tax advisers who sold tax avoidance schemes as 'perfectly legal', only for their clients to loses court cases against HMRC... and have to repay millions ?
The guidance was intended to prevent more such embarrassments. Accountants (reputable ones, at least) now tend to run such schemes by the revenue, before marketing them to innocent punters.
Tax avoidance is legal; tax evasion is illegal. Sometimes it is not clear which a particular scheme is because it's pushing the line on something where the law is unclear or open to interpretation. That lack of clarity does not imply legality.
The HMRC website is saying that some schemes are legal but not "within the spirit of the law". Whatever tf that means, legally.
Presumably refers to the inevitable changing of tax rules to close loopholes. Some of these avoidance schemes can be very expensive to unwind, if the law changes. If your tax advisers have been taking the piss, you're taking that risk.
Also true but doesn't alter my point that tax avoidance is legal. ISAs are tax avoidance. Film investment schemes were then they weren't.
Doesn't affect the status of genuine tax avoidance.
Tax avoidance, and terms such as the spirit of the law or the "intent" of the drafter are all established in caselaw and have a meaning in the UK context. There's a long history of cases starting with House of Lords in W T Ramsay Ltd v IRC ([1981] STC 174) that have progressively sought to define and ring-fence artificial tax avoidance from acceptable tax planning. Since 2013 we've also had a general anti-abuse rule (GAAR), which uses the term "abuse" which is more common in European civil law settings, alongside our DOTAS (disclosure of tax avoidance) rules.
So for a layman, what does this mean, as defined in caselaw: "It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law."
It means that if you are taken to court the judge will rule in your favour, but you could be still branded a rampent tax avoider not paying your fair amount of tax to fund the NHS in the press and by politicians.
Re farming what happens if those inheriting land can’t raise the IHT liability ?
It’s not like property which would generally be easier to sell .
Farmland is easy enough to sell. Phone the local auctioneers, cash lands in the bank about a month later.
There are lots of reasons why this policy is bad, but this isn't one.
Scenario: Farm is valued at 10k/acre for inheritance tax purposes. Farm is lets say 300 acres, so the bill is £200k (We'll assume the lad owns all the equipment and/or it's all depreciated for the sake of argument). The old Farmer's son sticks 20 acres up for sale, and only gets 5k/acre. A bit extreme, but just putting it out there for the sake of argument... Does the farm now get revalued to 1.5 million so the 200k isn't due ?
If the land is sold in open auction that is the value. It is really a bad idea but totally expected. It will also trash other businesses where succession is important. My ex MP says the first suicide has happened, not sure if that is true. We really have a vile incompetent government with a vile incompetent Prime Minister. But we knew that.
We seem to have a lot of press writing half baked incorrect stories to scare farmers.
It's been badly announced but I don't actually think there are many people at all who understand what the changes are yet alone the actual impact it has on people.
There is a story going around (no idea if it's true) on a supposed farmers' fb page describing a suicide which is getting everyone enraged.
I think farmers generally (can) have a very rough time and the suicide rate is very high. That said, governments of the past decades have prioritised mass market affordability of farm produce over farmers' well-being and it is difficult to argue that that has been the wrong policy.
Also it has long been known that buying agricultural land is a good tax avoidance wheeze but, a situation affecting 0.0n% of the farmers, still less of the population is not I believe good grounds for policy-making.
Removing a good tax avoidance wheeze is something that a sensible Government should be doing.
The suicide could be caused by a lot of things with this being the final one of a lot of straws. Farmer suicide is scarily high anyway as it's a lonely business that can feeling never ending..
I don't doubt but it is getting everyone agitated. Plus ISAs are a good tax avoidance wheeze.
An ISA is not tax avoidance.
“Tax avoidance is bending the rules of the tax system to gain a tax advantage, that parliament never intended.” (HMRC, 2015)
"It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law".
So in other words it is perfectly legal and this description is designed a) to give The State more power over you at their sole discretion and whim; and b) scare you. Which latter it appears to have done.
Or an understandable reaction by the revenue to rich people's accountants regularly taking the piss.
Nothing in that link (which both Mighty Alex and I used) says anything about it not being legal.
By "do not work" I presume they mean they aren't tax avoidance but are, rather, illegal.
You've clearly not followed all those stories about tax advisers who sold tax avoidance schemes as 'perfectly legal', only for their clients to loses court cases against HMRC... and have to repay millions ?
The guidance was intended to prevent more such embarrassments. Accountants (reputable ones, at least) now tend to run such schemes by the revenue, before marketing them to innocent punters.
Tax avoidance is legal; tax evasion is illegal. Sometimes it is not clear which a particular scheme is because it's pushing the line on something where the law is unclear or open to interpretation. That lack of clarity does not imply legality.
The HMRC website is saying that some schemes are legal but not "within the spirit of the law". Whatever tf that means, legally.
Presumably refers to the inevitable changing of tax rules to close loopholes. Some of these avoidance schemes can be very expensive to unwind, if the law changes. If your tax advisers have been taking the piss, you're taking that risk.
Also true but doesn't alter my point that tax avoidance is legal. ISAs are tax avoidance. Film investment schemes were then they weren't.
Doesn't affect the status of genuine tax avoidance.
Tax avoidance, and terms such as the spirit of the law or the "intent" of the drafter are all established in caselaw and have a meaning in the UK context. There's a long history of cases starting with House of Lords in W T Ramsay Ltd v IRC ([1981] STC 174) that have progressively sought to define and ring-fence artificial tax avoidance from acceptable tax planning. Since 2013 we've also had a general anti-abuse rule (GAAR), which uses the term "abuse" which is more common in European civil law settings, alongside our DOTAS (disclosure of tax avoidance) rules.
So for a layman, what does this mean, as defined in caselaw: "It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law."
It means that you're doing something technically legal but not intended to be legal so don't be surprised if the law changes.
Which if its difficult to unwind if the law does change then can leave you considerably out of pocket.
Sounds weird. Interested in what the law says. Are people in danger of being charged with acting outside the spirit of the law?
Yes, if the law changes. Which can happen quite quickly sometimes for things that are outside the spirit of the law.
Are there odds on him calling Kamala a c*** by next Tuesday? You just know he does it in private anyway.
I don't think he is that vulgar. Non-drinking, non-smoking/drug-taking.
Plus of that age. I don't think it is in his vernacular.
But we can have a bet if you would like.
Lol, a man who calls his opponents stupid bastards, scum and garbage, mentions the size of a famous sportsman's cock & does an impersonation of a disabled journalist during speeches, and boasts about grabbing women by the pussy isn't 'that vulgar'. A judgment for the ages.
His musings about executing Liz Cheney by firing squad is quite startling. I do wonder whether Trump will enact his wet dreams and take the ultimate action against anyone he believes have dimished him over the years. The list, I suspect will be incredibly long.
Are we at peak derangement yet? He's not literally calling to shoot people by firing squad, in the same way he's not literarily having a fascist rally in Maddison square garden, or going to literally have a bloodbath.
This is bonkers stuff. But, once you have convinced yourself the man is a fascist you can convince yourself all his utterances can be interrelated in the worse possible bad faith way.
It is an interesting phenomenon to see many/most of PB so deranged.
I can't really understand it. Don't like his policies on immigration by all means, but going off on one because he says he wants to deport illegal immigrants (while no doubt sipping their chai latte from one of *those* mugs) is super strange.
I think it's fear. Some people need to channel their otherwise illogical and unfounded fears into a concrete form. That way they can rail against Trump, who in this case is the manifestation of their fears and take comfort, either in his eventual defeat, or in the solidarity they find from others who think the same.
Otherwise the whole nazi/fascist/sending troops to kill Americans thing is not really fathomable.
If you think most of PB is deranged; perhaps they're the 'normal' ones and it is your view on matters that is 'deranged' ?
Yes could be. I mean my - well-documented on here - position is that I don't think that Trump is a nazi, nor that he is a threat to "American democracy", nor that he will do very much damage in office beyond at the margin because the paraphernalia of the US state and constitution is powerful and has those famous checks and balances which would prevent any individual from subverting it or them.
Any egregious example of what he has done or what he is feared as doing has been done countless times in other democracies the world over from time immemorial.
I have also said he is a laugh at, not laugh with kind of guy whose pronouncements are just extraordinary, but then that's America.
What I do respect is almost half (perhaps more) of the American voting public have decided that he's their man and it irritates me that people on PB in their typical bien pensant, Guardian letter-writing, oh aren't they all ghastly way, seem to think they know better.
And every time someone does call him a nazi or whatnot (not on PB, obvs, because no one cares) it serves to solidify the support he has.
That was a politer answer than my comment deserved.
My own view is that Trump is not a Nazi, which is a very specific thing. He is not a fascist - yet.
But I do think he is a threat to American democracy - as we saw on January 6th, and by the comments that he, and people around him, have made. And I think the deportations his team have been mooting would be disastrous for the country.
Words have power, especially if you are close to becoming the leader of the dominant world power. That's why you cannot just laugh 'at' him. What he says matters.
The reaction to Trump’s comments about Liz Cheney seems to be classic TDS. He’s asking how war hawks would feel if they were the ones having guns pointed at them.
One feature of the Budget is how few of the different predictions re tax increases actually happened - instead Reeves got the vast majority of additional tax from Employers NI.
This was a smart move - as we've seen with farmers as soon as you do something specific that really hits a particular group then a massive row follows.
This suggests to me that if she has to put up taxes again in future years she'll just put it all on Employers NI. The public don't see it on their payslip, they don't really understand it and nobody takes a really substantial hit.
Other than it is horrifically anti-business and anti-growth measure....politically it might be short term better, its another form of fiscal drag, but long term this is a terrible approach. Tax income, tax profits, don't tax turn-over and growth, and also its most effects lower paid end of the jobs spectrum.
One thing worth emphasising about this budget is that the Tax changes removed any incentive for employees to keep workers only doing 16 hours a week.
Now to avoid tax the worker has to do 8 hours and that doesn't work for them or their part time employees.
Except it isn't true.
The incentive was never on the employer to do that.
The incentive is on the employee who can get over ten grand per annum in benefits if they only do 16 hours and faces a roughly 80% tax rate if they do any more.
And the state places upon employers a legal responsibility to accept such "flexible working" unless they've got a good reason not to.
So nothing has been fixed.
Universal credit at least ensures not all benefits are lost if doing part time work
No, only about 80% real marginal tax rate.
Hands up who here wants to do more work when they won't receive 80% of the extra income earned . . .
Was 100% real marginal tax rate before
Would you be prepared to work in a shitty job for about £1 an hour?
Yes as if you work in a shitty job it is still better for your mental health and self worth than sitting on benefits on the sofa every weekday. Plus the best way to get a higher paid job is to have a job in the first place
Re farming what happens if those inheriting land can’t raise the IHT liability ?
It’s not like property which would generally be easier to sell .
Farmland is easy enough to sell. Phone the local auctioneers, cash lands in the bank about a month later.
There are lots of reasons why this policy is bad, but this isn't one.
Scenario: Farm is valued at 10k/acre for inheritance tax purposes. Farm is lets say 300 acres, so the bill is £200k (We'll assume the lad owns all the equipment and/or it's all depreciated for the sake of argument). The old Farmer's son sticks 20 acres up for sale, and only gets 5k/acre. A bit extreme, but just putting it out there for the sake of argument... Does the farm now get revalued to 1.5 million so the 200k isn't due ?
If the land is sold in open auction that is the value. It is really a bad idea but totally expected. It will also trash other businesses where succession is important. My ex MP says the first suicide has happened, not sure if that is true. We really have a vile incompetent government with a vile incompetent Prime Minister. But we knew that.
We seem to have a lot of press writing half baked incorrect stories to scare farmers.
It's been badly announced but I don't actually think there are many people at all who understand what the changes are yet alone the actual impact it has on people.
There is a story going around (no idea if it's true) on a supposed farmers' fb page describing a suicide which is getting everyone enraged.
I think farmers generally (can) have a very rough time and the suicide rate is very high. That said, governments of the past decades have prioritised mass market affordability of farm produce over farmers' well-being and it is difficult to argue that that has been the wrong policy.
Also it has long been known that buying agricultural land is a good tax avoidance wheeze but, a situation affecting 0.0n% of the farmers, still less of the population is not I believe good grounds for policy-making.
Removing a good tax avoidance wheeze is something that a sensible Government should be doing.
The suicide could be caused by a lot of things with this being the final one of a lot of straws. Farmer suicide is scarily high anyway as it's a lonely business that can feeling never ending..
I don't doubt but it is getting everyone agitated. Plus ISAs are a good tax avoidance wheeze.
An ISA is not tax avoidance.
“Tax avoidance is bending the rules of the tax system to gain a tax advantage, that parliament never intended.” (HMRC, 2015)
"It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law".
So in other words it is perfectly legal and this description is designed a) to give The State more power over you at their sole discretion and whim; and b) scare you. Which latter it appears to have done.
Or an understandable reaction by the revenue to rich people's accountants regularly taking the piss.
Nothing in that link (which both Mighty Alex and I used) says anything about it not being legal.
By "do not work" I presume they mean they aren't tax avoidance but are, rather, illegal.
You've clearly not followed all those stories about tax advisers who sold tax avoidance schemes as 'perfectly legal', only for their clients to loses court cases against HMRC... and have to repay millions ?
The guidance was intended to prevent more such embarrassments. Accountants (reputable ones, at least) now tend to run such schemes by the revenue, before marketing them to innocent punters.
Tax avoidance is legal; tax evasion is illegal. Sometimes it is not clear which a particular scheme is because it's pushing the line on something where the law is unclear or open to interpretation. That lack of clarity does not imply legality.
The HMRC website is saying that some schemes are legal but not "within the spirit of the law". Whatever tf that means, legally.
Presumably refers to the inevitable changing of tax rules to close loopholes. Some of these avoidance schemes can be very expensive to unwind, if the law changes. If your tax advisers have been taking the piss, you're taking that risk.
Also true but doesn't alter my point that tax avoidance is legal. ISAs are tax avoidance. Film investment schemes were then they weren't.
Doesn't affect the status of genuine tax avoidance.
Tax avoidance, and terms such as the spirit of the law or the "intent" of the drafter are all established in caselaw and have a meaning in the UK context. There's a long history of cases starting with House of Lords in W T Ramsay Ltd v IRC ([1981] STC 174) that have progressively sought to define and ring-fence artificial tax avoidance from acceptable tax planning. Since 2013 we've also had a general anti-abuse rule (GAAR), which uses the term "abuse" which is more common in European civil law settings, alongside our DOTAS (disclosure of tax avoidance) rules.
So for a layman, what does this mean, as defined in caselaw: "It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law."
There are a number of, for want of a better word, "hallmarks" of tax avoidance in the caselaw and also in the DOTAS guidance. These are, and I paraphrase:
- a degree of artificiality, i.e. the taxpayer has gone beyond simply doing things in a certain way to get the better tax outcome, they've actually inserted steps in the process that are only there for tax reasons - pre-meditated / preordained: there's evidence that what the taxpayer did was planned in advance - at odds with the intent of the drafter of the legislation: courts often spend a lot of effort establishing what was in the mind of the government when they introduced legislation. If a tax outcome is at odds with what they intended then this is the world of loopholes
Ramsey is the most famous case because all anti-avoidance caselaw really evolves from there. But in the other corner we have the venerable old Inland Revenue Commissioners v. Duke of Westminster [1936] A.C. 1;[1] 19 TC 490, with the important principle "Every man is entitled, if he can, to order his affairs so that the tax attaching under the appropriate Acts is less than it otherwise would be. If he succeeds in ordering them so as to secure this result, then, however unappreciative the Commissioners of Inland Revenue or his fellow tax-payers may be of his ingenuity, he cannot be compelled to pay an increased tax."
Ramsey and subsequent cases don't completely overturn this principle but they do make it more contingent. In Ramsey the key phrase was "A preordained series of transactions – or a single composite transaction – which includes Steps inserted which have no commercial purpose apart from tax avoidance or deferral."
Re farming what happens if those inheriting land can’t raise the IHT liability ?
It’s not like property which would generally be easier to sell .
Farmland is easy enough to sell. Phone the local auctioneers, cash lands in the bank about a month later.
There are lots of reasons why this policy is bad, but this isn't one.
Scenario: Farm is valued at 10k/acre for inheritance tax purposes. Farm is lets say 300 acres, so the bill is £200k (We'll assume the lad owns all the equipment and/or it's all depreciated for the sake of argument). The old Farmer's son sticks 20 acres up for sale, and only gets 5k/acre. A bit extreme, but just putting it out there for the sake of argument... Does the farm now get revalued to 1.5 million so the 200k isn't due ?
If the land is sold in open auction that is the value. It is really a bad idea but totally expected. It will also trash other businesses where succession is important. My ex MP says the first suicide has happened, not sure if that is true. We really have a vile incompetent government with a vile incompetent Prime Minister. But we knew that.
We seem to have a lot of press writing half baked incorrect stories to scare farmers.
It's been badly announced but I don't actually think there are many people at all who understand what the changes are yet alone the actual impact it has on people.
There is a story going around (no idea if it's true) on a supposed farmers' fb page describing a suicide which is getting everyone enraged.
I think farmers generally (can) have a very rough time and the suicide rate is very high. That said, governments of the past decades have prioritised mass market affordability of farm produce over farmers' well-being and it is difficult to argue that that has been the wrong policy.
Also it has long been known that buying agricultural land is a good tax avoidance wheeze but, a situation affecting 0.0n% of the farmers, still less of the population is not I believe good grounds for policy-making.
Removing a good tax avoidance wheeze is something that a sensible Government should be doing.
The suicide could be caused by a lot of things with this being the final one of a lot of straws. Farmer suicide is scarily high anyway as it's a lonely business that can feeling never ending..
I don't doubt but it is getting everyone agitated. Plus ISAs are a good tax avoidance wheeze.
An ISA is not tax avoidance.
“Tax avoidance is bending the rules of the tax system to gain a tax advantage, that parliament never intended.” (HMRC, 2015)
"It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law".
So in other words it is perfectly legal and this description is designed a) to give The State more power over you at their sole discretion and whim; and b) scare you. Which latter it appears to have done.
Or an understandable reaction by the revenue to rich people's accountants regularly taking the piss.
Nothing in that link (which both Mighty Alex and I used) says anything about it not being legal.
By "do not work" I presume they mean they aren't tax avoidance but are, rather, illegal.
You've clearly not followed all those stories about tax advisers who sold tax avoidance schemes as 'perfectly legal', only for their clients to loses court cases against HMRC... and have to repay millions ?
The guidance was intended to prevent more such embarrassments. Accountants (reputable ones, at least) now tend to run such schemes by the revenue, before marketing them to innocent punters.
Tax avoidance is legal; tax evasion is illegal. Sometimes it is not clear which a particular scheme is because it's pushing the line on something where the law is unclear or open to interpretation. That lack of clarity does not imply legality.
The HMRC website is saying that some schemes are legal but not "within the spirit of the law". Whatever tf that means, legally.
Presumably refers to the inevitable changing of tax rules to close loopholes. Some of these avoidance schemes can be very expensive to unwind, if the law changes. If your tax advisers have been taking the piss, you're taking that risk.
Also true but doesn't alter my point that tax avoidance is legal. ISAs are tax avoidance. Film investment schemes were then they weren't.
Doesn't affect the status of genuine tax avoidance.
Tax avoidance, and terms such as the spirit of the law or the "intent" of the drafter are all established in caselaw and have a meaning in the UK context. There's a long history of cases starting with House of Lords in W T Ramsay Ltd v IRC ([1981] STC 174) that have progressively sought to define and ring-fence artificial tax avoidance from acceptable tax planning. Since 2013 we've also had a general anti-abuse rule (GAAR), which uses the term "abuse" which is more common in European civil law settings, alongside our DOTAS (disclosure of tax avoidance) rules.
So for a layman, what does this mean, as defined in caselaw: "It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law."
It means that you're doing something technically legal but not intended to be legal so don't be surprised if the law changes.
Which if its difficult to unwind if the law does change then can leave you considerably out of pocket.
Sounds weird. Interested in what the law says. Are people in danger of being charged with acting outside the spirit of the law?
Yes, if the law changes. Which can happen quite quickly sometimes for things that are outside the spirit of the law.
Meaningless twaddle. You could be charged with eating a Terry's Chocolate Orange. If the law changes.
One feature of the Budget is how few of the different predictions re tax increases actually happened - instead Reeves got the vast majority of additional tax from Employers NI.
This was a smart move - as we've seen with farmers as soon as you do something specific that really hits a particular group then a massive row follows.
This suggests to me that if she has to put up taxes again in future years she'll just put it all on Employers NI. The public don't see it on their payslip, they don't really understand it and nobody takes a really substantial hit.
Other than it is horrifically anti-business and anti-growth measure....politically it might be short term better, its another form of fiscal drag, but long term this is a terrible approach. Tax income, tax profits, don't tax turn-over and growth, and also its most effects lower paid end of the jobs spectrum.
One thing worth emphasising about this budget is that the Tax changes removed any incentive for employees to keep workers only doing 16 hours a week.
Now to avoid tax the worker has to do 8 hours and that doesn't work for them or their part time employees.
Except it isn't true.
The incentive was never on the employer to do that.
The incentive is on the employee who can get over ten grand per annum in benefits if they only do 16 hours and faces a roughly 80% tax rate if they do any more.
And the state places upon employers a legal responsibility to accept such "flexible working" unless they've got a good reason not to.
So nothing has been fixed.
Universal credit at least ensures not all benefits are lost if doing part time work
No, only about 80% real marginal tax rate.
Hands up who here wants to do more work when they won't receive 80% of the extra income earned . . .
Was 100% real marginal tax rate before
Would you be prepared to work in a shitty job for about £1 an hour?
The poor man already volunteers for the Tory party.
Are there odds on him calling Kamala a c*** by next Tuesday? You just know he does it in private anyway.
I don't think he is that vulgar. Non-drinking, non-smoking/drug-taking.
Plus of that age. I don't think it is in his vernacular.
But we can have a bet if you would like.
Lol, a man who calls his opponents stupid bastards, scum and garbage, mentions the size of a famous sportsman's cock & does an impersonation of a disabled journalist during speeches, and boasts about grabbing women by the pussy isn't 'that vulgar'. A judgment for the ages.
His musings about executing Liz Cheney by firing squad is quite startling. I do wonder whether Trump will enact his wet dreams and take the ultimate action against anyone he believes have dimished him over the years. The list, I suspect will be incredibly long.
Are we at peak derangement yet? He's not literally calling to shoot people by firing squad, in the same way he's not literarily having a fascist rally in Maddison square garden, or going to literally have a bloodbath.
This is bonkers stuff. But, once you have convinced yourself the man is a fascist you can convince yourself all his utterances can be interrelated in the worse possible bad faith way.
It is an interesting phenomenon to see many/most of PB so deranged.
I can't really understand it. Don't like his policies on immigration by all means, but going off on one because he says he wants to deport illegal immigrants (while no doubt sipping their chai latte from one of *those* mugs) is super strange.
I think it's fear. Some people need to channel their otherwise illogical and unfounded fears into a concrete form. That way they can rail against Trump, who in this case is the manifestation of their fears and take comfort, either in his eventual defeat, or in the solidarity they find from others who think the same.
Otherwise the whole nazi/fascist/sending troops to kill Americans thing is not really fathomable.
If you think most of PB is deranged; perhaps they're the 'normal' ones and it is your view on matters that is 'deranged' ?
Yes could be. I mean my - well-documented on here - position is that I don't think that Trump is a nazi, nor that he is a threat to "American democracy", nor that he will do very much damage in office beyond at the margin because the paraphernalia of the US state and constitution is powerful and has those famous checks and balances which would prevent any individual from subverting it or them.
Any egregious example of what he has done or what he is feared as doing has been done countless times in other democracies the world over from time immemorial.
I have also said he is a laugh at, not laugh with kind of guy whose pronouncements are just extraordinary, but then that's America.
What I do respect is almost half (perhaps more) of the American voting public have decided that he's their man and it irritates me that people on PB in their typical bien pensant, Guardian letter-writing, oh aren't they all ghastly way, seem to think they know better.
And every time someone does call him a nazi or whatnot (not on PB, obvs, because no one cares) it serves to solidify the support he has.
That was a politer answer than my comment deserved.
My own view is that Trump is not a Nazi, which is a very specific thing. He is not a fascist - yet.
But I do think he is a threat to American democracy - as we saw on January 6th, and by the comments that he, and people around him, have made. And I think the deportations his team have been mooting would be disastrous for the country.
Words have power, especially if you are close to becoming the leader of the dominant world power. That's why you cannot just laugh 'at' him. What he says matters.
It does matter because he might be about to become POTUS. What he says matters a very great deal. I think American democracy worked just fine on January 6th with the instruments of state responding to some illegality (it wasn't presumably illegal until it broke in to the Capitol).
Did Trump incite it? We can argue one way or another but democracy was preserved and will be preserved, imo, whether he does indeed become POTUS or not.
The reaction to Trump’s comments about Liz Cheney seems to be classic TDS. He’s asking how war hawks would feel if they were the ones having guns pointed at them.
Re farming what happens if those inheriting land can’t raise the IHT liability ?
It’s not like property which would generally be easier to sell .
Farmland is easy enough to sell. Phone the local auctioneers, cash lands in the bank about a month later.
There are lots of reasons why this policy is bad, but this isn't one.
Scenario: Farm is valued at 10k/acre for inheritance tax purposes. Farm is lets say 300 acres, so the bill is £200k (We'll assume the lad owns all the equipment and/or it's all depreciated for the sake of argument). The old Farmer's son sticks 20 acres up for sale, and only gets 5k/acre. A bit extreme, but just putting it out there for the sake of argument... Does the farm now get revalued to 1.5 million so the 200k isn't due ?
If the land is sold in open auction that is the value. It is really a bad idea but totally expected. It will also trash other businesses where succession is important. My ex MP says the first suicide has happened, not sure if that is true. We really have a vile incompetent government with a vile incompetent Prime Minister. But we knew that.
We seem to have a lot of press writing half baked incorrect stories to scare farmers.
It's been badly announced but I don't actually think there are many people at all who understand what the changes are yet alone the actual impact it has on people.
There is a story going around (no idea if it's true) on a supposed farmers' fb page describing a suicide which is getting everyone enraged.
I think farmers generally (can) have a very rough time and the suicide rate is very high. That said, governments of the past decades have prioritised mass market affordability of farm produce over farmers' well-being and it is difficult to argue that that has been the wrong policy.
Also it has long been known that buying agricultural land is a good tax avoidance wheeze but, a situation affecting 0.0n% of the farmers, still less of the population is not I believe good grounds for policy-making.
Removing a good tax avoidance wheeze is something that a sensible Government should be doing.
The suicide could be caused by a lot of things with this being the final one of a lot of straws. Farmer suicide is scarily high anyway as it's a lonely business that can feeling never ending..
I don't doubt but it is getting everyone agitated. Plus ISAs are a good tax avoidance wheeze.
An ISA is not tax avoidance.
“Tax avoidance is bending the rules of the tax system to gain a tax advantage, that parliament never intended.” (HMRC, 2015)
"It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law".
So in other words it is perfectly legal and this description is designed a) to give The State more power over you at their sole discretion and whim; and b) scare you. Which latter it appears to have done.
Or an understandable reaction by the revenue to rich people's accountants regularly taking the piss.
Nothing in that link (which both Mighty Alex and I used) says anything about it not being legal.
By "do not work" I presume they mean they aren't tax avoidance but are, rather, illegal.
You've clearly not followed all those stories about tax advisers who sold tax avoidance schemes as 'perfectly legal', only for their clients to loses court cases against HMRC... and have to repay millions ?
The guidance was intended to prevent more such embarrassments. Accountants (reputable ones, at least) now tend to run such schemes by the revenue, before marketing them to innocent punters.
Tax avoidance is legal; tax evasion is illegal. Sometimes it is not clear which a particular scheme is because it's pushing the line on something where the law is unclear or open to interpretation. That lack of clarity does not imply legality.
The HMRC website is saying that some schemes are legal but not "within the spirit of the law". Whatever tf that means, legally.
Presumably refers to the inevitable changing of tax rules to close loopholes. Some of these avoidance schemes can be very expensive to unwind, if the law changes. If your tax advisers have been taking the piss, you're taking that risk.
Also true but doesn't alter my point that tax avoidance is legal. ISAs are tax avoidance. Film investment schemes were then they weren't.
Doesn't affect the status of genuine tax avoidance.
Tax avoidance, and terms such as the spirit of the law or the "intent" of the drafter are all established in caselaw and have a meaning in the UK context. There's a long history of cases starting with House of Lords in W T Ramsay Ltd v IRC ([1981] STC 174) that have progressively sought to define and ring-fence artificial tax avoidance from acceptable tax planning. Since 2013 we've also had a general anti-abuse rule (GAAR), which uses the term "abuse" which is more common in European civil law settings, alongside our DOTAS (disclosure of tax avoidance) rules.
So for a layman, what does this mean, as defined in caselaw: "It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law."
It means that you're doing something technically legal but not intended to be legal so don't be surprised if the law changes.
Which if its difficult to unwind if the law does change then can leave you considerably out of pocket.
Sounds weird. Interested in what the law says. Are people in danger of being charged with acting outside the spirit of the law?
Yes, if the law changes. Which can happen quite quickly sometimes for things that are outside the spirit of the law.
Meaningless twaddle. You could be charged with eating a Terry's Chocolate Orange. If the law changes.
The law changes quite regularly, which is why its important to consider both the letter and spirit of the law, especially if its going to take some time to unwind your actions.
There is no spirit of the law that implies Parliament wants eating a Terry's Chocolate Orange to be illegal. If there was, then buying a lifetime's supply of Terry's Chocolate Oranges might not be a wise investment as they'll need to be binned as it would be criminal to eat them if the law changed, but there's not.
Avoidance is a different matter. What's legal today could be illegal next year and you might get very little advance warning of that changing - and if you're out of pocket as a result, then its a result of your own actions so you're not entitled to compensation.
Lots of discussion on IHT; one of the questions I keep pondering is why it still exists.
It's absolutely hated, and raises very little revenue; 0.7% of government income.
For example, Jeremy Hunt used £10bln to cut NI by 2%. He could have abolished IHT instead and had £2.5bln left to play with.
Surely the smart politics would have been to ditch IHT entirely, rather than a modest reduction in NI which virtually everyone forgot about 24hrs later.
There are lots of advantages to wiping out a tax entirely rather than changing rates - the government would save the cost revenue collection, lots of people would save the cost of employing the tax planning parasites*, it would knock the bottom out of all the known dodges like buying farmland (with the amusing side effect of burning the fingers of those most egregiously attempting to tax dodge in this way as asset values drop back to their true levels).
Why on earth didn't he do it? If nothing else, he would have gone down in history as the chancellor who abolished IHT, and it's hard to imaging that would be an unpopular legacy.
*Maybe they could become social care workers, instead of us having to import millions of Nigerians
Remove IHT and when the next Government comes along do you tax the money as income received or a capital gain.
That's why you leave IHT because with it removed other options become available that would be worse...
Those options exist now, Reeves may yet come back to them next year when she's trying to fill in the massive black holes she created this time round.
The difference is that once you've nuked IHT, any form of reinstatment will be massively unpopular, and politicians tend not to survive introducing or raising really unpopular taxes (see also the Poll Tax or the way that fuel duty has been flat for years). If Hunk had killed IHT, I don't think Reeves would have survived introducing IT or CGT for benificaries of Estates, and so she wouldn't have done it.
Reeves lacked the resolve to increase fuel duty and blame Hunt for it. She could have announced in the budget that the nation's finances were so parlous that she had no option but to stick to Hunt's planned increase in fuel duty. "The Tory tax rise they didn't want to tell you about."
She flunked it. The idea that she would have dared to reintroduce a form of IHT is not supported by experience.
Why should she have increased fuel duty? Its a bloody stupid tax to increase now.
Its a hateful tax that is the most regressive tax of all, taking a considerable share of the poorest income but taking considerably less (to none at all) of the wealthiest incomes. Those who can afford a new EV don't pay a penny, while those who rely on their old banger to work are out of pocket.
Its also a stupid tax to increase as its being eliminated. HMRC was making a fortune from drivers via fuel duty but need to diversify away from that as the golden goose is losing its feathers and won't be consuming fuel anymore - HMRC needs to find some other source of revenue instead for general taxation rather than fleecing drivers.
Its also one of the most inflationary taxes to raise.
Why increase a tax today that is being phased out? Its pointless.
There is not a single good reason to increase fuel duty. So well done Reeves for not being so stupid as to do it.
I'm not going to stop calling you out for this blatant lie.
PB has had thoughtful debates about what should happen with motoring taxation going forward as EVs rollout. Those discussions are not helped by these falsehoods.
Yes could be. I mean my - well-documented on here - position is that I don't think that Trump is a nazi, nor that he is a threat to "American democracy", nor that he will do very much damage in office beyond at the margin because the paraphernalia of the US state and constitution is powerful and has those famous checks and balances which would prevent any individual from subverting it or them.
With respect your opinion on the matter is a worth a hell of lot less than the likes of Esper, Milley, Mattis, McMaster and so on. The defence and security big-wigs that worked with Trump are warning everyone of the danger Trump represents. I'm going to side with them until someone more credible presents evidence that it's a storm in a teacup.
Yep good call you do that.
Presumably you agree with this description of Trump and fascism:
“a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy,”
I mean if that's what you and the good general believe then you should take all appropriate action to guard against it.
It's almost like somebody wrote an article about how difficult classifying political parties is.
Re farming what happens if those inheriting land can’t raise the IHT liability ?
It’s not like property which would generally be easier to sell .
Farmland is easy enough to sell. Phone the local auctioneers, cash lands in the bank about a month later.
There are lots of reasons why this policy is bad, but this isn't one.
Scenario: Farm is valued at 10k/acre for inheritance tax purposes. Farm is lets say 300 acres, so the bill is £200k (We'll assume the lad owns all the equipment and/or it's all depreciated for the sake of argument). The old Farmer's son sticks 20 acres up for sale, and only gets 5k/acre. A bit extreme, but just putting it out there for the sake of argument... Does the farm now get revalued to 1.5 million so the 200k isn't due ?
If the land is sold in open auction that is the value. It is really a bad idea but totally expected. It will also trash other businesses where succession is important. My ex MP says the first suicide has happened, not sure if that is true. We really have a vile incompetent government with a vile incompetent Prime Minister. But we knew that.
We seem to have a lot of press writing half baked incorrect stories to scare farmers.
It's been badly announced but I don't actually think there are many people at all who understand what the changes are yet alone the actual impact it has on people.
There is a story going around (no idea if it's true) on a supposed farmers' fb page describing a suicide which is getting everyone enraged.
I think farmers generally (can) have a very rough time and the suicide rate is very high. That said, governments of the past decades have prioritised mass market affordability of farm produce over farmers' well-being and it is difficult to argue that that has been the wrong policy.
Also it has long been known that buying agricultural land is a good tax avoidance wheeze but, a situation affecting 0.0n% of the farmers, still less of the population is not I believe good grounds for policy-making.
Removing a good tax avoidance wheeze is something that a sensible Government should be doing.
The suicide could be caused by a lot of things with this being the final one of a lot of straws. Farmer suicide is scarily high anyway as it's a lonely business that can feeling never ending..
I don't doubt but it is getting everyone agitated. Plus ISAs are a good tax avoidance wheeze.
An ISA is not tax avoidance.
“Tax avoidance is bending the rules of the tax system to gain a tax advantage, that parliament never intended.” (HMRC, 2015)
"It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law".
So in other words it is perfectly legal and this description is designed a) to give The State more power over you at their sole discretion and whim; and b) scare you. Which latter it appears to have done.
Or an understandable reaction by the revenue to rich people's accountants regularly taking the piss.
Nothing in that link (which both Mighty Alex and I used) says anything about it not being legal.
By "do not work" I presume they mean they aren't tax avoidance but are, rather, illegal.
You've clearly not followed all those stories about tax advisers who sold tax avoidance schemes as 'perfectly legal', only for their clients to loses court cases against HMRC... and have to repay millions ?
The guidance was intended to prevent more such embarrassments. Accountants (reputable ones, at least) now tend to run such schemes by the revenue, before marketing them to innocent punters.
Tax avoidance is legal; tax evasion is illegal. Sometimes it is not clear which a particular scheme is because it's pushing the line on something where the law is unclear or open to interpretation. That lack of clarity does not imply legality.
The HMRC website is saying that some schemes are legal but not "within the spirit of the law". Whatever tf that means, legally.
Presumably refers to the inevitable changing of tax rules to close loopholes. Some of these avoidance schemes can be very expensive to unwind, if the law changes. If your tax advisers have been taking the piss, you're taking that risk.
Also true but doesn't alter my point that tax avoidance is legal. ISAs are tax avoidance. Film investment schemes were then they weren't.
Doesn't affect the status of genuine tax avoidance.
Tax avoidance, and terms such as the spirit of the law or the "intent" of the drafter are all established in caselaw and have a meaning in the UK context. There's a long history of cases starting with House of Lords in W T Ramsay Ltd v IRC ([1981] STC 174) that have progressively sought to define and ring-fence artificial tax avoidance from acceptable tax planning. Since 2013 we've also had a general anti-abuse rule (GAAR), which uses the term "abuse" which is more common in European civil law settings, alongside our DOTAS (disclosure of tax avoidance) rules.
So for a layman, what does this mean, as defined in caselaw: "It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law."
There are a number of, for want of a better word, "hallmarks" of tax avoidance in the caselaw and also in the DOTAS guidance. These are, and I paraphrase:
- a degree of artificiality, i.e. the taxpayer has gone beyond simply doing things in a certain way to get the better tax outcome, they've actually inserted steps in the process that are only there for tax reasons - pre-meditated / preordained: there's evidence that what the taxpayer did was planned in advance - at odds with the intent of the drafter of the legislation: courts often spend a lot of effort establishing what was in the mind of the government when they introduced legislation. If a tax outcome is at odds with what they intended then this is the world of loopholes
Ramsey is the most famous case because all anti-avoidance caselaw really evolves from there. But in the other corner we have the venerable old Inland Revenue Commissioners v. Duke of Westminster [1936] A.C. 1;[1] 19 TC 490, with the important principle "Every man is entitled, if he can, to order his affairs so that the tax attaching under the appropriate Acts is less than it otherwise would be. If he succeeds in ordering them so as to secure this result, then, however unappreciative the Commissioners of Inland Revenue or his fellow tax-payers may be of his ingenuity, he cannot be compelled to pay an increased tax."
Ramsey and subsequent cases don't completely overturn this principle but they do make it more contingent. In Ramsey the key phrase was "A preordained series of transactions – or a single composite transaction – which includes Steps inserted which have no commercial purpose apart from tax avoidance or deferral."
Thanks. In other words, it is legal unless or until it is deemed illegal.
As for the hallmarks, then yes - the more complicated something is tax-wise, the less clear it is whether it is legal or illegal but it will be determined one way or the other at some point.
So "spirit of the law" is in itself, as a phrase, meaningless in law?
Yes, I noticed that. I know it's a 'model' but that doesn't feel right to me.
On reflection nor me!
The model doesn't have to be particularly wrong for the probability of a Harris pop vote win and electoral college loss to increase substantially. As good as 538 is it's still only a model.
Lots of discussion on IHT; one of the questions I keep pondering is why it still exists.
It's absolutely hated, and raises very little revenue; 0.7% of government income.
For example, Jeremy Hunt used £10bln to cut NI by 2%. He could have abolished IHT instead and had £2.5bln left to play with.
Surely the smart politics would have been to ditch IHT entirely, rather than a modest reduction in NI which virtually everyone forgot about 24hrs later.
There are lots of advantages to wiping out a tax entirely rather than changing rates - the government would save the cost revenue collection, lots of people would save the cost of employing the tax planning parasites*, it would knock the bottom out of all the known dodges like buying farmland (with the amusing side effect of burning the fingers of those most egregiously attempting to tax dodge in this way as asset values drop back to their true levels).
Why on earth didn't he do it? If nothing else, he would have gone down in history as the chancellor who abolished IHT, and it's hard to imaging that would be an unpopular legacy.
*Maybe they could become social care workers, instead of us having to import millions of Nigerians
Remove IHT and when the next Government comes along do you tax the money as income received or a capital gain.
That's why you leave IHT because with it removed other options become available that would be worse...
Those options exist now, Reeves may yet come back to them next year when she's trying to fill in the massive black holes she created this time round.
The difference is that once you've nuked IHT, any form of reinstatment will be massively unpopular, and politicians tend not to survive introducing or raising really unpopular taxes (see also the Poll Tax or the way that fuel duty has been flat for years). If Hunk had killed IHT, I don't think Reeves would have survived introducing IT or CGT for benificaries of Estates, and so she wouldn't have done it.
Reeves lacked the resolve to increase fuel duty and blame Hunt for it. She could have announced in the budget that the nation's finances were so parlous that she had no option but to stick to Hunt's planned increase in fuel duty. "The Tory tax rise they didn't want to tell you about."
She flunked it. The idea that she would have dared to reintroduce a form of IHT is not supported by experience.
Why should she have increased fuel duty? Its a bloody stupid tax to increase now.
Its a hateful tax that is the most regressive tax of all, taking a considerable share of the poorest income but taking considerably less (to none at all) of the wealthiest incomes. Those who can afford a new EV don't pay a penny, while those who rely on their old banger to work are out of pocket.
Its also a stupid tax to increase as its being eliminated. HMRC was making a fortune from drivers via fuel duty but need to diversify away from that as the golden goose is losing its feathers and won't be consuming fuel anymore - HMRC needs to find some other source of revenue instead for general taxation rather than fleecing drivers.
Its also one of the most inflationary taxes to raise.
Why increase a tax today that is being phased out? Its pointless.
There is not a single good reason to increase fuel duty. So well done Reeves for not being so stupid as to do it.
I'm not going to stop calling you out for this blatant lie.
PB has had thoughtful debates about what should happen with motoring taxation going forward as EVs rollout. Those discussions are not helped by these falsehoods.
Its not a lie, its true.
You talking about mileage instead of percentage of income spent on the tax doesn't change that.
The poorest deciles spend a high percentage of their income on fuel duty. The richest deciles do not.
Re farming what happens if those inheriting land can’t raise the IHT liability ?
It’s not like property which would generally be easier to sell .
Farmland is easy enough to sell. Phone the local auctioneers, cash lands in the bank about a month later.
There are lots of reasons why this policy is bad, but this isn't one.
Scenario: Farm is valued at 10k/acre for inheritance tax purposes. Farm is lets say 300 acres, so the bill is £200k (We'll assume the lad owns all the equipment and/or it's all depreciated for the sake of argument). The old Farmer's son sticks 20 acres up for sale, and only gets 5k/acre. A bit extreme, but just putting it out there for the sake of argument... Does the farm now get revalued to 1.5 million so the 200k isn't due ?
If the land is sold in open auction that is the value. It is really a bad idea but totally expected. It will also trash other businesses where succession is important. My ex MP says the first suicide has happened, not sure if that is true. We really have a vile incompetent government with a vile incompetent Prime Minister. But we knew that.
We seem to have a lot of press writing half baked incorrect stories to scare farmers.
It's been badly announced but I don't actually think there are many people at all who understand what the changes are yet alone the actual impact it has on people.
There is a story going around (no idea if it's true) on a supposed farmers' fb page describing a suicide which is getting everyone enraged.
I think farmers generally (can) have a very rough time and the suicide rate is very high. That said, governments of the past decades have prioritised mass market affordability of farm produce over farmers' well-being and it is difficult to argue that that has been the wrong policy.
Also it has long been known that buying agricultural land is a good tax avoidance wheeze but, a situation affecting 0.0n% of the farmers, still less of the population is not I believe good grounds for policy-making.
Removing a good tax avoidance wheeze is something that a sensible Government should be doing.
The suicide could be caused by a lot of things with this being the final one of a lot of straws. Farmer suicide is scarily high anyway as it's a lonely business that can feeling never ending..
I don't doubt but it is getting everyone agitated. Plus ISAs are a good tax avoidance wheeze.
An ISA is not tax avoidance.
“Tax avoidance is bending the rules of the tax system to gain a tax advantage, that parliament never intended.” (HMRC, 2015)
"It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law".
So in other words it is perfectly legal and this description is designed a) to give The State more power over you at their sole discretion and whim; and b) scare you. Which latter it appears to have done.
Or an understandable reaction by the revenue to rich people's accountants regularly taking the piss.
Nothing in that link (which both Mighty Alex and I used) says anything about it not being legal.
By "do not work" I presume they mean they aren't tax avoidance but are, rather, illegal.
You've clearly not followed all those stories about tax advisers who sold tax avoidance schemes as 'perfectly legal', only for their clients to loses court cases against HMRC... and have to repay millions ?
The guidance was intended to prevent more such embarrassments. Accountants (reputable ones, at least) now tend to run such schemes by the revenue, before marketing them to innocent punters.
Tax avoidance is legal; tax evasion is illegal. Sometimes it is not clear which a particular scheme is because it's pushing the line on something where the law is unclear or open to interpretation. That lack of clarity does not imply legality.
The HMRC website is saying that some schemes are legal but not "within the spirit of the law". Whatever tf that means, legally.
Presumably refers to the inevitable changing of tax rules to close loopholes. Some of these avoidance schemes can be very expensive to unwind, if the law changes. If your tax advisers have been taking the piss, you're taking that risk.
Also true but doesn't alter my point that tax avoidance is legal. ISAs are tax avoidance. Film investment schemes were then they weren't.
Doesn't affect the status of genuine tax avoidance.
Tax avoidance, and terms such as the spirit of the law or the "intent" of the drafter are all established in caselaw and have a meaning in the UK context. There's a long history of cases starting with House of Lords in W T Ramsay Ltd v IRC ([1981] STC 174) that have progressively sought to define and ring-fence artificial tax avoidance from acceptable tax planning. Since 2013 we've also had a general anti-abuse rule (GAAR), which uses the term "abuse" which is more common in European civil law settings, alongside our DOTAS (disclosure of tax avoidance) rules.
So for a layman, what does this mean, as defined in caselaw: "It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law."
It means that if you are taken to court the judge will rule in your favour, but you could be still branded a rampent tax avoider not paying your fair amount of tax to fund the NHS in the press and by politicians.
It is a risk I will have to assess carefully. Once the press gets hold of my details all hell would break loose.
The reaction to Trump’s comments about Liz Cheney seems to be classic TDS. He’s asking how war hawks would feel if they were the ones having guns pointed at them.
How stupid are we for not laughing at Trump's hilarious narrative?
“She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”
Are there odds on him calling Kamala a c*** by next Tuesday? You just know he does it in private anyway.
I don't think he is that vulgar. Non-drinking, non-smoking/drug-taking.
Plus of that age. I don't think it is in his vernacular.
But we can have a bet if you would like.
Lol, a man who calls his opponents stupid bastards, scum and garbage, mentions the size of a famous sportsman's cock & does an impersonation of a disabled journalist during speeches, and boasts about grabbing women by the pussy isn't 'that vulgar'. A judgment for the ages.
His musings about executing Liz Cheney by firing squad is quite startling. I do wonder whether Trump will enact his wet dreams and take the ultimate action against anyone he believes have dimished him over the years. The list, I suspect will be incredibly long.
Are we at peak derangement yet? He's not literally calling to shoot people by firing squad, in the same way he's not literarily having a fascist rally in Maddison square garden, or going to literally have a bloodbath.
This is bonkers stuff. But, once you have convinced yourself the man is a fascist you can convince yourself all his utterances can be interrelated in the worse possible bad faith way.
It is an interesting phenomenon to see many/most of PB so deranged.
I can't really understand it. Don't like his policies on immigration by all means, but going off on one because he says he wants to deport illegal immigrants (while no doubt sipping their chai latte from one of *those* mugs) is super strange.
I think it's fear. Some people need to channel their otherwise illogical and unfounded fears into a concrete form. That way they can rail against Trump, who in this case is the manifestation of their fears and take comfort, either in his eventual defeat, or in the solidarity they find from others who think the same.
Otherwise the whole nazi/fascist/sending troops to kill Americans thing is not really fathomable.
I posted a WashPo article earlier today explaining how he’s proposed deporting people currently LEGALLY in the US.
When he said, “And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now” about illegal immigrants, I find it hard not to interpret that as racism and as something at least close to fascism.
When he said that immigrants are "poisoning the blood of our country”, again that seems awfully reminiscent of fascist phraseology.
Or consider: “I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they’re the big — and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.” Again, that’s not normal political discourse. It seems like authoritarianism.
Or: “They were very brave, the Supreme Court. Very brave, and they take a lot of hits because of it. It should be illegal, what happens. You know, you have these guys like playing the ref. ... These people should be put in jail the way they talk about our judges and our justices.” Jailing people for criticising the Supreme Court is certainly unconstitutional.
Also, he tried to organise a scheme to replace valid slates of electoral college votes with fake ones and then encouraged a group of people to storm the Capitol. That is not normal. That seems like the sort of thing a fascist does.
Are there odds on him calling Kamala a c*** by next Tuesday? You just know he does it in private anyway.
I don't think he is that vulgar. Non-drinking, non-smoking/drug-taking.
Plus of that age. I don't think it is in his vernacular.
But we can have a bet if you would like.
Lol, a man who calls his opponents stupid bastards, scum and garbage, mentions the size of a famous sportsman's cock & does an impersonation of a disabled journalist during speeches, and boasts about grabbing women by the pussy isn't 'that vulgar'. A judgment for the ages.
His musings about executing Liz Cheney by firing squad is quite startling. I do wonder whether Trump will enact his wet dreams and take the ultimate action against anyone he believes have dimished him over the years. The list, I suspect will be incredibly long.
Are we at peak derangement yet? He's not literally calling to shoot people by firing squad, in the same way he's not literarily having a fascist rally in Maddison square garden, or going to literally have a bloodbath.
This is bonkers stuff. But, once you have convinced yourself the man is a fascist you can convince yourself all his utterances can be interrelated in the worse possible bad faith way.
It is an interesting phenomenon to see many/most of PB so deranged.
I can't really understand it. Don't like his policies on immigration by all means, but going off on one because he says he wants to deport illegal immigrants (while no doubt sipping their chai latte from one of *those* mugs) is super strange.
I think it's fear. Some people need to channel their otherwise illogical and unfounded fears into a concrete form. That way they can rail against Trump, who in this case is the manifestation of their fears and take comfort, either in his eventual defeat, or in the solidarity they find from others who think the same.
Otherwise the whole nazi/fascist/sending troops to kill Americans thing is not really fathomable.
If you think most of PB is deranged; perhaps they're the 'normal' ones and it is your view on matters that is 'deranged' ?
Yes could be. I mean my - well-documented on here - position is that I don't think that Trump is a nazi, nor that he is a threat to "American democracy", nor that he will do very much damage in office beyond at the margin because the paraphernalia of the US state and constitution is powerful and has those famous checks and balances which would prevent any individual from subverting it or them.
Any egregious example of what he has done or what he is feared as doing has been done countless times in other democracies the world over from time immemorial.
I have also said he is a laugh at, not laugh with kind of guy whose pronouncements are just extraordinary, but then that's America.
What I do respect is almost half (perhaps more) of the American voting public have decided that he's their man and it irritates me that people on PB in their typical bien pensant, Guardian letter-writing, oh aren't they all ghastly way, seem to think they know better.
And every time someone does call him a nazi or whatnot (not on PB, obvs, because no one cares) it serves to solidify the support he has.
That was a politer answer than my comment deserved.
My own view is that Trump is not a Nazi, which is a very specific thing. He is not a fascist - yet.
But I do think he is a threat to American democracy - as we saw on January 6th, and by the comments that he, and people around him, have made. And I think the deportations his team have been mooting would be disastrous for the country.
Words have power, especially if you are close to becoming the leader of the dominant world power. That's why you cannot just laugh 'at' him. What he says matters.
You are not General John Kelly and like Trump I claim my Purple Heart.
Re farming what happens if those inheriting land can’t raise the IHT liability ?
It’s not like property which would generally be easier to sell .
Farmland is easy enough to sell. Phone the local auctioneers, cash lands in the bank about a month later.
There are lots of reasons why this policy is bad, but this isn't one.
Scenario: Farm is valued at 10k/acre for inheritance tax purposes. Farm is lets say 300 acres, so the bill is £200k (We'll assume the lad owns all the equipment and/or it's all depreciated for the sake of argument). The old Farmer's son sticks 20 acres up for sale, and only gets 5k/acre. A bit extreme, but just putting it out there for the sake of argument... Does the farm now get revalued to 1.5 million so the 200k isn't due ?
If the land is sold in open auction that is the value. It is really a bad idea but totally expected. It will also trash other businesses where succession is important. My ex MP says the first suicide has happened, not sure if that is true. We really have a vile incompetent government with a vile incompetent Prime Minister. But we knew that.
We seem to have a lot of press writing half baked incorrect stories to scare farmers.
It's been badly announced but I don't actually think there are many people at all who understand what the changes are yet alone the actual impact it has on people.
There is a story going around (no idea if it's true) on a supposed farmers' fb page describing a suicide which is getting everyone enraged.
I think farmers generally (can) have a very rough time and the suicide rate is very high. That said, governments of the past decades have prioritised mass market affordability of farm produce over farmers' well-being and it is difficult to argue that that has been the wrong policy.
Also it has long been known that buying agricultural land is a good tax avoidance wheeze but, a situation affecting 0.0n% of the farmers, still less of the population is not I believe good grounds for policy-making.
Removing a good tax avoidance wheeze is something that a sensible Government should be doing.
The suicide could be caused by a lot of things with this being the final one of a lot of straws. Farmer suicide is scarily high anyway as it's a lonely business that can feeling never ending..
I don't doubt but it is getting everyone agitated. Plus ISAs are a good tax avoidance wheeze.
An ISA is not tax avoidance.
“Tax avoidance is bending the rules of the tax system to gain a tax advantage, that parliament never intended.” (HMRC, 2015)
"It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law".
So in other words it is perfectly legal and this description is designed a) to give The State more power over you at their sole discretion and whim; and b) scare you. Which latter it appears to have done.
Or an understandable reaction by the revenue to rich people's accountants regularly taking the piss.
Nothing in that link (which both Mighty Alex and I used) says anything about it not being legal.
By "do not work" I presume they mean they aren't tax avoidance but are, rather, illegal.
You've clearly not followed all those stories about tax advisers who sold tax avoidance schemes as 'perfectly legal', only for their clients to loses court cases against HMRC... and have to repay millions ?
The guidance was intended to prevent more such embarrassments. Accountants (reputable ones, at least) now tend to run such schemes by the revenue, before marketing them to innocent punters.
Tax avoidance is legal; tax evasion is illegal. Sometimes it is not clear which a particular scheme is because it's pushing the line on something where the law is unclear or open to interpretation. That lack of clarity does not imply legality.
The HMRC website is saying that some schemes are legal but not "within the spirit of the law". Whatever tf that means, legally.
Presumably refers to the inevitable changing of tax rules to close loopholes. Some of these avoidance schemes can be very expensive to unwind, if the law changes. If your tax advisers have been taking the piss, you're taking that risk.
Also true but doesn't alter my point that tax avoidance is legal. ISAs are tax avoidance. Film investment schemes were then they weren't.
Doesn't affect the status of genuine tax avoidance.
Tax avoidance, and terms such as the spirit of the law or the "intent" of the drafter are all established in caselaw and have a meaning in the UK context. There's a long history of cases starting with House of Lords in W T Ramsay Ltd v IRC ([1981] STC 174) that have progressively sought to define and ring-fence artificial tax avoidance from acceptable tax planning. Since 2013 we've also had a general anti-abuse rule (GAAR), which uses the term "abuse" which is more common in European civil law settings, alongside our DOTAS (disclosure of tax avoidance) rules.
So for a layman, what does this mean, as defined in caselaw: "It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law."
It means that if you are taken to court the judge will rule in your favour, but you could be still branded a rampent tax avoider not paying your fair amount of tax to fund the NHS in the press and by politicians.
Looking at many recent tax tribunals I wouldn't fancy your chances of the judge ruling in your favour...
One of the recent loan charge cases went - well we can see that what you've done was legal but we are going to ignore that and use this bit here to force you to pay HMRC.....
Re farming what happens if those inheriting land can’t raise the IHT liability ?
It’s not like property which would generally be easier to sell .
Farmland is easy enough to sell. Phone the local auctioneers, cash lands in the bank about a month later.
There are lots of reasons why this policy is bad, but this isn't one.
Scenario: Farm is valued at 10k/acre for inheritance tax purposes. Farm is lets say 300 acres, so the bill is £200k (We'll assume the lad owns all the equipment and/or it's all depreciated for the sake of argument). The old Farmer's son sticks 20 acres up for sale, and only gets 5k/acre. A bit extreme, but just putting it out there for the sake of argument... Does the farm now get revalued to 1.5 million so the 200k isn't due ?
If the land is sold in open auction that is the value. It is really a bad idea but totally expected. It will also trash other businesses where succession is important. My ex MP says the first suicide has happened, not sure if that is true. We really have a vile incompetent government with a vile incompetent Prime Minister. But we knew that.
We seem to have a lot of press writing half baked incorrect stories to scare farmers.
It's been badly announced but I don't actually think there are many people at all who understand what the changes are yet alone the actual impact it has on people.
There is a story going around (no idea if it's true) on a supposed farmers' fb page describing a suicide which is getting everyone enraged.
I think farmers generally (can) have a very rough time and the suicide rate is very high. That said, governments of the past decades have prioritised mass market affordability of farm produce over farmers' well-being and it is difficult to argue that that has been the wrong policy.
Also it has long been known that buying agricultural land is a good tax avoidance wheeze but, a situation affecting 0.0n% of the farmers, still less of the population is not I believe good grounds for policy-making.
Removing a good tax avoidance wheeze is something that a sensible Government should be doing.
The suicide could be caused by a lot of things with this being the final one of a lot of straws. Farmer suicide is scarily high anyway as it's a lonely business that can feeling never ending..
I don't doubt but it is getting everyone agitated. Plus ISAs are a good tax avoidance wheeze.
An ISA is not tax avoidance.
“Tax avoidance is bending the rules of the tax system to gain a tax advantage, that parliament never intended.” (HMRC, 2015)
"It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law".
So in other words it is perfectly legal and this description is designed a) to give The State more power over you at their sole discretion and whim; and b) scare you. Which latter it appears to have done.
Or an understandable reaction by the revenue to rich people's accountants regularly taking the piss.
Nothing in that link (which both Mighty Alex and I used) says anything about it not being legal.
By "do not work" I presume they mean they aren't tax avoidance but are, rather, illegal.
You've clearly not followed all those stories about tax advisers who sold tax avoidance schemes as 'perfectly legal', only for their clients to loses court cases against HMRC... and have to repay millions ?
The guidance was intended to prevent more such embarrassments. Accountants (reputable ones, at least) now tend to run such schemes by the revenue, before marketing them to innocent punters.
Tax avoidance is legal; tax evasion is illegal. Sometimes it is not clear which a particular scheme is because it's pushing the line on something where the law is unclear or open to interpretation. That lack of clarity does not imply legality.
The HMRC website is saying that some schemes are legal but not "within the spirit of the law". Whatever tf that means, legally.
Presumably refers to the inevitable changing of tax rules to close loopholes. Some of these avoidance schemes can be very expensive to unwind, if the law changes. If your tax advisers have been taking the piss, you're taking that risk.
Also true but doesn't alter my point that tax avoidance is legal. ISAs are tax avoidance. Film investment schemes were then they weren't.
Doesn't affect the status of genuine tax avoidance.
Tax avoidance, and terms such as the spirit of the law or the "intent" of the drafter are all established in caselaw and have a meaning in the UK context. There's a long history of cases starting with House of Lords in W T Ramsay Ltd v IRC ([1981] STC 174) that have progressively sought to define and ring-fence artificial tax avoidance from acceptable tax planning. Since 2013 we've also had a general anti-abuse rule (GAAR), which uses the term "abuse" which is more common in European civil law settings, alongside our DOTAS (disclosure of tax avoidance) rules.
So for a layman, what does this mean, as defined in caselaw: "It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law."
It means that you're doing something technically legal but not intended to be legal so don't be surprised if the law changes.
Which if its difficult to unwind if the law does change then can leave you considerably out of pocket.
Sounds weird. Interested in what the law says. Are people in danger of being charged with acting outside the spirit of the law?
Yes, if the law changes. Which can happen quite quickly sometimes for things that are outside the spirit of the law.
Meaningless twaddle. You could be charged with eating a Terry's Chocolate Orange. If the law changes.
The law changes quite regularly, which is why its important to consider both the letter and spirit of the law, especially if its going to take some time to unwind your actions.
There is no spirit of the law that implies Parliament wants eating a Terry's Chocolate Orange to be illegal. If there was, then buying a lifetime's supply of Terry's Chocolate Oranges might not be a wise investment as they'll need to be binned as it would be criminal to eat them if the law changed, but there's not.
Avoidance is a different matter. What's legal today could be illegal next year and you might get very little advance warning of that changing - and if you're out of pocket as a result, then its a result of your own actions so you're not entitled to compensation.
All true. No one is arguing that. But what is legal today is legal today. Plus if the "spirit of the law" doesn't want people or companies to have complex tax structures then it is howling at the moon. So again, meaningless.
Are there odds on him calling Kamala a c*** by next Tuesday? You just know he does it in private anyway.
I don't think he is that vulgar. Non-drinking, non-smoking/drug-taking.
Plus of that age. I don't think it is in his vernacular.
But we can have a bet if you would like.
Lol, a man who calls his opponents stupid bastards, scum and garbage, mentions the size of a famous sportsman's cock & does an impersonation of a disabled journalist during speeches, and boasts about grabbing women by the pussy isn't 'that vulgar'. A judgment for the ages.
His musings about executing Liz Cheney by firing squad is quite startling. I do wonder whether Trump will enact his wet dreams and take the ultimate action against anyone he believes have dimished him over the years. The list, I suspect will be incredibly long.
Are we at peak derangement yet? He's not literally calling to shoot people by firing squad, in the same way he's not literarily having a fascist rally in Maddison square garden, or going to literally have a bloodbath.
This is bonkers stuff. But, once you have convinced yourself the man is a fascist you can convince yourself all his utterances can be interrelated in the worse possible bad faith way.
It is an interesting phenomenon to see many/most of PB so deranged.
I can't really understand it. Don't like his policies on immigration by all means, but going off on one because he says he wants to deport illegal immigrants (while no doubt sipping their chai latte from one of *those* mugs) is super strange.
I think it's fear. Some people need to channel their otherwise illogical and unfounded fears into a concrete form. That way they can rail against Trump, who in this case is the manifestation of their fears and take comfort, either in his eventual defeat, or in the solidarity they find from others who think the same.
Otherwise the whole nazi/fascist/sending troops to kill Americans thing is not really fathomable.
If you think most of PB is deranged; perhaps they're the 'normal' ones and it is your view on matters that is 'deranged' ?
Yes could be. I mean my - well-documented on here - position is that I don't think that Trump is a nazi, nor that he is a threat to "American democracy", nor that he will do very much damage in office beyond at the margin because the paraphernalia of the US state and constitution is powerful and has those famous checks and balances which would prevent any individual from subverting it or them.
Any egregious example of what he has done or what he is feared as doing has been done countless times in other democracies the world over from time immemorial.
I have also said he is a laugh at, not laugh with kind of guy whose pronouncements are just extraordinary, but then that's America.
What I do respect is almost half (perhaps more) of the American voting public have decided that he's their man and it irritates me that people on PB in their typical bien pensant, Guardian letter-writing, oh aren't they all ghastly way, seem to think they know better.
And every time someone does call him a nazi or whatnot (not on PB, obvs, because no one cares) it serves to solidify the support he has.
That was a politer answer than my comment deserved.
My own view is that Trump is not a Nazi, which is a very specific thing. He is not a fascist - yet.
But I do think he is a threat to American democracy - as we saw on January 6th, and by the comments that he, and people around him, have made. And I think the deportations his team have been mooting would be disastrous for the country.
Words have power, especially if you are close to becoming the leader of the dominant world power. That's why you cannot just laugh 'at' him. What he says matters.
It does matter because he might be about to become POTUS. What he says matters a very great deal. I think American democracy worked just fine on January 6th with the instruments of state responding to some illegality (it wasn't presumably illegal until it broke in to the Capitol).
Did Trump incite it? We can argue one way or another but democracy was preserved and will be preserved, imo, whether he does indeed become POTUS or not.
The organisation of fake slates of electors was illegal before the events of 6 Jan.
It's reached the point that if the popular vote is 50-50ish IRL I'll be surprised. I think they are just taking the piss at this point "Yeah, 50/50 mate. Don't forget the 100k fee, yeah. In cash".
It’s very difficult for me because I don’t want to throw aspersions on the pollsters, particularly because I am not as au fait with their practices in the US as I am here. There is however, it feels to me, a lot of herding going on, at 50/50.
The reaction to Trump’s comments about Liz Cheney seems to be classic TDS. He’s asking how war hawks would feel if they were the ones having guns pointed at them.
How stupid are we for not laughing at Trump's hilarious narrative?
“She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”
Are there odds on him calling Kamala a c*** by next Tuesday? You just know he does it in private anyway.
I don't think he is that vulgar. Non-drinking, non-smoking/drug-taking.
Plus of that age. I don't think it is in his vernacular.
But we can have a bet if you would like.
Lol, a man who calls his opponents stupid bastards, scum and garbage, mentions the size of a famous sportsman's cock & does an impersonation of a disabled journalist during speeches, and boasts about grabbing women by the pussy isn't 'that vulgar'. A judgment for the ages.
His musings about executing Liz Cheney by firing squad is quite startling. I do wonder whether Trump will enact his wet dreams and take the ultimate action against anyone he believes have dimished him over the years. The list, I suspect will be incredibly long.
Are we at peak derangement yet? He's not literally calling to shoot people by firing squad, in the same way he's not literarily having a fascist rally in Maddison square garden, or going to literally have a bloodbath.
This is bonkers stuff. But, once you have convinced yourself the man is a fascist you can convince yourself all his utterances can be interrelated in the worse possible bad faith way.
It is an interesting phenomenon to see many/most of PB so deranged.
I can't really understand it. Don't like his policies on immigration by all means, but going off on one because he says he wants to deport illegal immigrants (while no doubt sipping their chai latte from one of *those* mugs) is super strange.
I think it's fear. Some people need to channel their otherwise illogical and unfounded fears into a concrete form. That way they can rail against Trump, who in this case is the manifestation of their fears and take comfort, either in his eventual defeat, or in the solidarity they find from others who think the same.
Otherwise the whole nazi/fascist/sending troops to kill Americans thing is not really fathomable.
If you think most of PB is deranged; perhaps they're the 'normal' ones and it is your view on matters that is 'deranged' ?
Yes could be. I mean my - well-documented on here - position is that I don't think that Trump is a nazi, nor that he is a threat to "American democracy", nor that he will do very much damage in office beyond at the margin because the paraphernalia of the US state and constitution is powerful and has those famous checks and balances which would prevent any individual from subverting it or them.
Any egregious example of what he has done or what he is feared as doing has been done countless times in other democracies the world over from time immemorial.
I have also said he is a laugh at, not laugh with kind of guy whose pronouncements are just extraordinary, but then that's America.
What I do respect is almost half (perhaps more) of the American voting public have decided that he's their man and it irritates me that people on PB in their typical bien pensant, Guardian letter-writing, oh aren't they all ghastly way, seem to think they know better.
And every time someone does call him a nazi or whatnot (not on PB, obvs, because no one cares) it serves to solidify the support he has.
That was a politer answer than my comment deserved.
My own view is that Trump is not a Nazi, which is a very specific thing. He is not a fascist - yet.
But I do think he is a threat to American democracy - as we saw on January 6th, and by the comments that he, and people around him, have made. And I think the deportations his team have been mooting would be disastrous for the country.
Words have power, especially if you are close to becoming the leader of the dominant world power. That's why you cannot just laugh 'at' him. What he says matters.
It does matter because he might be about to become POTUS. What he says matters a very great deal. I think American democracy worked just fine on January 6th with the instruments of state responding to some illegality (it wasn't presumably illegal until it broke in to the Capitol).
Did Trump incite it? We can argue one way or another but democracy was preserved and will be preserved, imo, whether he does indeed become POTUS or not.
The organisation of fake slates of electors was illegal before the events of 6 Jan.
Yes I think @rcs1000 noted some actual illegal actions that were taken. What is/was the outcome of that.
The reaction to Trump’s comments about Liz Cheney seems to be classic TDS. He’s asking how war hawks would feel if they were the ones having guns pointed at them.
How stupid are we for not laughing at Trump's hilarious narrative?
“She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”
I see that as a direct threat, because that is what it is.
Re farming what happens if those inheriting land can’t raise the IHT liability ?
It’s not like property which would generally be easier to sell .
Farmland is easy enough to sell. Phone the local auctioneers, cash lands in the bank about a month later.
There are lots of reasons why this policy is bad, but this isn't one.
Scenario: Farm is valued at 10k/acre for inheritance tax purposes. Farm is lets say 300 acres, so the bill is £200k (We'll assume the lad owns all the equipment and/or it's all depreciated for the sake of argument). The old Farmer's son sticks 20 acres up for sale, and only gets 5k/acre. A bit extreme, but just putting it out there for the sake of argument... Does the farm now get revalued to 1.5 million so the 200k isn't due ?
If the land is sold in open auction that is the value. It is really a bad idea but totally expected. It will also trash other businesses where succession is important. My ex MP says the first suicide has happened, not sure if that is true. We really have a vile incompetent government with a vile incompetent Prime Minister. But we knew that.
We seem to have a lot of press writing half baked incorrect stories to scare farmers.
It's been badly announced but I don't actually think there are many people at all who understand what the changes are yet alone the actual impact it has on people.
There is a story going around (no idea if it's true) on a supposed farmers' fb page describing a suicide which is getting everyone enraged.
I think farmers generally (can) have a very rough time and the suicide rate is very high. That said, governments of the past decades have prioritised mass market affordability of farm produce over farmers' well-being and it is difficult to argue that that has been the wrong policy.
Also it has long been known that buying agricultural land is a good tax avoidance wheeze but, a situation affecting 0.0n% of the farmers, still less of the population is not I believe good grounds for policy-making.
Removing a good tax avoidance wheeze is something that a sensible Government should be doing.
The suicide could be caused by a lot of things with this being the final one of a lot of straws. Farmer suicide is scarily high anyway as it's a lonely business that can feeling never ending..
I don't doubt but it is getting everyone agitated. Plus ISAs are a good tax avoidance wheeze.
An ISA is not tax avoidance.
“Tax avoidance is bending the rules of the tax system to gain a tax advantage, that parliament never intended.” (HMRC, 2015)
"It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law".
So in other words it is perfectly legal and this description is designed a) to give The State more power over you at their sole discretion and whim; and b) scare you. Which latter it appears to have done.
Or an understandable reaction by the revenue to rich people's accountants regularly taking the piss.
Nothing in that link (which both Mighty Alex and I used) says anything about it not being legal.
By "do not work" I presume they mean they aren't tax avoidance but are, rather, illegal.
You've clearly not followed all those stories about tax advisers who sold tax avoidance schemes as 'perfectly legal', only for their clients to loses court cases against HMRC... and have to repay millions ?
The guidance was intended to prevent more such embarrassments. Accountants (reputable ones, at least) now tend to run such schemes by the revenue, before marketing them to innocent punters.
Tax avoidance is legal; tax evasion is illegal. Sometimes it is not clear which a particular scheme is because it's pushing the line on something where the law is unclear or open to interpretation. That lack of clarity does not imply legality.
The HMRC website is saying that some schemes are legal but not "within the spirit of the law". Whatever tf that means, legally.
Presumably refers to the inevitable changing of tax rules to close loopholes. Some of these avoidance schemes can be very expensive to unwind, if the law changes. If your tax advisers have been taking the piss, you're taking that risk.
Also true but doesn't alter my point that tax avoidance is legal. ISAs are tax avoidance. Film investment schemes were then they weren't.
Doesn't affect the status of genuine tax avoidance.
Tax avoidance, and terms such as the spirit of the law or the "intent" of the drafter are all established in caselaw and have a meaning in the UK context. There's a long history of cases starting with House of Lords in W T Ramsay Ltd v IRC ([1981] STC 174) that have progressively sought to define and ring-fence artificial tax avoidance from acceptable tax planning. Since 2013 we've also had a general anti-abuse rule (GAAR), which uses the term "abuse" which is more common in European civil law settings, alongside our DOTAS (disclosure of tax avoidance) rules.
So for a layman, what does this mean, as defined in caselaw: "It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law."
There are a number of, for want of a better word, "hallmarks" of tax avoidance in the caselaw and also in the DOTAS guidance. These are, and I paraphrase:
- a degree of artificiality, i.e. the taxpayer has gone beyond simply doing things in a certain way to get the better tax outcome, they've actually inserted steps in the process that are only there for tax reasons - pre-meditated / preordained: there's evidence that what the taxpayer did was planned in advance - at odds with the intent of the drafter of the legislation: courts often spend a lot of effort establishing what was in the mind of the government when they introduced legislation. If a tax outcome is at odds with what they intended then this is the world of loopholes
Ramsey is the most famous case because all anti-avoidance caselaw really evolves from there. But in the other corner we have the venerable old Inland Revenue Commissioners v. Duke of Westminster [1936] A.C. 1;[1] 19 TC 490, with the important principle "Every man is entitled, if he can, to order his affairs so that the tax attaching under the appropriate Acts is less than it otherwise would be. If he succeeds in ordering them so as to secure this result, then, however unappreciative the Commissioners of Inland Revenue or his fellow tax-payers may be of his ingenuity, he cannot be compelled to pay an increased tax."
Ramsey and subsequent cases don't completely overturn this principle but they do make it more contingent. In Ramsey the key phrase was "A preordained series of transactions – or a single composite transaction – which includes Steps inserted which have no commercial purpose apart from tax avoidance or deferral."
Thanks. In other words, it is legal unless or until it is deemed illegal.
As for the hallmarks, then yes - the more complicated something is tax-wise, the less clear it is whether it is legal or illegal but it will be determined one way or the other at some point.
So "spirit of the law" is in itself, as a phrase, meaningless in law?
Spirit is a word used by judges and found in transcripts quite often, but you are right in one sense: that there is an in-built teleology in how jurisprudence treats avoidance now. Because courts and anti-avoidance rules are now able to deny tax benefits where planning falls outside the spirit (or intent / purpose) of the law, you could argue that the law IS the spirit of the law. Which is part of what Bill is saying.
Re farming what happens if those inheriting land can’t raise the IHT liability ?
It’s not like property which would generally be easier to sell .
Farmland is easy enough to sell. Phone the local auctioneers, cash lands in the bank about a month later.
There are lots of reasons why this policy is bad, but this isn't one.
Scenario: Farm is valued at 10k/acre for inheritance tax purposes. Farm is lets say 300 acres, so the bill is £200k (We'll assume the lad owns all the equipment and/or it's all depreciated for the sake of argument). The old Farmer's son sticks 20 acres up for sale, and only gets 5k/acre. A bit extreme, but just putting it out there for the sake of argument... Does the farm now get revalued to 1.5 million so the 200k isn't due ?
If the land is sold in open auction that is the value. It is really a bad idea but totally expected. It will also trash other businesses where succession is important. My ex MP says the first suicide has happened, not sure if that is true. We really have a vile incompetent government with a vile incompetent Prime Minister. But we knew that.
We seem to have a lot of press writing half baked incorrect stories to scare farmers.
It's been badly announced but I don't actually think there are many people at all who understand what the changes are yet alone the actual impact it has on people.
There is a story going around (no idea if it's true) on a supposed farmers' fb page describing a suicide which is getting everyone enraged.
I think farmers generally (can) have a very rough time and the suicide rate is very high. That said, governments of the past decades have prioritised mass market affordability of farm produce over farmers' well-being and it is difficult to argue that that has been the wrong policy.
Also it has long been known that buying agricultural land is a good tax avoidance wheeze but, a situation affecting 0.0n% of the farmers, still less of the population is not I believe good grounds for policy-making.
Removing a good tax avoidance wheeze is something that a sensible Government should be doing.
The suicide could be caused by a lot of things with this being the final one of a lot of straws. Farmer suicide is scarily high anyway as it's a lonely business that can feeling never ending..
I don't doubt but it is getting everyone agitated. Plus ISAs are a good tax avoidance wheeze.
An ISA is not tax avoidance.
“Tax avoidance is bending the rules of the tax system to gain a tax advantage, that parliament never intended.” (HMRC, 2015)
"It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law".
So in other words it is perfectly legal and this description is designed a) to give The State more power over you at their sole discretion and whim; and b) scare you. Which latter it appears to have done.
Or an understandable reaction by the revenue to rich people's accountants regularly taking the piss.
Nothing in that link (which both Mighty Alex and I used) says anything about it not being legal.
By "do not work" I presume they mean they aren't tax avoidance but are, rather, illegal.
You've clearly not followed all those stories about tax advisers who sold tax avoidance schemes as 'perfectly legal', only for their clients to loses court cases against HMRC... and have to repay millions ?
The guidance was intended to prevent more such embarrassments. Accountants (reputable ones, at least) now tend to run such schemes by the revenue, before marketing them to innocent punters.
Tax avoidance is legal; tax evasion is illegal. Sometimes it is not clear which a particular scheme is because it's pushing the line on something where the law is unclear or open to interpretation. That lack of clarity does not imply legality.
The HMRC website is saying that some schemes are legal but not "within the spirit of the law". Whatever tf that means, legally.
Presumably refers to the inevitable changing of tax rules to close loopholes. Some of these avoidance schemes can be very expensive to unwind, if the law changes. If your tax advisers have been taking the piss, you're taking that risk.
Also true but doesn't alter my point that tax avoidance is legal. ISAs are tax avoidance. Film investment schemes were then they weren't.
Doesn't affect the status of genuine tax avoidance.
Tax avoidance, and terms such as the spirit of the law or the "intent" of the drafter are all established in caselaw and have a meaning in the UK context. There's a long history of cases starting with House of Lords in W T Ramsay Ltd v IRC ([1981] STC 174) that have progressively sought to define and ring-fence artificial tax avoidance from acceptable tax planning. Since 2013 we've also had a general anti-abuse rule (GAAR), which uses the term "abuse" which is more common in European civil law settings, alongside our DOTAS (disclosure of tax avoidance) rules.
So for a layman, what does this mean, as defined in caselaw: "It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law."
It means that you're doing something technically legal but not intended to be legal so don't be surprised if the law changes.
Which if its difficult to unwind if the law does change then can leave you considerably out of pocket.
Sounds weird. Interested in what the law says. Are people in danger of being charged with acting outside the spirit of the law?
Yes, if the law changes. Which can happen quite quickly sometimes for things that are outside the spirit of the law.
Meaningless twaddle. You could be charged with eating a Terry's Chocolate Orange. If the law changes.
The law changes quite regularly, which is why its important to consider both the letter and spirit of the law, especially if its going to take some time to unwind your actions.
There is no spirit of the law that implies Parliament wants eating a Terry's Chocolate Orange to be illegal. If there was, then buying a lifetime's supply of Terry's Chocolate Oranges might not be a wise investment as they'll need to be binned as it would be criminal to eat them if the law changed, but there's not.
Avoidance is a different matter. What's legal today could be illegal next year and you might get very little advance warning of that changing - and if you're out of pocket as a result, then its a result of your own actions so you're not entitled to compensation.
All true. No one is arguing that. But what is legal today is legal today. Plus if the "spirit of the law" doesn't want people or companies to have complex tax structures then it is howling at the moon. So again, meaningless.
Its only meaningless if you are expecting the status quo to remain the case forever.
It does not. Both because of primary and secondary legislation changing the law, and caselaw doing so too.
Hence you get people like Clarkson bitching and moaning when their tax avoidance loophole gets closed and they're left carrying an asset they expected to avoid tax on but now won't.
Fuel duty freeze saves the richest quintile 2.96x as much as the lowest quintile. If you want a cost-effective way to help poor people out with a tax cut, this ain't it.
Re farming what happens if those inheriting land can’t raise the IHT liability ?
It’s not like property which would generally be easier to sell .
Farmland is easy enough to sell. Phone the local auctioneers, cash lands in the bank about a month later.
There are lots of reasons why this policy is bad, but this isn't one.
Scenario: Farm is valued at 10k/acre for inheritance tax purposes. Farm is lets say 300 acres, so the bill is £200k (We'll assume the lad owns all the equipment and/or it's all depreciated for the sake of argument). The old Farmer's son sticks 20 acres up for sale, and only gets 5k/acre. A bit extreme, but just putting it out there for the sake of argument... Does the farm now get revalued to 1.5 million so the 200k isn't due ?
If the land is sold in open auction that is the value. It is really a bad idea but totally expected. It will also trash other businesses where succession is important. My ex MP says the first suicide has happened, not sure if that is true. We really have a vile incompetent government with a vile incompetent Prime Minister. But we knew that.
We seem to have a lot of press writing half baked incorrect stories to scare farmers.
It's been badly announced but I don't actually think there are many people at all who understand what the changes are yet alone the actual impact it has on people.
There is a story going around (no idea if it's true) on a supposed farmers' fb page describing a suicide which is getting everyone enraged.
I think farmers generally (can) have a very rough time and the suicide rate is very high. That said, governments of the past decades have prioritised mass market affordability of farm produce over farmers' well-being and it is difficult to argue that that has been the wrong policy.
Also it has long been known that buying agricultural land is a good tax avoidance wheeze but, a situation affecting 0.0n% of the farmers, still less of the population is not I believe good grounds for policy-making.
Removing a good tax avoidance wheeze is something that a sensible Government should be doing.
The suicide could be caused by a lot of things with this being the final one of a lot of straws. Farmer suicide is scarily high anyway as it's a lonely business that can feeling never ending..
I don't doubt but it is getting everyone agitated. Plus ISAs are a good tax avoidance wheeze.
An ISA is not tax avoidance.
“Tax avoidance is bending the rules of the tax system to gain a tax advantage, that parliament never intended.” (HMRC, 2015)
"It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law".
So in other words it is perfectly legal and this description is designed a) to give The State more power over you at their sole discretion and whim; and b) scare you. Which latter it appears to have done.
Or an understandable reaction by the revenue to rich people's accountants regularly taking the piss.
Nothing in that link (which both Mighty Alex and I used) says anything about it not being legal.
By "do not work" I presume they mean they aren't tax avoidance but are, rather, illegal.
You've clearly not followed all those stories about tax advisers who sold tax avoidance schemes as 'perfectly legal', only for their clients to loses court cases against HMRC... and have to repay millions ?
The guidance was intended to prevent more such embarrassments. Accountants (reputable ones, at least) now tend to run such schemes by the revenue, before marketing them to innocent punters.
Tax avoidance is legal; tax evasion is illegal. Sometimes it is not clear which a particular scheme is because it's pushing the line on something where the law is unclear or open to interpretation. That lack of clarity does not imply legality.
The HMRC website is saying that some schemes are legal but not "within the spirit of the law". Whatever tf that means, legally.
Presumably refers to the inevitable changing of tax rules to close loopholes. Some of these avoidance schemes can be very expensive to unwind, if the law changes. If your tax advisers have been taking the piss, you're taking that risk.
I think a good rule o thumb if you're going to chance your arm with one of these schemes, umbrella companies or whatever is to make sure the fees aren't too high and keep the tax for a bit should you have to pay it back.
The film schemes (huge ongoing I think legal battles) were different because HMRC decided they were against the rules and then claimed back the implied amount (or something) that you would otherwise have paid something something resulting in not just the tax you avoided having to be paid back but a huge amount more.
Details will I'm sure be on google.
The film schemes puzzled me at the time because sfaict the films were actually getting made as the government intended.
The reaction to Trump’s comments about Liz Cheney seems to be classic TDS. He’s asking how war hawks would feel if they were the ones having guns pointed at them.
How stupid are we for not laughing at Trump's hilarious narrative?
“She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”
Lots of discussion on IHT; one of the questions I keep pondering is why it still exists.
It's absolutely hated, and raises very little revenue; 0.7% of government income.
For example, Jeremy Hunt used £10bln to cut NI by 2%. He could have abolished IHT instead and had £2.5bln left to play with.
Surely the smart politics would have been to ditch IHT entirely, rather than a modest reduction in NI which virtually everyone forgot about 24hrs later.
There are lots of advantages to wiping out a tax entirely rather than changing rates - the government would save the cost revenue collection, lots of people would save the cost of employing the tax planning parasites*, it would knock the bottom out of all the known dodges like buying farmland (with the amusing side effect of burning the fingers of those most egregiously attempting to tax dodge in this way as asset values drop back to their true levels).
Why on earth didn't he do it? If nothing else, he would have gone down in history as the chancellor who abolished IHT, and it's hard to imaging that would be an unpopular legacy.
*Maybe they could become social care workers, instead of us having to import millions of Nigerians
Remove IHT and when the next Government comes along do you tax the money as income received or a capital gain.
That's why you leave IHT because with it removed other options become available that would be worse...
Yup - and this is why I can't abide all the whinging about IHT. As I understand It is a lax regime, with high thresholds and low rates and full of ways of getting round it.
However, I am quite attracted to the idea of getting rid of it and simply treating inheritances as a capital gain (or income if put inside a trust of which you are a beneficiary). I have no doubt there are sensible reasons why to not do it like that. But, ultimately what is an inheritance if not a massive capital gain? It is not like a gambling win.
Everyone gets a lifetime gifts and inheritance allowance, once that's gone, anything you receive on top is a capital gain.
Are there odds on him calling Kamala a c*** by next Tuesday? You just know he does it in private anyway.
I don't think he is that vulgar. Non-drinking, non-smoking/drug-taking.
Plus of that age. I don't think it is in his vernacular.
But we can have a bet if you would like.
Lol, a man who calls his opponents stupid bastards, scum and garbage, mentions the size of a famous sportsman's cock & does an impersonation of a disabled journalist during speeches, and boasts about grabbing women by the pussy isn't 'that vulgar'. A judgment for the ages.
His musings about executing Liz Cheney by firing squad is quite startling. I do wonder whether Trump will enact his wet dreams and take the ultimate action against anyone he believes have dimished him over the years. The list, I suspect will be incredibly long.
Are we at peak derangement yet? He's not literally calling to shoot people by firing squad, in the same way he's not literarily having a fascist rally in Maddison square garden, or going to literally have a bloodbath.
This is bonkers stuff. But, once you have convinced yourself the man is a fascist you can convince yourself all his utterances can be interrelated in the worse possible bad faith way.
It is an interesting phenomenon to see many/most of PB so deranged.
I can't really understand it. Don't like his policies on immigration by all means, but going off on one because he says he wants to deport illegal immigrants (while no doubt sipping their chai latte from one of *those* mugs) is super strange.
I think it's fear. Some people need to channel their otherwise illogical and unfounded fears into a concrete form. That way they can rail against Trump, who in this case is the manifestation of their fears and take comfort, either in his eventual defeat, or in the solidarity they find from others who think the same.
Otherwise the whole nazi/fascist/sending troops to kill Americans thing is not really fathomable.
If you think most of PB is deranged; perhaps they're the 'normal' ones and it is your view on matters that is 'deranged' ?
Yes could be. I mean my - well-documented on here - position is that I don't think that Trump is a nazi, nor that he is a threat to "American democracy", nor that he will do very much damage in office beyond at the margin because the paraphernalia of the US state and constitution is powerful and has those famous checks and balances which would prevent any individual from subverting it or them.
Any egregious example of what he has done or what he is feared as doing has been done countless times in other democracies the world over from time immemorial.
I have also said he is a laugh at, not laugh with kind of guy whose pronouncements are just extraordinary, but then that's America.
What I do respect is almost half (perhaps more) of the American voting public have decided that he's their man and it irritates me that people on PB in their typical bien pensant, Guardian letter-writing, oh aren't they all ghastly way, seem to think they know better.
And every time someone does call him a nazi or whatnot (not on PB, obvs, because no one cares) it serves to solidify the support he has.
That was a politer answer than my comment deserved.
My own view is that Trump is not a Nazi, which is a very specific thing. He is not a fascist - yet.
But I do think he is a threat to American democracy - as we saw on January 6th, and by the comments that he, and people around him, have made. And I think the deportations his team have been mooting would be disastrous for the country.
Words have power, especially if you are close to becoming the leader of the dominant world power. That's why you cannot just laugh 'at' him. What he says matters.
It does matter because he might be about to become POTUS. What he says matters a very great deal. I think American democracy worked just fine on January 6th with the instruments of state responding to some illegality (it wasn't presumably illegal until it broke in to the Capitol).
Did Trump incite it? We can argue one way or another but democracy was preserved and will be preserved, imo, whether he does indeed become POTUS or not.
The organisation of fake slates of electors was illegal before the events of 6 Jan.
Yes I think @rcs1000 noted some actual illegal actions that were taken. What is/was the outcome of that.
Several people have pleaded guilty and been punished. Others face trial. The Supreme Court delivered a bonkers ruling giving Trump partial immunity, which has delayed his trial.
Re farming what happens if those inheriting land can’t raise the IHT liability ?
It’s not like property which would generally be easier to sell .
Farmland is easy enough to sell. Phone the local auctioneers, cash lands in the bank about a month later.
There are lots of reasons why this policy is bad, but this isn't one.
Scenario: Farm is valued at 10k/acre for inheritance tax purposes. Farm is lets say 300 acres, so the bill is £200k (We'll assume the lad owns all the equipment and/or it's all depreciated for the sake of argument). The old Farmer's son sticks 20 acres up for sale, and only gets 5k/acre. A bit extreme, but just putting it out there for the sake of argument... Does the farm now get revalued to 1.5 million so the 200k isn't due ?
If the land is sold in open auction that is the value. It is really a bad idea but totally expected. It will also trash other businesses where succession is important. My ex MP says the first suicide has happened, not sure if that is true. We really have a vile incompetent government with a vile incompetent Prime Minister. But we knew that.
We seem to have a lot of press writing half baked incorrect stories to scare farmers.
It's been badly announced but I don't actually think there are many people at all who understand what the changes are yet alone the actual impact it has on people.
There is a story going around (no idea if it's true) on a supposed farmers' fb page describing a suicide which is getting everyone enraged.
I think farmers generally (can) have a very rough time and the suicide rate is very high. That said, governments of the past decades have prioritised mass market affordability of farm produce over farmers' well-being and it is difficult to argue that that has been the wrong policy.
Also it has long been known that buying agricultural land is a good tax avoidance wheeze but, a situation affecting 0.0n% of the farmers, still less of the population is not I believe good grounds for policy-making.
Removing a good tax avoidance wheeze is something that a sensible Government should be doing.
The suicide could be caused by a lot of things with this being the final one of a lot of straws. Farmer suicide is scarily high anyway as it's a lonely business that can feeling never ending..
I don't doubt but it is getting everyone agitated. Plus ISAs are a good tax avoidance wheeze.
An ISA is not tax avoidance.
“Tax avoidance is bending the rules of the tax system to gain a tax advantage, that parliament never intended.” (HMRC, 2015)
"It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law".
So in other words it is perfectly legal and this description is designed a) to give The State more power over you at their sole discretion and whim; and b) scare you. Which latter it appears to have done.
Or an understandable reaction by the revenue to rich people's accountants regularly taking the piss.
Nothing in that link (which both Mighty Alex and I used) says anything about it not being legal.
By "do not work" I presume they mean they aren't tax avoidance but are, rather, illegal.
You've clearly not followed all those stories about tax advisers who sold tax avoidance schemes as 'perfectly legal', only for their clients to loses court cases against HMRC... and have to repay millions ?
The guidance was intended to prevent more such embarrassments. Accountants (reputable ones, at least) now tend to run such schemes by the revenue, before marketing them to innocent punters.
Tax avoidance is legal; tax evasion is illegal. Sometimes it is not clear which a particular scheme is because it's pushing the line on something where the law is unclear or open to interpretation. That lack of clarity does not imply legality.
The HMRC website is saying that some schemes are legal but not "within the spirit of the law". Whatever tf that means, legally.
Presumably refers to the inevitable changing of tax rules to close loopholes. Some of these avoidance schemes can be very expensive to unwind, if the law changes. If your tax advisers have been taking the piss, you're taking that risk.
Also true but doesn't alter my point that tax avoidance is legal. ISAs are tax avoidance. Film investment schemes were then they weren't.
Doesn't affect the status of genuine tax avoidance.
Tax avoidance, and terms such as the spirit of the law or the "intent" of the drafter are all established in caselaw and have a meaning in the UK context. There's a long history of cases starting with House of Lords in W T Ramsay Ltd v IRC ([1981] STC 174) that have progressively sought to define and ring-fence artificial tax avoidance from acceptable tax planning. Since 2013 we've also had a general anti-abuse rule (GAAR), which uses the term "abuse" which is more common in European civil law settings, alongside our DOTAS (disclosure of tax avoidance) rules.
So for a layman, what does this mean, as defined in caselaw: "It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law."
There are a number of, for want of a better word, "hallmarks" of tax avoidance in the caselaw and also in the DOTAS guidance. These are, and I paraphrase:
- a degree of artificiality, i.e. the taxpayer has gone beyond simply doing things in a certain way to get the better tax outcome, they've actually inserted steps in the process that are only there for tax reasons - pre-meditated / preordained: there's evidence that what the taxpayer did was planned in advance - at odds with the intent of the drafter of the legislation: courts often spend a lot of effort establishing what was in the mind of the government when they introduced legislation. If a tax outcome is at odds with what they intended then this is the world of loopholes
Ramsey is the most famous case because all anti-avoidance caselaw really evolves from there. But in the other corner we have the venerable old Inland Revenue Commissioners v. Duke of Westminster [1936] A.C. 1;[1] 19 TC 490, with the important principle "Every man is entitled, if he can, to order his affairs so that the tax attaching under the appropriate Acts is less than it otherwise would be. If he succeeds in ordering them so as to secure this result, then, however unappreciative the Commissioners of Inland Revenue or his fellow tax-payers may be of his ingenuity, he cannot be compelled to pay an increased tax."
Ramsey and subsequent cases don't completely overturn this principle but they do make it more contingent. In Ramsey the key phrase was "A preordained series of transactions – or a single composite transaction – which includes Steps inserted which have no commercial purpose apart from tax avoidance or deferral."
Thanks. In other words, it is legal unless or until it is deemed illegal.
As for the hallmarks, then yes - the more complicated something is tax-wise, the less clear it is whether it is legal or illegal but it will be determined one way or the other at some point.
So "spirit of the law" is in itself, as a phrase, meaningless in law?
Spirit is a word used by judges and found in transcripts quite often, but you are right in one sense: that there is an in-built teleology in how jurisprudence treats avoidance now. Because courts and anti-avoidance rules are now able to deny tax benefits where planning falls outside the spirit (or intent / purpose) of the law, you could argue that the law IS the spirit of the law. Which is part of what Bill is saying.
Sounds like the spirit of cricket which a lot of players think is nonsense.
A council is considering a city centre ban on cyclists to protect pedestrians, with fines for people who do not comply.
Birmingham City council has become the latest local authority to discuss barring cyclists from pedestrian-only areas to curb anti-social cycling.
A report by the council’s regulation and community safety executives has raised concerns that food and parcel couriers on e-bikes, travelling “at speed and without care for pedestrians”, pose a particular danger to the public in areas of high footfall.
The report, published earlier this month, proposes extending the city’s public spaces protection order to encompass cycling. The move would add it to a list of anti-social behaviours that includes graffiti, street drinking, large gatherings, and excessive noise.
The report said cycling could be “restricted by time periods” or banned outright, with the issue being put to a public consultation.
I'm surprised that this has taken so long to hit the national media. Telegraph article in the Telegraph; more rounded piece in the Groan; I have not checked the Daily Wail. Disabled charities on my network (TBF this is focused on active travel, of course) have been contacting Birmingham Council with their concerns for 2-3 weeks, as it will impact their members / supporters / clients who use cycles or adapted cycles as their mobility aid, and cannot walk, who will be targeted for harassment by Council or BID officers (this happens routinely), who are never trained properly. This is Council Officers as Jesus: Pick up your Mobility Aid and Walk.
TLDR: I don't see this happening, because BCCs evidence does not support the claims. Cycling has been normal in Brum City Centre for 50-70 years, and the Council Report specifically - as mentioned by @Big_G_NorthWales - talks about food delivery and parcel couriers travelling at high speed, probably on mopeds not pedal-cycles, and mini van style cargo bikes (think Postman Pat)also at speed.
The former are a problem of supply chain and business regulation, with laws in place that can manage it, and the latter can be regulated. The way Scotland does it is by treating delivery riders as Street Traders needing a licence. The current UK Govt, unlike the last one, will get onto that. As a PSPO it needs one against ASB, not a ban on things that the Council's evidence do not identify as a problem.
One problem is the PSPO process, which legally requires evidence, but practically they can be pushed though with none, and are set up to be almost impossible to stop. The only one I have ever seen stopped was the Mansfield one about 5 years ago, where 5 locals targeted by it threatened a High Court legal action and forced them to moderate it. The Mansfield one was in reaction to a couple of occasions where kids had been wheelying around the outdoor market, and Captain Mainwaring jerked his knee.
The PSPO process needs reform to address problems and not address prejudices. At present these style of PSPO tend to exist in Reform type, or Blue Rinse type, coastal towns, or in fairly leafy country places. And one or two places where LD or Lab have gone local populist.
There already exist good inclusive models in Leicester, and to an extent Coventry, which Brum can follow. If they try and persist, I think they are big enough to get a challenge - but we shall see. I think they will take a via media.
I was part of a group that seriously curtailed a PSPO trying to regulate all public speaking and bring under civil law what was supposed to be criminal public order issues. It was mainly (entirely) done at the behest of some activist lgbt groups who couldn't cope with a Christian preacher saying things they disliked. Anyway the flaccid council dropped it when it hit resistance and a threat of judicial review.
The problem is the lack of interest in enforcement.
In my view, as a start, there needs to be a crackdown on the illegal eBikes. The local cycle lanes are becoming unusable due to people doing 30mph+ with electric motorcycles.
To start with, the batteries are nearly always unsafe.
Then there's the thuggish behaviour towards actual cyclists - I've sen them blast past children on bikes, missing them by millimetres.
Almost always unlawful motorcycles. Some police forces have become quite good and can spot and confiscate these bikes routinely. Most certainly a police matter, the unlocked unlawful ones are pretty easy to spot.
The wrong type of cyclists? Should all cyclists be preceded by a man carrying a red flag? That would slow them down. As a pedestrian, I find fast-pedalling cyclists more of a hazard as the effort often keeps their heads down so they are not looking out for people crossing the road. At least ebikers are generally looking where they are going.
E-bikes that don’t comply with the law (have a throttle that doesn’t require pedal assist and can do more than 15mph) are not electric bicycles but electric motorcycles and need to be licensed, insured and rode as if they were.
Fuel duty freeze saves the richest quintile 2.96x as much as the lowest quintile. If you want a cost-effective way to help poor people out with a tax cut, this ain't it.
A better metric would be fraction of disposable income spent on petrol.
Fuel duty freeze saves the richest quintile 2.96x as much as the lowest quintile. If you want a cost-effective way to help poor people out with a tax cut, this ain't it.
Even if that were correct (it is not!) now change that to percentage of income. 🤦♂️
1/3rd in cash terms is a considerably higher percentage of a poor persons income than it is a wealthier person's income.
Progressive/regressive is as a percentage of income and so using your own data it is exceptionally regressive. VAT, income tax etc don't see the poorest pay 1/3rd of what the richest do.
However you didn't quote cost, you quoted mileage. Mileage is meaningless twaddle since the wealthier can afford zero-fuel or more fuel-efficient vehicles.
Something Eek spoke about a while ago. Seems to be gathering pace.
Now one in 10 people on Ferryhill, Durham, have been dumped up here by London councils. Landlords are happy but these people, often with extra needs, become a burden on our local council and council tax payers. If this is going to happen then surely the council cleansing these people should pay for their services via a cash transfer to the receiving council.
Re farming what happens if those inheriting land can’t raise the IHT liability ?
It’s not like property which would generally be easier to sell .
Farmland is easy enough to sell. Phone the local auctioneers, cash lands in the bank about a month later.
There are lots of reasons why this policy is bad, but this isn't one.
Scenario: Farm is valued at 10k/acre for inheritance tax purposes. Farm is lets say 300 acres, so the bill is £200k (We'll assume the lad owns all the equipment and/or it's all depreciated for the sake of argument). The old Farmer's son sticks 20 acres up for sale, and only gets 5k/acre. A bit extreme, but just putting it out there for the sake of argument... Does the farm now get revalued to 1.5 million so the 200k isn't due ?
If the land is sold in open auction that is the value. It is really a bad idea but totally expected. It will also trash other businesses where succession is important. My ex MP says the first suicide has happened, not sure if that is true. We really have a vile incompetent government with a vile incompetent Prime Minister. But we knew that.
We seem to have a lot of press writing half baked incorrect stories to scare farmers.
It's been badly announced but I don't actually think there are many people at all who understand what the changes are yet alone the actual impact it has on people.
There is a story going around (no idea if it's true) on a supposed farmers' fb page describing a suicide which is getting everyone enraged.
I think farmers generally (can) have a very rough time and the suicide rate is very high. That said, governments of the past decades have prioritised mass market affordability of farm produce over farmers' well-being and it is difficult to argue that that has been the wrong policy.
Also it has long been known that buying agricultural land is a good tax avoidance wheeze but, a situation affecting 0.0n% of the farmers, still less of the population is not I believe good grounds for policy-making.
Removing a good tax avoidance wheeze is something that a sensible Government should be doing.
The suicide could be caused by a lot of things with this being the final one of a lot of straws. Farmer suicide is scarily high anyway as it's a lonely business that can feeling never ending..
I don't doubt but it is getting everyone agitated. Plus ISAs are a good tax avoidance wheeze.
An ISA is not tax avoidance.
“Tax avoidance is bending the rules of the tax system to gain a tax advantage, that parliament never intended.” (HMRC, 2015)
"It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law".
So in other words it is perfectly legal and this description is designed a) to give The State more power over you at their sole discretion and whim; and b) scare you. Which latter it appears to have done.
Or an understandable reaction by the revenue to rich people's accountants regularly taking the piss.
Nothing in that link (which both Mighty Alex and I used) says anything about it not being legal.
By "do not work" I presume they mean they aren't tax avoidance but are, rather, illegal.
You've clearly not followed all those stories about tax advisers who sold tax avoidance schemes as 'perfectly legal', only for their clients to loses court cases against HMRC... and have to repay millions ?
The guidance was intended to prevent more such embarrassments. Accountants (reputable ones, at least) now tend to run such schemes by the revenue, before marketing them to innocent punters.
Tax avoidance is legal; tax evasion is illegal. Sometimes it is not clear which a particular scheme is because it's pushing the line on something where the law is unclear or open to interpretation. That lack of clarity does not imply legality.
The HMRC website is saying that some schemes are legal but not "within the spirit of the law". Whatever tf that means, legally.
Presumably refers to the inevitable changing of tax rules to close loopholes. Some of these avoidance schemes can be very expensive to unwind, if the law changes. If your tax advisers have been taking the piss, you're taking that risk.
Also true but doesn't alter my point that tax avoidance is legal. ISAs are tax avoidance. Film investment schemes were then they weren't.
Doesn't affect the status of genuine tax avoidance.
Tax avoidance, and terms such as the spirit of the law or the "intent" of the drafter are all established in caselaw and have a meaning in the UK context. There's a long history of cases starting with House of Lords in W T Ramsay Ltd v IRC ([1981] STC 174) that have progressively sought to define and ring-fence artificial tax avoidance from acceptable tax planning. Since 2013 we've also had a general anti-abuse rule (GAAR), which uses the term "abuse" which is more common in European civil law settings, alongside our DOTAS (disclosure of tax avoidance) rules.
So for a layman, what does this mean, as defined in caselaw: "It involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law."
There are a number of, for want of a better word, "hallmarks" of tax avoidance in the caselaw and also in the DOTAS guidance. These are, and I paraphrase:
- a degree of artificiality, i.e. the taxpayer has gone beyond simply doing things in a certain way to get the better tax outcome, they've actually inserted steps in the process that are only there for tax reasons - pre-meditated / preordained: there's evidence that what the taxpayer did was planned in advance - at odds with the intent of the drafter of the legislation: courts often spend a lot of effort establishing what was in the mind of the government when they introduced legislation. If a tax outcome is at odds with what they intended then this is the world of loopholes
Ramsey is the most famous case because all anti-avoidance caselaw really evolves from there. But in the other corner we have the venerable old Inland Revenue Commissioners v. Duke of Westminster [1936] A.C. 1;[1] 19 TC 490, with the important principle "Every man is entitled, if he can, to order his affairs so that the tax attaching under the appropriate Acts is less than it otherwise would be. If he succeeds in ordering them so as to secure this result, then, however unappreciative the Commissioners of Inland Revenue or his fellow tax-payers may be of his ingenuity, he cannot be compelled to pay an increased tax."
Ramsey and subsequent cases don't completely overturn this principle but they do make it more contingent. In Ramsey the key phrase was "A preordained series of transactions – or a single composite transaction – which includes Steps inserted which have no commercial purpose apart from tax avoidance or deferral."
Thanks. In other words, it is legal unless or until it is deemed illegal.
As for the hallmarks, then yes - the more complicated something is tax-wise, the less clear it is whether it is legal or illegal but it will be determined one way or the other at some point.
So "spirit of the law" is in itself, as a phrase, meaningless in law?
Spirit is a word used by judges and found in transcripts quite often, but you are right in one sense: that there is an in-built teleology in how jurisprudence treats avoidance now. Because courts and anti-avoidance rules are now able to deny tax benefits where planning falls outside the spirit (or intent / purpose) of the law, you could argue that the law IS the spirit of the law. Which is part of what Bill is saying.
Sounds like the spirit of cricket which a lot of players think is nonsense.
The difference is, if we applied tax principles to cricket then an umpire could rule something out or not out based on whether they think the player was acting within the spirit of the rules.
Fuel duty freeze saves the richest quintile 2.96x as much as the lowest quintile. If you want a cost-effective way to help poor people out with a tax cut, this ain't it.
Even if that were correct (it is not!) now change that to percentage of income. 🤦♂️
1/3rd in cash terms is a considerably higher percentage of a poor persons income than it is a wealthier person's income.
Progressive/regressive is as a percentage of income and so using your own data it is exceptionally regressive. VAT, income tax etc don't see the poorest pay 1/3rd of what the richest do.
However you didn't quote cost, you quoted mileage. Mileage is meaningless twaddle since the wealthier can afford zero-fuel or more fuel-efficient vehicles.
A clever government could have said, during the spike in fuel prices back in 2022 "we will fix pump prices through the tax system so that they will be at (say) £1.55 per litre for the next 5 years". It would have cost money then, but the 5p cut did anyway. But they would be absolutely raking it in now.
Fuel duty freeze saves the richest quintile 2.96x as much as the lowest quintile. If you want a cost-effective way to help poor people out with a tax cut, this ain't it.
From someone leaning left it was a pretty crap budget. Crap, but not from the same perspective as that of the PB glitterati.
In 2021 the LE results were in terms of NEV Lab 29%, Con 36%, LDs 17%. So those results from local by elections suggest both Labour and the Tories will lose county council seats next year with the LDs and Reform and Greens making gains (Reform are likely to stand more candidates than they have in local by elections too)
Something Eek spoke about a while ago. Seems to be gathering pace.
Now one in 10 people on Ferryhill, Durham, have been dumped up here by London councils. Landlords are happy but these people, often with extra needs, become a burden on our local council and council tax payers. If this is going to happen then surely the council cleansing these people should pay for their services via a cash transfer to the receiving council.
Also it's Ferryhill - it's a very small town 10,000 with poor communication links - it's got an hourly bus service to Durham / Darlington and that's about it..
Comments
Now to avoid tax the worker has to do 8 hours and that doesn't work for them or their part time employees.
Being 'paid' via a loan (so not incurring tax) that you are told never needs to be paid back, isn't.
If people want to get involved in complex "avoidance" schemes that promoters charge handsomely for, they should be under no illusion who HMRC will come after for the cash.
Doesn't affect the status of genuine tax avoidance.
Successful tax avoidance is legal.
Unsuccessful tax avoidance is illegal but not generally criminal on the basis you inform HMRC about what you have done.
One subset of tax avoidance is stuff like ISAs, within the intention of the legislation and parliament. It can be unclear what the relevant intention should be. This can be viewed as tax mitigation.
The incentive was never on the employer to do that.
The incentive is on the employee who can get over ten grand per annum in benefits if they only do 16 hours and faces a roughly 80% tax rate if they do any more.
And the state places upon employers a legal responsibility to accept such "flexible working" unless they've got a good reason not to.
So nothing has been fixed.
TIPP was most accurate pollster on the 2020 popular vote but has Trump ahead by 1% nationally today.
Marist meanwhile has Harris ahead in all 3 bluewall states today, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and Harris leads all NE02 polls.
I have said it before and will say it again, in 2004 Bush won the popular vote by 2% but Kerry won Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and unlike him Harris does not need to win Ohio or Florida to win the EC
https://tippinsights.com/tipp-tracking-day-19-trump-holds-a-one-point-lead-as-race-coasts-toward-election-day/
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/harris-holds-narrow-lead-over-trump-blue-wall-states-michigan-pennsylvania-wisconsin-poll
The employee benefit trust loan wheeze went back almost 20 years before the Supreme Court ruled in favour of HMRC
What about the interest on the unpaid tax ? What about the penalty charges ? What about the accountancy / legal fees that you will need for someone to argue your case ?
Surely better to just pay your tax in the first place.
Details will I'm sure be on google.
The difference is that once you've nuked IHT, any form of reinstatment will be massively unpopular, and politicians tend not to survive introducing or raising really unpopular taxes (see also the Poll Tax or the way that fuel duty has been flat for years). If Hunk had killed IHT, I don't think Reeves would have survived introducing IT or CGT for benificaries of Estates, and so she wouldn't have done it.
The other stuff is not avoidance it is illegal, or evasion, or whatever the HMRC wants to call it (there used to be a category of "aggressive tax avoidance").
On its own website it says Tax Avoidance is legal (then blah blah letter of the law).
You sell yourself as a competent professional but then sign up to have your invoices paid to a company in the IOM on the understanding that they'll take their cut and return the balance as a "loan" free from tax.
What do you make of HMRC's now famous (on PB): "[Tax Avoidance] involves operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law."
Hands up who here wants to do more work when they won't receive 80% of the extra income earned . . .
National
Trump 50% Harris 49%
Arizona
Trump 50% Harris 49%
Pennsylvania
Harris 50% Trump 48%
https://substack.com/inbox/post/151014002?r=4aupgp
Which if its difficult to unwind if the law does change then can leave you considerably out of pocket.
She flunked it. The idea that she would have dared to reintroduce a form of IHT is not supported by experience.
https://x.com/rpsagainsttrump/status/1852211077947240872
Just wait until the budget moves the dial. The BBC in their entirety, Jeremy Clarkson, Ed, Conway, Kay Burley and Beth Rigby hated it.
Liz Cheney issues a response on X to Trump's comments: “This is how dictators destroy free nations. They threaten those who speak against them with death. We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant.”
https://x.com/MSNBC/status/1852328701293109603
Presumably you agree with this description of Trump and fascism:
“a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy,”
I mean if that's what you and the good general believe then you should take all appropriate action to guard against it.
Its a hateful tax that is the most regressive tax of all, taking a considerable share of the poorest income but taking considerably less (to none at all) of the wealthiest incomes. Those who can afford a new EV don't pay a penny, while those who rely on their old banger to work are out of pocket.
Its also a stupid tax to increase as its being eliminated. HMRC was making a fortune from drivers via fuel duty but need to diversify away from that as the golden goose is losing its feathers and won't be consuming fuel anymore - HMRC needs to find some other source of revenue instead for general taxation rather than fleecing drivers.
Its also one of the most inflationary taxes to raise.
Why increase a tax today that is being phased out? Its pointless.
There is not a single good reason to increase fuel duty. So well done Reeves for not being so stupid as to do it.
'Employers added 12,000 jobs last month, much lower than the 223,000 created in September, according to the Labor Department.
But while hiring slowed, the unemployment rate held steady at 4.1%.'
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yr0g4gpjro
Nobody should ever face a real tax rate over 50%, let alone 80%.
My own view is that Trump is not a Nazi, which is a very specific thing. He is not a fascist - yet.
But I do think he is a threat to American democracy - as we saw on January 6th, and by the comments that he, and people around him, have made. And I think the deportations his team have been mooting would be disastrous for the country.
Words have power, especially if you are close to becoming the leader of the dominant world power. That's why you cannot just laugh 'at' him. What he says matters.
You are gaslighting us.
How stupid are we for not laughing at Trump's hilarious narrative?
- a degree of artificiality, i.e. the taxpayer has gone beyond simply doing things in a certain way to get the better tax outcome, they've actually inserted steps in the process that are only there for tax reasons
- pre-meditated / preordained: there's evidence that what the taxpayer did was planned in advance
- at odds with the intent of the drafter of the legislation: courts often spend a lot of effort establishing what was in the mind of the government when they introduced legislation. If a tax outcome is at odds with what they intended then this is the world of loopholes
Ramsey is the most famous case because all anti-avoidance caselaw really evolves from there. But in the other corner we have the venerable old Inland Revenue Commissioners v. Duke of Westminster [1936] A.C. 1;[1] 19 TC 490, with the important principle "Every man is entitled, if he can, to order his affairs so that the tax attaching under the appropriate Acts is less than it otherwise would be. If he succeeds in ordering them so as to secure this result, then, however unappreciative the Commissioners of Inland Revenue or his fellow tax-payers may be of his ingenuity, he cannot be compelled to pay an increased tax."
Ramsey and subsequent cases don't completely overturn this principle but they do make it more contingent. In Ramsey the key phrase was "A preordained series of transactions – or a single composite transaction – which includes Steps inserted which have no commercial purpose apart from tax avoidance or deferral."
Did Trump incite it? We can argue one way or another but democracy was preserved and will be preserved, imo, whether he does indeed become POTUS or not.
There is no spirit of the law that implies Parliament wants eating a Terry's Chocolate Orange to be illegal. If there was, then buying a lifetime's supply of Terry's Chocolate Oranges might not be a wise investment as they'll need to be binned as it would be criminal to eat them if the law changed, but there's not.
Avoidance is a different matter. What's legal today could be illegal next year and you might get very little advance warning of that changing - and if you're out of pocket as a result, then its a result of your own actions so you're not entitled to compensation.
PB has had thoughtful debates about what should happen with motoring taxation going forward as EVs rollout. Those discussions are not helped by these falsehoods.
https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2024/01/07/classification/
As for the hallmarks, then yes - the more complicated something is tax-wise, the less clear it is whether it is legal or illegal but it will be determined one way or the other at some point.
So "spirit of the law" is in itself, as a phrase, meaningless in law?
You talking about mileage instead of percentage of income spent on the tax doesn't change that.
The poorest deciles spend a high percentage of their income on fuel duty. The richest deciles do not.
Gang tore out BT Openreach cables worth £1m and left thousands of people cut off
https://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/north-wales-news/gang-tore-out-bt-openreach-30275995#ICID=Android_DailyPostNewsApp_AppShare
When he said, “And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now” about illegal immigrants, I find it hard not to interpret that as racism and as something at least close to fascism.
When he said that immigrants are "poisoning the blood of our country”, again that seems awfully reminiscent of fascist phraseology.
Or consider: “I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they’re the big — and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.” Again, that’s not normal political discourse. It seems like authoritarianism.
Or: “They were very brave, the Supreme Court. Very brave, and they take a lot of hits because of it. It should be illegal, what happens. You know, you have these guys like playing the ref. ... These people should be put in jail the way they talk about our judges and our justices.” Jailing people for criticising the Supreme Court is certainly unconstitutional.
Also, he tried to organise a scheme to replace valid slates of electoral college votes with fake ones and then encouraged a group of people to storm the Capitol. That is not normal. That seems like the sort of thing a fascist does.
I could go on and on!
One of the recent loan charge cases went - well we can see that what you've done was legal but we are going to ignore that and use this bit here to force you to pay HMRC.....
Election Maps UK
@ElectionMapsUK
·
25m
Aggregate Vote Share:
LAB: 25.0% (-9.0)
CON: 24.5% (+1.0)
LDM: 18.4% (+3.1)
GRN: 11.3% (+1.1)
RFM: 5.1% (+4.8)
SNP: 4.9% (-1.8)
PLC: 1.1% (+0.1)
Others: 9.6% (+0.7)
The implication is that Cheney is a foreign policy hawk, who would think differently, if she had to brave bullets.
Of course, Trump, like so many upper class Americans, went to some lengths to avoid braving bullets.
One reason to be optimistic about the USA, even under a Trump Presidency, is that so many of the military despise him.
Nobody disputed that Hitler was an extremely brave soldier, who earned his Iron Cross, First Class.
https://www.taxadvisermagazine.com/article/spirit-law
Spirit is a word used by judges and found in transcripts quite often, but you are right in one sense: that there is an in-built teleology in how jurisprudence treats avoidance now. Because courts and anti-avoidance rules are now able to deny tax benefits where planning falls outside the spirit (or intent / purpose) of the law, you could argue that the law IS the spirit of the law. Which is part of what Bill is saying.
It does not. Both because of primary and secondary legislation changing the law, and caselaw doing so too.
Hence you get people like Clarkson bitching and moaning when their tax avoidance loophole gets closed and they're left carrying an asset they expected to avoid tax on but now won't.
The Reform number reflects the fact they and their predecessor parties always seem to underperform national polling in locals.
1/3rd in cash terms is a considerably higher percentage of a poor persons income than it is a wealthier person's income.
Progressive/regressive is as a percentage of income and so using your own data it is exceptionally regressive. VAT, income tax etc don't see the poorest pay 1/3rd of what the richest do.
However you didn't quote cost, you quoted mileage. Mileage is meaningless twaddle since the wealthier can afford zero-fuel or more fuel-efficient vehicles.
Now one in 10 people on Ferryhill, Durham, have been dumped up here by London councils. Landlords are happy but these people, often with extra needs, become a burden on our local council and council tax payers. If this is going to happen then surely the council cleansing these people should pay for their services via a cash transfer to the receiving council.
Seems like it’s happening in Easington now too.
https://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/24688250.tenth-ferryhill-population-moved-london-councils/
In 2021 the LE results were in terms of NEV Lab 29%, Con 36%, LDs 17%. So those results from local by elections suggest both Labour and the Tories will lose county council seats next year with the LDs and Reform and Greens making gains (Reform are likely to stand more candidates than they have in local by elections too)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_United_Kingdom_local_elections
2024 CLOSING MESSAGES
Kamala Harris: "I want to be a President for all Americans."
Trump: "I want to shoot Liz Cheney."
https://x.com/keithedwards/status/1852351672107798622
Also it's Ferryhill - it's a very small town 10,000 with poor communication links - it's got an hourly bus service to Durham / Darlington and that's about it..