Interesting to see what roles go and stay: Housing is gone, but she has to decide to resign as party deputy and, iirc, Labour constitution does link that party role to being de facto DPM, whether or not that formally exists as a government role.
Exceptionally useful for the right if Angela Rayner is out of government, with her popular touch.
It's almost, dare I say it almost, ideal for the Telegraoh's Reform agenda, and its journalists working on the story. No, what a naughty and scandalous thought on my part.
The question is who knew all the pieces of jigsaw that would allow the Telegraph to stand up this story. There can't be many. Her ex-husband and a few people in government.
To paraphrase, assets of billionaires are £620bn, taxing them 3% raises £40bn which funds the entire NHS.
Err no Claudia, 3% of £620bn is £18.6bn, and the NHS budget is more than £200bn.
(Assuming of course that the billionaires don’t relocate to Delaware or Dubai, and just happily pay 3% of their wealth every year).
Why is it that so many politicians are all at sea when they need to deal with numbers greater than they can do on fingers and toes? The inability to sort out millions from billions from trillions should disqualify them from office, when the job of running the country requires a rudimentary understanding of Big Numbers.
A million seconds is 11 days; a billion seconds is 30 years.
“Farage claimed last year to have “bought a house” in his constituency but the property is actually owned in the name of his partner, meaning he legally avoided higher-rate stamp duty on the purchase of an additional home – given he already owns other properties”
In some ways it might be a good strategy for Rayner to resign, take the hit, then repeatedly ask why Farage isn't doing the same.
One of the great tax iniquities is that playing this game is only legal if you're not married, which creates a perverse incentive against marriage. This is true for lots of bits of tax - eg if you and your partner both own a business each and marry, it wipes out one lot of your employers NI allowance, and means that both businesses only get the 19% rate of corp tax for the first £25k each rather than £50 they got before marriage (this applies regardless of trade or business connections - it doesn't matter if she's running a blacksmiths and he's running a florist).
In fact, there are just so many ways that Rayner’s tax affairs are a gift to Nigel Farage. I have seen some outlandish theories on social media about the deputy prime minister’s difficulties being manufactured by the government as a distraction from Reform’s annual conference in Birmingham today and tomorrow. On the contrary: if Farage had been allowed to write the script for the past few weeks, he would not have dared to make it so favourable to his interests.
It is not just that Labour seems no better than the Tories in ministerial ethics, but that Labour pays a heavier price for its transgressions because it has been so sanctimonious in the past. Starmer and Rayner’s recent condemnations of Tory ministers’ tax avoidance are like the backing chorus to the news at the moment.
If you want to know how that works, just look at Farage cutting his tax bill by having his TV fees paid into a company, and by putting the house he has bought in his Clacton constituency in his girlfriend’s name. He gets away with it because he has never been “holier than thou” about other politicians’ self-interested conduct.
@KevinASchofield · 2m Confirmation expected soon that Angela Rayner has left the government.
Wow. That BBC article was so generous to her yesterday I thought she'd be fine.
There must be something that demonstrates she didn't share all the info with the lawyers.
When her conveyancer for the new property started talking to the press last night, to make it clear they knew nothing about the Trust, that was probably the start of the end for Rayner.
Any lawyer in the “we do conveyancing cheap” business is going to look at a form that mentions a trust and turn the business down.
It’s why you look at this and go it’s an almighty mess that ended the only way it could
£2k/hour to appear on GB News seems more like an undisclosed political donation than a genuine appearance fee. Just another example of how rich rightwing fanatics like GB News owner Marshall are distorting the political conversation.
Nigel Farage had a programme on GB News long before his re-entry into the political fray. You just can't bear the fact that someone who you bitterly oppose is doing well.
If you're not worried about the man who could be PM in four years taking oodles of cash (that he's fuelling through a tax avoidance corporate vehicle) from a shadowy billionaire who is also buying up vast swathes of the UK media landscape, then you should be.
The Guardian article is (deliberately?) misleading - if you funnel your income into a ltd company like this then you pay 25% corporation tax, but then you have to pay dividend taxes on top - 8.75% if you’re a lower rate income tax payer & a painful 33.75% if you’re higher rate.
So a higher rate taxpayer pays ~50% on their marginal income paying themselves this way. A lower rate one pays 31.5%. If you compare with the total tax take for a salaried employee you’ll find the figures are roughly comparable - an employee earning £50k pays 30% of their total cost of employment in taxes (income tax + NI + employers NI) and the marginal rate for a high income earner is 40-45% plus 15% employers NI on top.
Dividend taxes used to be much lower & it was a huge tax advantage to structure your income through a ltd company. These days, after administration costs you’re probably slightly worse off, but you do get the advantage of being able to structure your income in whatever way you choose, including the ability to spread lumpy income across multiple tax years which can make it worth the effort for some people.
If you play fast & loose with the corporate credit card you can push some of that income through as expenses of course, but you’re asking for trouble if HMRC ever comes knocking.
That's not quite right either - Corp tax is only 25% for companies making a profit over £250k. It's 19% up to £50k then a sliding scale between the too.
So if you get £50k income or less channeled through a ltd, it's 27.75%. You get the first £12.7k as as tax free PAYE, although there is still employers NI on it.
It's also very tax efficient to dump the money into a pension from a ltd, but obviously you can only get the money back out again once you are old enough to retire.
All of this is of course full of perverse incentives - e.g. if you have a business that makes zero profit some years and £100k others, it's very much in your interest to cook to books so it makes £50k every year instead.
I have a business which on paper has substantial retained earnings - my accountant told me to take dividends out so my earnings total £50k every year (even if the cash to do so doesn't exist and therefore the dividend just becomes a directors loan to the business) partly on the basis that if the taxation regime changes it will almost certainly only get worse, and mostly because you pay far less tax by taking £50k each year than £0 for two years and £150k the next.
Honestly, if your income is very lumpy and regularly falls well below the higher rate threshold I don’t personally have a problem with people using a ltd company to smooth it out. Consider an author who takes an advance for a book which might have to last them multiple years - why shouldn’t they take that as PAYE in two successive years? Is that egregious tax avoidance? I don’t believe so personally.
Also if you’re an MP you’re perilously close to that horrible 60% rate of income tax between £100k and £120k. Much better to leave that in the company if you don’t need the cash, and either take it after you’ve finished life in Parliament or take several years’ income all in one go.
Note to Rachel from accounts, such high tax rates cause market distortions and behavioural changes to avoid them.
The marginal rate from 100-120k is even worse than that if you’re an MP with kids paying back student loans on top.
Cutting shallots time ... the buggers are *responsible* (admittedly for some only in the sense of continuing management, rather than the original genius idea) for the SLC.
The loss of childcare from £100k is worse than the student loans. The point is that the marginal rate of income tax for typical professional salaried people earning > £100k with young families is completely ludicrous.
Some of those who have a household income over £100k will be able to afford a nanny let alone childcare
To paraphrase, assets of billionaires are £620bn, taxing them 3% raises £40bn which funds the entire NHS.
Err no Claudia, 3% of £620bn is £18.6bn, and the NHS budget is more than £200bn.
(Assuming of course that the billionaires don’t relocate to Delaware or Dubai, and just happily pay 3% of their wealth every year).
Why is it that so many politicians are all at sea when they need to deal with numbers greater than they can do on fingers and toes? The inability to sort out millions from billions from trillions should disqualify them from office, when the job of running the country requires a rudimentary understanding of Big Numbers.
A million seconds is 11 days; a billion seconds is 30 years.
If you have a tax paying population of 50 million, £1million is 2p each, £1bn is £20 each, £1trillion is £20,000 each.
£2k/hour to appear on GB News seems more like an undisclosed political donation than a genuine appearance fee. Just another example of how rich rightwing fanatics like GB News owner Marshall are distorting the political conversation.
Nigel Farage had a programme on GB News long before his re-entry into the political fray. You just can't bear the fact that someone who you bitterly oppose is doing well.
If you're not worried about the man who could be PM in four years taking oodles of cash (that he's fuelling through a tax avoidance corporate vehicle) from a shadowy billionaire who is also buying up vast swathes of the UK media landscape, then you should be.
The Guardian article is (deliberately?) misleading - if you funnel your income into a ltd company like this then you pay 25% corporation tax, but then you have to pay dividend taxes on top - 8.75% if you’re a lower rate income tax payer & a painful 33.75% if you’re higher rate.
So a higher rate taxpayer pays ~50% on their marginal income paying themselves this way. A lower rate one pays 31.5%. If you compare with the total tax take for a salaried employee you’ll find the figures are roughly comparable - an employee earning £50k pays 30% of their total cost of employment in taxes (income tax + NI + employers NI) and the marginal rate for a high income earner is 40-45% plus 15% employers NI on top.
Dividend taxes used to be much lower & it was a huge tax advantage to structure your income through a ltd company. These days, after administration costs you’re probably slightly worse off, but you do get the advantage of being able to structure your income in whatever way you choose, including the ability to spread lumpy income across multiple tax years which can make it worth the effort for some people.
If you play fast & loose with the corporate credit card you can push some of that income through as expenses of course, but you’re asking for trouble if HMRC ever comes knocking.
That's not quite right either - Corp tax is only 25% for companies making a profit over £250k. It's 19% up to £50k then a sliding scale between the too.
So if you get £50k income or less channeled through a ltd, it's 27.75%. You get the first £12.7k as as tax free PAYE, although there is still employers NI on it.
It's also very tax efficient to dump the money into a pension from a ltd, but obviously you can only get the money back out again once you are old enough to retire.
All of this is of course full of perverse incentives - e.g. if you have a business that makes zero profit some years and £100k others, it's very much in your interest to cook to books so it makes £50k every year instead.
I have a business which on paper has substantial retained earnings - my accountant told me to take dividends out so my earnings total £50k every year (even if the cash to do so doesn't exist and therefore the dividend just becomes a directors loan to the business) partly on the basis that if the taxation regime changes it will almost certainly only get worse, and mostly because you pay far less tax by taking £50k each year than £0 for two years and £150k the next.
Honestly, if your income is very lumpy and regularly falls well below the higher rate threshold I don’t personally have a problem with people using a ltd company to smooth it out. Consider an author who takes an advance for a book which might have to last them multiple years - why shouldn’t they take that as PAYE in two successive years? Is that egregious tax avoidance? I don’t believe so personally.
Also if you’re an MP you’re perilously close to that horrible 60% rate of income tax between £100k and £120k. Much better to leave that in the company if you don’t need the cash, and either take it after you’ve finished life in Parliament or take several years’ income all in one go.
Note to Rachel from accounts, such high tax rates cause market distortions and behavioural changes to avoid them.
The marginal rate from 100-120k is even worse than that if you’re an MP with kids paying back student loans on top.
Cutting shallots time ... the buggers are *responsible* (admittedly for some only in the sense of continuing management, rather than the original genius idea) for the SLC.
The loss of childcare from £100k is worse than the student loans. The point is that the marginal rate of income tax for typical professional salaried people earning > £100k with young families is completely ludicrous.
Some of those who have a household income over £100k will be able to afford a nanny let alone childcare
The huge marginal tax rate is the problem, because it incentivises very productive employees to reduce their labour hours to below the threshold. Why work an entire extra day a week week you could work a four day week, take home the same pay & get to spend that extra day with your kids? It’s a no brainer.
Also, if you’re living in the London commuter belt & working in central London, £100k doesn’t go all that far frankly, Have you seen the prices of very ordinary three bed semis in outer London?
In most of the country though £100k makes you very well off with house prices half those in London
Exceptionally useful for the right if Angela Rayner is out of government, with her popular touch.
It's almost, dare I say it almost, ideal for the Telegraoh's Reform agenda, and its journalists working on the story. No, what a naughty and scandalous thought on my part.
The question is who knew all the pieces of jigsaw that would allow the Telegraph to stand up this story. There can't be many. Her ex-husband and a few people in government.
It will certainly be someone on her own side who has thrown her under the bus.
It would be strange if the ethics report cleared her but she still resigned . Surely then it must have been critical of her behaviour.
To resign from all roles including deputy leader would indicate the ethics advisor was very critical
If she’s standing down as deputy leader then she’s in big trouble. She can’t be “asked” to resign from that position, as it’s a directly elected post by the membership.
Kemi Badenoch making some extraordinary allegations about Angela Rayner.
She’s in Essex and doesn’t have Parliamentary privilege.
She must be very confident that no legal jeopardy line is being crossed. A very brave lady.
Kemi leads from the front - a bit of recognition of how hard she has worked the last twelve months would be truly deserved. Truth is, Kemi, who I did not vote for, is doing a bloody good job with a hand that has no face cards in it at all
@KevinASchofield · 2m Confirmation expected soon that Angela Rayner has left the government.
Wow. That BBC article was so generous to her yesterday I thought she'd be fine.
There must be something that demonstrates she didn't share all the info with the lawyers.
When her conveyancer for the new property started talking to the press last night, to make it clear they knew nothing about the Trust, that was probably the start of the end for Rayner.
Any lawyer in the “we do conveyancing cheap” business is going to look at a form that mentions a trust and turn the business down.
It’s why you look at this and go it’s an almighty mess that ended the only way it could
Yep, she should have paid for expensive legal advice at the beginning not the end, then she'd still have her job and £40k.
Refreshing that the ethics advisor has reported and been acted on so quickly
Interesting to see what roles go and stay: Housing is gone, but she has to decide to resign as party deputy and, iirc, Labour constitution does link that party role to being de facto DPM, whether or not that formally exists as a government role.
She was incredibly crap at Housing. Might help if her successor had previously sat on a Development Control Committee.
Also on electric vehicles and tax, if you buy one for your small business then you can claim 100% first year allowance, saving plenty - so @Theprole if you have a particularly good year maybe something to consider
Only good if you were buying a new car anyway (when it's very very good).
I run a 11 year old diesel estate which cost me £2500. There is nothing available new that comes close to the cost per mile once you allow for the depreciation. All in it costs about 17p/mile. It's all in my name, so I get to claim the first 10k back out of the business at 45p/mile tax free. All far better than buying new through the business then getting hit for some BIK plus a whacking depreciation cost. Only mugs run new cars.
Also, I couldn't really go EV anyway, I do quite a lot of days for work which require me to drive ~250 miles, spend a couple of hours somewhere (often in the middle of nowhere) and drive home again - I can get almost 1000 miles from a tank on said diesel barge, having to sit around on public EV chargers isn't something I'm willing to do.
I've done journeys like that in an EV - include from London to Chablis. Pretty much all motorway services in the UK & France have Tesla fast chargers. In France, they seem to have done a deal with Ibis hotels to put chargers in their car parks. Ibis (France) seem to have upgraded their coffee to match the market - had a very good espresso at a couple. Made with a proper, clean machine etc.
You plug in for maybe 15 minutes, until you are up to 80%, then on your way.
For 250 miles you would probably be charging once or maybe twice (if the battery was low when you started).
Comments
Also deputy leader
In fact, there are just so many ways that Rayner’s tax affairs are a gift to Nigel Farage. I have seen some outlandish theories on social media about the deputy prime minister’s difficulties being manufactured by the government as a distraction from Reform’s annual conference in Birmingham today and tomorrow. On the contrary: if Farage had been allowed to write the script for the past few weeks, he would not have dared to make it so favourable to his interests.
It is not just that Labour seems no better than the Tories in ministerial ethics, but that Labour pays a heavier price for its transgressions because it has been so sanctimonious in the past. Starmer and Rayner’s recent condemnations of Tory ministers’ tax avoidance are like the backing chorus to the news at the moment.
If you want to know how that works, just look at Farage cutting his tax bill by having his TV fees paid into a company, and by putting the house he has bought in his Clacton constituency in his girlfriend’s name. He gets away with it because he has never been “holier than thou” about other politicians’ self-interested conduct.
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/angela-rayner-resigns-tax-stamp-duty-flat-labour-b2820754.html
It’s why you look at this and go it’s an almighty mess that ended the only way it could
This must mean something about the state of Labour Party politics today.
Rayner is free to sue her for libel if she wants to. I doubt she will.
Lock her up!
NEW THREAD
Sky reading the exchange of resignation letters
Edit: beaten to it by @Mexicanpete
Refreshing that the ethics advisor has reported and been acted on so quickly
Smart to go under cover of Rayner.
You plug in for maybe 15 minutes, until you are up to 80%, then on your way.
For 250 miles you would probably be charging once or maybe twice (if the battery was low when you started).