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Brown and Darling take note: tax doesn’t have to be taxing

Wednesday, 30th January 2008

In his 10 years as Chancellor, Gordon Brown never tired of telling us how much he was in favour of enterprise.

In his 10 years as Chancellor, Gordon Brown never tired of telling us how much he was in favour of enterprise. He littered the phrase through his speeches. In one memorably fatuous initiative, he even launched a National Enterprise Week: the last one ran in November, in case you missed it.

Yet the gap between rhetoric and reality grows ever bigger. In the past few months, Brown and his Chancellor Alistair Darling have taken a relatively simple corporate tax regime and turned it into a minefield of complexity, forgetting in the process the many virtues of simplicity.

The first, and most controversial change, have been the new rules on capital gains tax. Twenty years ago, Lord (Nigel) Lawson, probably the last Chancellor who understood the intellectual argument for low, neutral taxes, equalised the taxes charged on income and capital gain. Brown fiddled around with that, introducing taper relief that allowed entrepreneurs (and others) to pay only 10% when they sold a business or business asset held for a certain period of time.

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