Cheap shots and uncosted bribes are drowning out vision, wisdom and optimism

The interesting thing about Labour’s pledge to abolish non-dom tax status — a squib designed to trap Tories into expressing sympathy for the rich, in the knowledge on the part of Ed Miliband and Ed Balls that it might cause loss of tax revenues and inward investment — is that it has been welcomed by influential voices in the City. The Eds must be astonished to find Sir Roger Carr, chairman of BAE Systems and former deputy chairman of the Bank of England, bang on message: he told the FT that non-dom rules are ‘a relic of the past that unfairly favours the few at the expense of the many’. Likewise veteran financier Dame Alison Carnwath, chairman of Land Securities and one of this column’s beacons of good City sense, said the rules are ‘out of date and should be scrapped’.

Leave aside the East India men and Greek shipowners for whom the rules were originally framed, and the reputable non-doms who pay HMRC £8 billion (5 per cent of all income tax receipts) on their UK income while sheltering overseas earnings. What’s behind the Carr response is the suspicion that non-dommery has become a common tax avoidance device for highly paid executives of global businesses. And that creates jealousies inside the silo of the seven-figure-salaried, notoriously insensitive to the plight of the world outside: the Canary Wharf trading floor on which dubious non-doms take home more than high-performing UK taxpayers is, we may guess, an unhappy place. I once met a director of a famous investment bank who told me ruefully he was the only non-non-dom among 23 London board members. For entirely the wrong reasons, the Eds may have hit on something that really does need reforming.

As for the Conservative promise of a post-election sale of Lloyds Banking Group shares with discounts and loyalty bonuses for small investors, it is aimed at bringing a feelgood whiff of 1980s capitalism to the closure to Lloyds’ painful passage through state hands — and it deserves a better reception than the Guardian’s description of it as ‘a bung to those people able to write a cheque for a few thousand quid at short notice’.