The Chancellor’s Budget may have gone down well with Labour backbenchers, but its ‘smorgasbord’ approach has managed to rather annoy a rather lot of people – including, it appears, those resident in Gibraltar. The gambling tax reforms announced by Rachel Reeves have sparked concerns about the impact these will have on the overseas territory. A scathing press release has been put out by the Friends of the British Overseas Territories (Fotbot) slamming the ‘severe overreach’ by the UK government that could lead to a ‘disproportionate impact’ on the territory. ‘There is no indication that the Government has considered how these decisions will affect the Overseas Territories,’ the organisation fumed. Oo er.
The statement didn’t end there. It went on:
In today’s UK Budget the Chancellor announced an increase in Remote Gaming Duty from 21 per cent to 40 per cent and a new Remote Betting Duty of 25 per cent to replace the existing General Betting Duty at 15 per cent. This will impose hundreds of millions of pounds of costs on Gibraltar businesses, having a devastating impact on profits, jobs, and local tax payments that fund public services. This is a severe overreach of the UK Government on Gibraltar and will have a severe and disproportionate impact on the territory. Remote gaming and online betting are sectors that make up a substantial part of Gibraltar’s modern economy.
It claims that the Labour government hadn’t heeded warnings from Gibraltar, whose government had ‘repeatedly highlighted the risks to employment, business stability and long-term investment should the UK proceed without appropriate carve-outs or mitigations’. In a pretty galling sign-off, the organisation concluded: ‘This week, London hosts the UK Overseas Territories Joint Ministerial Council where the leaders of the Overseas Territories will be watching with horror the precedent this overreach is setting.’ Shots fired…
The chief executive of Fotbot, James Lunn, also warned the Labour government that if these new measures are not dropped, they will ‘undermine the long-standing relationship between the UK and its overseas territories’. And the organisation’s spokesperson Robert Midgley last night announced that ’emergency talks’ are talking place about the ‘calamitous effects’ on the territory’s economy. ‘By openly supporting the Chagos Islands surrender, Gibraltar thought it would win friends in London,’ he wrote. It would appear that was a miscalculation…
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