On Monday, via the BBC, the Treasury put out the line that ‘10 per cent of those earning more than £10 million a year pay less than 20 per cent in income tax.’ It was not explained, or asked by the BBC, how this could be, or how many people were involved. Even in the era of preposterous bonuses, the number of people registered as earning more than £10 million p.a. is, I discover, only 200. So 10 per cent of them is 20 people: the total sums involved cannot amount to much more than £100 million, probably less. In the context — the decision to cap the amount of tax relief on charitable donations — the line was irrelevant. The government, represented by the unfortunate Treasury minister David Gawke, is trying to shift its ground. It now tacitly admits that avoiding income tax by paying to charity does not make the rich richer, since they have to pay much more to charity than they can reclaim against tax. Instead, it seeks to develop a new doctrine that rich people must pay tax, rather than giving away their money to good causes in other ways, because this is ‘fairer’. Perhaps there is a respectable argument somewhere in here that taxes should be borne by all, but it seems flatly contradictory to the idea of the Big Society if people’s personal efforts at direct, individual philanthropy are to be curtailed in favour of HMRC. The whole country is now bewildered about what this government actually thinks about the use of riches.
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The tendency of the Treasury to sidle up to individual tax examples and quote them in public is new, and not good. These figures about top earners were put out by the Treasury as ‘background’, in a self-contradictory attempt not to draw attention to the people involved. I wonder if these tricks result from Gordon Brown’s decision to merge the Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise and bring the new entity under the Treasury wing. This was presented as more efficient. But it turns out to be more unscrupulous, and more political.
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It is a given in the media that we must ‘take the big money out of politics’. Hence the latest Ed Miliband play to keep individual donations below £5,000. But why is big money wrong? Surely it is objectionable in principle only if the donations are concealed. If parties declare all the large amounts they receive (which, in law, they must) then it is up to us, the public, to judge. If we do not mind trade unions financing Labour and rich men financing the Conservatives, then that is fine. If we do mind — and it would seem that, on the whole, we do — then this is a good discipline for the parties. They must decide whether to grab the money and face the obloquy, or try to get the money from sources which people see as less tainted. This sets politicians a reasonable test: the fact that they tend to fail it is no reason for the taxpayer being forced to come to the rescue.
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It seems likely that making the fences at the Grand National lower, as happened for this year’s race in which two horses died, actually makes them more dangerous. Now that they are less stiff and, in the case of Becher’s, have a smaller drop, horses go at them too fast. If you look at film of the race 50 years ago, you can see that the riders took the first circuit more at a ‘married man’s gallop’. Pre-the Martin Pipe/A.P. McCoy era of super-fitness, the doctrine that ‘every post’s a winning post’ was not followed. Now each fence is fought for, each angle of advantage is crowded into, and so the danger is greater. It is also possible, some say, that the breeding has changed things. Once upon a time, National Hunt horses reflected their name and were built strong, like hunters. Today, the typical thoroughbred is more of a flat-race horse and therefore more delicate and more likely to break its bones. Obviously, racing is not about to get more sedate and old-fashioned, so what can be done? Maybe the Aintree authorities will find something clever, but they should not go down the road of automatic concessions to the safety lobby. This is a covert way of bringing steeplechasing to an end, as has more or less happened in Australia. The Grand National is more successful than it has ever been, watched by 11 million people. It must not be cruel, but it does not succeed because it is tame.
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A new film of The Great Gatsby is coming soon, 90 years after the time in which when the story is set. I had never read the book until a few months ago, when it became the second book that I ever tackled on Kindle. I admired it greatly, but I was rather puzzled that Gatsby died only a quarter of the way through the book. Soon afterwards, I realised my mistake. Rather than enumerating pages, which obviously vary with the font size used, Kindle says in the corner of the screen what percentage of the book one has consumed. Gatsby died on, I think, 24 per cent. Checking, I discovered that the percentage referred to the Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald which I had downloaded, rather than to the novel itself. But it was an interesting example of how one’s appreciation of a book is affected by one’s expectations. Even when I had discovered the truth, I still could not quite get over the idea that The Great Gatsby had been misproportioned by its author, and so my pleasure was reduced. I shall have to read it again.
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I keep getting confused between Julian Assange and Anders Behring Breivik. One, I recall, was briefly the hero of the Guardian, and the other, so far as I know, never was. One is accused of murdering scores of Norwegians, the other of sexually assaulting a couple of Swedes. One believes in destroying multiculturalism, the other in destroying privacy. They seem to have little in common, yet something about these two Nordic-looking men born in the 1970s, with their vaguely left-wing, dysfunctional family backgrounds and their absolute narcissism, makes them quite hard to distinguish.
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