Helping her country ski ever more steeply down the wrong side of the Laffer curve, Rachel Reeves may be preparing to violate Labour’s manifesto and raise income tax – perhaps a suitable juncture at which to examine just how wacko the UK tax code is already.
Start with the duplicity of ‘national insurance’. This unhypothecated add-on simply pours into the Treasury’s coffers as plain taxes. Yet much of the populace still believes that NI specifically funds the NHS. This is misunderstanding by design. The sly mislabelling is a resentment blocker. In truth, the employee basic tax rate is a straight-up 28 per cent, not 20 as advertised. The mooted Reeves proposal of raising income tax by 2 per cent and reducing basic-rate NI by 2 per cent is dishonest. She might as well transparently raise taxes on pensioners, landlords and higher earners without the funny business.
Much of the populace still believes that NI specifically funds the NHS. This is misunderstanding by design
Next, the bar on married couples filing jointly, which multiple European countries (France, Spain and Germany, to name a few) and the US allow. This punishes stay-at-home parents. Breadwinners for whole families are taxed as if they’re singletons, and couples with wildly disparate earnings can’t pool their incomes to lower their tax band, even though they pool their incomes in real life.
How about that basic-to-higher-rate cliff edge? Hit £50,000 per annum (sorry, £50,270; simple round numbers are anathema to the tax code) and wham, the tax rate soars from 28 to 42 per cent – rising by half. This is fair? With two-bedroom flats in London averaging £2,250 a month, employees on £50,000 can lose more than half their salaries to rent. Whack off another £10,500 in tax, and there’s £12,500 left for food, utilities and swimming costumes for jumping off a bridge. Despite barely surviving, earners who cross the higher-rate Rubicon are suddenly treated as taxpayers ‘with the broadest shoulders’ (a pet Gordon Brown-ism I detest). The threshold for losing your shirt to HMRC is obscenely low, the abrupt percentage increase in tax take obscenely high.
With thresholds frozen since 2021/22 and Labour threatening to keep them on ice until 2030, millions more Britons are dressing in fiscal drag. The grim glee might be unattractive, but longtime higher-rate taxpayers might be forgiven for finding so much more company in their miserable bracket rather satisfying. Many of the folks whom inflation has pulled into the 42 per cent camp would have been delighted for the slightly better off to lose nearly half of every extra pound of their earnings – until the confiscatory tax rate applied to themselves. Oh, and did I say ‘nearly’ half? Between council tax, VAT, air passenger duty, stamp duty and a raft of pickpocketing fees, we’re talking well over half.
A vicious 40 per cent inheritance tax also kicks in at the ludicrously low level of £325,000. The US may be overgenerous on this point, but two American parents can pass on $28 million tax-free.
UK tax law has not mitigated the sinkhole of earnings between £100,000 and £125,000 which opened up in 2010, where the tapering away of the personal allowance – itself unfair – means this segment of income is taxed not at 42 but 60 per cent. Whoops! But who cares about ‘rich’ people?
And who cares about foreigners? Most Britons might quite reasonably dismiss the travails of foreign residents as not their problem. Nevertheless, prosperous foreigners do contribute to the tax base, so this should be of tangential interest to citizens.
Your tax year of 6 April to 5 April is absurd. You lot may be inured to it, but in departing from Britain in 2023 I was at least partially in flight from the tax year. Normal, sane countries conflate tax years and year-years. All my US annual financial documents cover the calendar year. Thus obligatory reporting of my worldwide income to HMRC entailed grotesque flurries of monthly statements to subtract three months from one year and add three months to another year, all of which accomplished nothing other than handsomely inflating accountancy fees by thousands of quid – effectively, more taxes.
While I’m subjecting you to this niche whingebaggery: you’re probably unaware of how HMRC calculates the gains and losses of offshore investments. Get this: if you sell shares in New York, the UK insists you calculate your gain or loss by how much the stock cost in pounds at sterling’s exchange rate at that time, in comparison to what you sold it for in pounds, at sterling’s current exchange rate. These dollars will never come within 3,000 miles of a pound. This insanity can flip major losses into taxable gains. I repeat: you’ve lost money on a transaction and are still taxed on your loss. The arcane complexity is yet another vast money-maker for British accountants and smacks of a sad, dated imperialism.
Even those who’ve made generous, um, donations to the British Exchequer can be sure those dismal brown envelopes slipped through their letterboxes will contain only grim, menacing, punitive language. No one ever thanks you, that’s for sure – including Britain’s hoi polloi, who, no matter how many times economists note that the top 10 per cent of earners pay 60 per cent of UK income taxes, always imagine that ‘the rich’ (anyone earning over £50,000) pay nothing.
Because apparently HMRC hadn’t concocted enough ways to discourage foreigners with 2p in their pockets from moving to Britain, we now have the new Roach Motel (‘Roaches check in, but they don’t check out!’) scheme for inheritance tax, levied on formerly long-resident non-citizens for whom the seductive charms of the British Isles have inexplicably waned. You can have fled the premises for up to ten years and the cold hand of the UK taxman will still claw back 40 per cent of every sou you’ve left behind on this Earth over £325,000.
Cheerfully, however, this flagrantly ridiculous regime – which violates other countries’ sovereignty and thus international law – has given me a whole new reason for living. Gym bunnying and hitting the Omega-3s, I will endure more than ten years beyond my flight from your grasping, desperate government if it kills me.
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