As the interminable Budget wait goes on, so does the trawl through the Chancellor’s bin bags. I refer to the old tabloid method of digging in celebrities’ dustbins for evidence of depravity or scandal; in Rachel Reeves’s case, that would mean piecing together shredded Treasury analyses on all the various tax wheezes floated since July. One curry-smeared paper no doubt addresses the pros and cons of an inheritance raid on ‘aristocrats and landowners’; beneath the Red Bull cans and pizza crusts, might there be another headed ‘Clawbacks on Enterprise Investment Scheme’?
Not that there have been substantive rumours, mind you. But that’s rather the point: having had so many draft Budget items shot to pieces, she must be desperate to shield some last surprises. EIS offers reliefs from income, capital gains and inheritance taxes for investors in small private companies. Since launch in 1994, it has channelled £32 billion into a sector otherwise perpetually starved of capital. Many start-up entrepreneurs consider it vital for survival and growth.
But it’s also notoriously gamed by tax advisers whose clients grab the breaks by investing in companies effectively designed for that purpose. It costs the Exchequer £1 billion a year – but would a tighter scheme produce better value for the taxpayer? An entrepreneur I know asked Rachel Reeves, shortly before the election, whether she had EIS in her sights. Emphatically not, she replied: too important for early-stage businesses that are such an asset to the UK economy and she wasn’t going anywhere near it. If she does, we’ll know she’s really had to scrape the bottom of the bin.
Shameful and shameless
‘How was it possible for [Mike] to have been so betrayed by the past government? Why did it allow such a biased, asymmetrical extradition agreement between the UK and the US to be implemented? This was wrong, and in my view it was disgraceful, both shameful and shameless.’ So spoke the Nobel laureate scientist Sir Paul Nurse at the funeral of Mike Lynch, the Autonomy software entrepreneur who was acquitted of US fraud charges in June but drowned when his yacht sank off Sicily in August.
Who indeed will ever right that diplomatic and judicial wrong? Surely not blundering Foreign Secretary David Lammy or his hot-tipped reshuffle successor Douglas Alexander – given that a Harris White House is no more likely than a second Trump one, or any version of Congress, to co-operate for a fairer treaty. We just have to keep up the clamour as we await the next extradition outrage.
Burning briefcase
What the jumping jihad, if I may respectfully put it that way, is Wahed? The answer is an Islamic fintech venture, launched in the US in 2019 and backed by the oil giant Saudi Aramco, which offers sharia-compliant savings products including a halal pension pot which excludes investments in tobacco, booze and arms. So far so good.
But Wahed’s ad campaign on the London Underground features a full-bearded Islamic preacher called Mufti Menk holding a metal briefcase full of burning banknotes, an image more likely to strike fear than financial curiosity in the average Tube traveller – unless they assume it to be a comedy stunt, especially as the beard looks oddly painted-on.
Wahed’s chief risk officer Umer Suleman says the burning briefcase symbolises the way non-sharia interest-bearing debt shifts wealth from poor borrowers to the rich – and that it is the ‘visibly Muslim’ appearance of Menk (who some years ago retracted homophobic views that got him banned from a speaking tour of British universities) which has ‘agitated parts of the media’. I’d happily debate the contribution of interest to western prosperity with Suleman, a University of London graduate who previously worked for HSBC, but in the meantime I’ll pay him this compliment: that poster on the Northern line certainly agitated this part of the media to find out more about Wahed.
Being patient
Wes Streeting has called for a ‘national conversation’ about the NHS. We’re invited to share our ideas to help the Health Secretary create a ten-year plan, the problem with this essentially spineless deferral of policymaking being, of course, that no NHS user can possibly have an overview of the whole construct – but we all have ‘lived experience’ from which we’re ready to generalise, and here’s mine for starters.
On Saturday afternoon I took a strange blemish on my leg to the local community hospital. You’ll have to go to A&E in York, said the nurse. Then after a phone call, triumphantly: ‘OK, you can go to EAU, they’re expecting you.’ At York there was a cheese sandwich with a bite out of it on the floor in reception. The bloke on the desk didn’t know where EAU was or what it stood for (I never found out) but told me the A&E queue was currently 12 hours. Try Ward 16, he said; at 16, someone said try Junction 5, but that led to obstetrics. ‘Twenty-two,’ suggested a catering assistant, but that was geriatrics; 21 across the corridor wasn’t labelled EAU and wasn’t expecting me but logged me in anyway. No wonder there are eight million missed appointments a year; half the non-attenders are lost in the corridors.
But eventually they looked at my leg. The nurses were from Nepal and Bougainville, the doctors from India, the trolley ladies – generous with pork pie and bad coffee – from Yorkshire. Everyone except the doctors called me ‘sweetheart’. Eight hours from leaving home, I was back with a bundle of antibiotics: it could have been a lot worse.
That’s ‘our NHS’, I thought, an impoverished, unmapped city-state that defies reform but relies on willing staff from the world over doing their best, one patient at a time. And until its systems are transformed by radical advances of data management and service delivery adopted from the private sector by bolder ministers yet to be appointed – perhaps yet to leave school – that’s what we have to be in response: endlessly patient.
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