Politics

Okay, I’m getting a bit ahead of myself, but I suspect I’ve spotted the first tax con of the budget – because there is a way Brown can turn the VAT cut into a tax rise for small businesses. He may find it too alluring to resist. Small firms and sole traders must charge VAT to their customers at 17.5%, but if their turnover is below a certain threshold they pay their VAT to HMRC at a flat rate of, say, 12.5%. They keep the difference, 5%, on which they’d pay corporation tax.  Now, if the VAT rate falls to 15%, will the flat rate they must pay to HMRC

With recession tightening its grip, the taxpaying public are more concerned than ever about the size of the tax burden, the efficiency of public services and getting value for money from the state. It is for that reason that the TaxPayers’ Alliance has published the third annual Public Sector Rich List, which provides a full run-down of the 387 public sector employees from 140 different organisations whose total remuneration in 2007-08 was above £150,000. With ordinary people footing the bill not only for these individuals’ large salaries, hefty bonuses and generous pensions, but also for the services and organisations they run, the list provides a crucial opportunity for taxpayers to

Is Britain going the same way as Iceland? Iain Dale says that my reference in my political column to senior economists referring to London as “Reykjavik on Thames” is “terrifying, if true.” Cheeky wee monkey. ‘Course it’s true. The phrase I can attribute directly to Willem Buiter, one of Brown’s first appointments to the MPC and a pro-Euro enthusiast (but that doesn’t make him bad and wrong). He makes the Iceland case, and coins the phrase, in this rather technical but sobering FT blog post. Now you could argue he’s just one maverick. But I’d make three points in defence. 1) Buiter was denounced as a maverick when he said

Given that Gordon Brown spent his adult life plotting to get into 10 Downing Street, he has been understandably quiet about his decision to leave it. Tony Blair’s old office certainly brought him rotten luck, and his new open-plan base in Number 12 has far better feng shui for a man of his disposition. There he sits as the leader of the gang, within stapler-hurling distance of about a dozen aides. It looks and feels like a general election campaign headquarters, the environment in which, historically, Mr Brown has been at his happiest and most deadly. He is already at war. For the second time in his career momentum is

From the economic and psychological bedlam of the global downturn has emerged a particularly dangerous false dichotomy: namely, that there is somehow a choice for ministers over the next few years between economic reconstruction and the repair of Britain’s broken society, and that the government (whether Labour or Conservative) must prioritise the former at the expense of the latter. From the economic and psychological bedlam of the global downturn has emerged a particularly dangerous false dichotomy: namely, that there is somehow a choice for ministers over the next few years between economic reconstruction and the repair of Britain’s broken society, and that the government (whether Labour or Conservative) must prioritise