Society

Will George Osborne have a better chance to abolish the 50p tax than this month’s Budget? It would be unpopular, so it’s the kind of move he’d be unlikely to make before an election. The Lib Dems have something they want to trade: permission to raise the tax threshold towards £10,000. And two recent reports, by the CEBR (pdf) and IFS (pdf), have reinforced that this tax is losing money. At the heart of the 50p tax is a deeper question: is Osborne a transformative Chancellor who will change the terms of debate? Or is he doomed to operate within parameters set by Gordon Brown? I look at this in

It’s good to see that Dr Karl Brandt has been reincarnated as an attractive young research associate at Oxford University, and is now known as Francesca Minerva. All too often the leading Nazis were reincarnated as very lowly life-forms, such as moss or krill. Reinhard Heydrich, for example, was reborn as Chlamydia and is now living inside a Slovakian woman called Svetlana. Dr Brandt, then, has lucked out. Karl spent many years supplementing his important work as Hitler’s personal physician by running the Action T4 programme, under which disabled people were killed because they had supposedly miserable lives and were a burden on the state. His conviction has survived transportation

When Rupert Murdoch visited the Sun newsroom recently, eyebrows were raised by the fact that he was accompanied not by James Murdoch but Lachlan Murdoch. James Murdoch, who has never had his father’s emotional commitment to the newspaper side of the business, has now stepped down as executive chairman of News International, though he remains as deputy COO of News Corporation.   James Murdoch has not come out well of the various investigations into hacking. He has appeared to have been oddly uninterested in developments at the company. His performances in front of parliamentary select committees have left several questions unanswered. James Murdoch, though, will now have left News International

The government is very pleased with itself today for closing a couple of tax loopholes such that Barclays will have to pay £500 million more to the Exchequer. And little wonder why. Not only does it support their rhetoric about a ‘tougher approach’ to tax avoidance, but — on the principle that ‘every little helps’ — it also hammers another few chips from the deficit. Broadly speaking, this sort of action is uncontroversial. In the battle of wits over taxation, the government is well within its legal rights to close loopholes, just as companies are well within theirs to exploit them. But this case is complicated by the fact that

Today brings the news, distressing to some quarters, that HSBC is paying its chief executive Stuart Gulliver £7.2 million — making him the highest-paid banker in the UK for the financial year so far. The remuneration comes on the back of a 28 per cent jump in full-year profits, which means HSBC has bucked the dismal trend of other British banks.   Still, as you might expect, it’s the buoyant figures denoting Gulliver’s pay — and those of the top 170 members of staff — that are making the headlines, with calls for HSBC to explain itself. This is part of the regular drumbeat against financial ‘fat cats’ that’s been