Tax

Next month’s Budget tax raids on capital have provoked a festival of creative doom-mongering on the fringes of Labour’s conference as well as in the columns of the business press. Most frequently voiced is the prediction that the 2,000 or so denizens of London’s private equity community who benefit from the ‘carried interest’ tax wheeze will pack their Louis Vuitton bags into their Chelsea tractors and form a convoy down the M20 towards continental tax havens. A recent addition to the litany is a warning from the London Stock Exchange chief Dame Julia Hoggett that the ‘ongoing viability’ of the Aim market for smaller companies is at risk if the

First, the good news. The Irish government is about to receive a €13 billion windfall in the form of back taxes from tech giant Apple, after the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled against the company. That should pay for a good few social homes in a country that has an even bigger housing crisis than Britain’s. It could even go some way to providing universal free public healthcare (at the moment most adults have to pay something, even at public hospitals). Why should countries which have been successful at managing their finances be forced to jack up tax rates? Now the bad news. Ireland doesn’t actually want to receive

Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt entered Downing Street with one mission: to clean up the public finances after Liz Truss’s mini-Budget debacle. They posed as the fiscally credible option. All bills would need to be covered, even if the tax burden had to rise. If the Tories were to lose power for being disciplined and truthful, then so be it. Reeves would like to pin any rise on the Conservatives: an extension of ‘Tory austerity’ rather than her own Rachel Reeves has sought to demolish their responsible reputation in her first weeks as Chancellor by announcing that she has discovered a £21.9 billion ‘black hole’ in the public finances this

No. 10 quickly asserted that the meltdown at National Air Traffic Services was a technical issue rather than a cyber attack. This was presumably meant to be reassuring. It is anything but. It speaks, once more, of a Britain with creaking infrastructure, where national paralysis has become a regular occurrence. The highest tax revenues in peacetime history have not created a properly functioning country.  The breakdown was caused by a single mis-filed flight plan. That such havoc can result from one trivial event does little credit to the organisation entrusted with our airspace. This week’s event may not be a cyber attack, but hostile states and organisations will be taking

Last summer, all the Tory party could talk about was tax. It was at the heart of the leadership contest and the dividing line between Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. The then foreign secretary promised to move fast and bring in deficit-financed tax cuts; the former chancellor said this would end in tears and instead pledged fully funded cuts over six years. Neither plan saw the light of day. All talk of tax cuts was suspended after Truss’s mini-Budget, when the premise of her borrow-and-spend agenda was tested to destruction. Since then, tax has become a difficult topic to bring up. Even within Tory circles, calls to cut tax are

The Office for Budget Responsibility was designed to protect the Chancellor from accusations that he is cooking the books. If the forecasts are prepared by an independent body, there can’t be the suggestion – as there often was before the OBR’s creation in 2010 – that they have been politically influenced. But what the OBR cannot do is eliminate uncertainty. In recent years, the likely trajectory of the financial future changed quite a lot from one month to the next: from interest rates and inflation to the Covid pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The OBR itself admits that it had to conduct its work without knowing the full economic