When he announced Labour Party proposals for changes to the non-dom rules, Ed Miliband tried very hard to be as misleading as possible without lying. He seems to have failed.
He said that non-doms ‘aren’t required to pay taxes like you and me’. They are. Non-doms are required to pay the same UK taxes as the rest of us on their UK income and foreign income remitted to the UK. Most of us don’t have any non-UK income, let alone non-UK income which we do not wish to remit to the UK (regardless of the tax treatment, it would mean we couldn’t spend it here) and therefore we do not pay tax on unremitted non-UK income either.
Clarity on the current rules is really important for what could be a question worth billions to the UK exchequer: will this measure raise revenue?
After all, non-doms do create revenues for the UK government in three ways: taxes on their consumption; taxes on the UK income and foreign income remitted to finance that consumption; and taxes on the economic activity that consumption creates (e.g.
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