Tax

Wednesday

Ross Clark

Will the G7 tax deal survive?

What are the chances of the G7’s agreement on a minimum rate of corporation tax actually coming into effect? While it was presented as a done deal last weekend, things are not going too well. Firstly, the G20 will have to agree — which is far from guaranteed given that smaller countries have less to gain from the proposal than the US. It is a tax designed to help countries with a large number of multinational companies who currently operate through subsidiaries in countries with lower corporation tax rates. While no G20 country currently has a rate below the agreed 15 per cent, (and the biggest loser, Ireland, with its 12.5 per cent

Thursday

The Spectator

Which countries still haven’t had a single case of Covid?

French lessons France’s former president Nicolas Sarkozy was sentenced to three years in jail, with two of them suspended, for corruption and ‘influence peddling’ after seeking to bribe a judge. Some other French leaders who have been convicted in criminal courts:— Jacques Chirac got a two-year suspended sentence in 2011 for setting up fake jobs to claim public funds for political purposes.— Christine Lagarde was convicted in 2016 of making payouts to a businessman while she was finance minister in 2008. She was not punished and went on to be appointed head of the European Central Bank.— In 2020 former PM François Fillon was given a five-year sentence, three suspended,

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

The case for keeping business taxes low

Why should business pay tax at all? That’s a provocative but forlorn question to ask in Budget week. Business pays corporation tax on profits because that’s what voters expect, partly because many are conditioned to believe profit is a sin and partly because all would prefer to pay less tax themselves. Investors pay tax on capital gains because — as the American bank robber Willie Sutton said of his crimes — that’s where the money is. And companies pay more tax as business rates on premises because that’s the easiest way to collect contributions towards public services from which they benefit — but it’s also an easy levy to relieve

Monday

Annabel Denham

20 taxes Rishi should bin

When Rishi Sunak takes to the Despatch Box on Wednesday it will be against a backdrop of colossal national debt, the recent rise in government bond yields and the ongoing Coronavirus crisis. The British state owes £2.1 trillion, ten times the size of the entire economy of an independent Scotland. Yet some concerns over the health of the public finances are misguided – or at least exaggerated. The increase in borrowing to pay for Covid does not itself have to be repaid (at least in the short term). Why? Because provided the government can continue to make the interest payments, debt can simply be rolled over. What’s more, the UK

Tuesday

Anthony Browne

A proportional property tax would be a disaster

Two of the most unpopular taxes in Britain are stamp duty and council tax, property taxes both, seen as economically damaging and unfair. So it is not surprising there is a noisy campaign, gaining widespread coverage, to abolish them both and replace them with a simple ‘proportional property tax’. The more your home is worth, the more you pay — what could be fairer and simpler? Although well intentioned, this new property tax is a genuinely bad idea. To be revenue neutral for the Treasury, campaigners estimate it needs to be set at 0.48 per cent of the value of the property per year — so that someone with a £1

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

If taxes must rise, Sunak should pick on private equity instead

It’s not axiomatic that taxes must rise to pay for the pandemic, if you seriously believe the surge in growth, jobs and prosperity that will follow the rollout of a hyper-efficient national vaccination programme will generate sufficient revenues for Rishi Sunak to stabilise the public finances, albeit at the highest level of debt ever seen in modern times. On the other hand, the Chancellor is surely pondering this question: in the current mood of public gratitude for the NHS and government support for the economy, there must be taxes I can tweak that won’t lose sackloads of Tory votes and might chip the peak off the debt mountain — so

Thursday

The Spectator

Who first committed ‘cultural appropriation’?

Culture clashes The pop star Adele was accused of ‘cultural appropriation’ for adopting a Jamaican hairstyle for the online Notting Hill Carnival. Who first committed this alleged sin? The concept has been traced to a paper presented by Canadian art historian Kenneth Coutts-Smith at a symposium of the International Association of Art Critics in Lisbon in September 1976 — he used the terms ‘cultural colonialism’ and ‘historical appropriation’. His earliest example didn’t involve black cultures, however, but the Medici adopting an ‘idealised view of Roman Republican Virtue’ in the construction of Florence. Bags of rubbish The mandatory charge for plastic bags is to be doubled to 10p and extended to

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Can Scotland afford independence?

How would an independent Scotland have fared during the pandemic? We found out this week on the annual release of Gers, which adds up all Scottish spending and taxes and states the size of the gap. This year it’s estimated at about 27 per cent of GDP, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which would make it the worst-hit country in the developed world. It’s unlikely that a small country could sustain a deficit of this size even in a pandemic: the UK has been hit bad, but we have the pound and the Bank of England’s QE to lower the cost of issuing debt. For a country of five million to run

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Italy owes Wales reparations for the wrongs of the Roman Empire

There’s talk of reparations in the air. Lobbyists from around the world are demanding sin-payments from former colonial powers. Let me add my voice to the clamour on behalf of this island’s indigenous Celtic people. My family are from Llanelli in Carmarthenshire and I believe that my compatriots have an excellent case to make against the Roman empire. This is not an extinct claim – the money is still in play. Britain was invaded by Julius Caesar in 55 BC and his visit was followed up a century later by the Emperor Claudius and his mob. The Roman occupation, which involved the military subjection of the Celtic peoples, lasted for

Monday

Ross Clark

Labour’s wealth tax proposal is deeply flawed

Will Labour ever stop pushing for punitive taxation? Not content with gifting the Conservatives an 80 seat majority in December, the supposedly more moderate Labour party under Keir Starmer is already dreaming up ways it can extract large sums from our pockets. Shadow Chancellor Anneliese Dodds floated a ‘wealth tax’ at the weekend, so that the burden of paying for the Covid 19 crisis might fall upon the ‘very best off people’. Except it won’t be the very best-off people who get whacked by a wealth tax, as she should surely know. The highly mobile global super rich wouldn’t hang around for five minutes after a Labour government announced a

Thursday

Taki

Switzerland is now an enemy of the rich

Gstaad The staff are back and all is well, as they used to say long ago in faraway places. The gardener and the cleaner are Portuguese, and they greet me, with their inherent dignity, from afar. The Filipina maid and cook almost gets me in a headlock trying to thank me for keeping her on salary while she rested at home. I shoo her away. Who does she take me for, a lowlife cheapskate like Philip Green? I didn’t hesitate to send them all home. Mind you, I’ve taken such a shellacking on the stock market that I’ll soon be applying for a job myself, perhaps as an ageing gigolo

Sunday

Melanie McDonagh

Footballers’ response to coronavirus: self-delusion or cheek?

Last week I was put on furlough from my job, which was – in a way – quite exciting, invoking images of sturdy sailors on shore leave (my grandfather, who was a sailor, had his own approach to this; jump ship from a vessel in port if he fancied a change). Anyway, the largest bit of my present work is to review art exhibitions and since there aren’t any exhibitions to review, and there’s a limit to the number of times you can exhort people to have a look at the Hermitage online, I could kind of see the point. But now I’m thinking that I was actually dreadfully short

Thursday

Kate Andrews

A fuel duty hike shows the Tories are struggling for Budget ideas

Could motorists be hit with the first fuel duty rise in ten years in this month’s Budget? According to the Sun, the PM’s chief advisor Dominic Cummings wants to use petrol and diesel as a revenue-raiser to fund big infrastructure projects outside the capital. But ending the fuel duty freeze after a decade might not be a good idea, particularly when many new Tory voters in the North are likely to be the worst affected. Fuel duty is an easy way to raise revenue in theory, as the demand for fuel is always high. It is also a tax that is difficult for motorists to avoid (though this doesn’t stop some from trying). Yet

Tuesday

James Max

How would Labour’s proposed tax grab affect your home?

At first glance you could be forgiven for thinking that Labour’s publication ‘Land for the Many’ is a set of policy ideas that solves the housing crisis. Increasing the supply of affordable housing and freeing up land to build, improving access to existing stock and transparency sounds fair, right? Yet tucked away inside the report, you’ll find a range of measures that could pull the market as we know it to pieces; it’s the most radical sets of property proposals since the mass building plan after the Second World War. The report’s editor, George Monbiot, has not thought through the unintended consequences of the proposals. Just one example and perhaps