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What’s in the tax news for 2015?

9th Jan 2015
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First of all the person at HMRC who suggested taxpayers use Twitter to contact them because they can’t get through on the phone: Something which sounds to me like last resort black humour and just indicates as ever that you shouldn’t make jokes to the Daily Mail (though a competition to see who can best express a complicated problem in 140 characters might be interesting), says Simon Sweetman.

And one of the reasons I think that is because I ran into a former colleague of mine in HMRC (or in those days the Inland Revenue) who can take retirement in May and is desperate to go: They don’t care about people any more, he said. Gallows humour time.

Apart from that, the scent of hypocrisy is in the air. We all shake our heads at Amazon’s and Google’s tax practices (whether or not we understand them), but we still shop there, we don’t give HMRC the resources or the law to do much about it, and we pretend not to notice that just about all their competitors are doing the same thing.

There were two stories in our local paper this week. One said that a survey had shown just how close to financial disaster very many hard working families are, with only a slight rise in inflation or interest rates needed to push them over the edge (has anyone remembered that we have the lowest interest rates in history helping to inflate the bubble, especially of house prices?) and the other pointing to the massive splurge in pre-Christmas spending (on credit cards of course). One and a quarter billion, was it? Which of course is what drives the economic “recovery”.

And then we have City Link going bust at precisely the wrong time of year. But no redundancy pay because all the drivers were “self-employed” (working for one boss in the boss’s vans and told exactly where to go every day – what would you think?).

The start of 2015 appears to have signalled the start of a squalid election race with nobody daring to lift their eyes beyond that. It’s winning that counts for politicians, not solving the problems.

Happy New Year, everyone.

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By ShirleyM
09th Jan 2015 12:56

There was an interesting program on TV last night

'The super-rich and us'. It wasn't very complimentary to politicians.

The TV guide describes it as: "Britain has more billionaires per capita than any other country on Earth, but few pay tax as they are not domiciled in the UK. In the first of a two-part documentary, Jacques Peretti looks at how the super-rich first exploited an obscure legal loophole to make Britain the most attractive tax haven on the planet, which was part of a deliberate strategy by the government to reconfigure the British economy in the mistaken belief their wealth would trickle down to the rest of the nation. Jacques challenges the architects of these policies and tracks down the foreign multimillionaires turning Britain from a nation of property owners to one of renters, examining the far-reaching effects this will have"

Some of the super-rich that were interviewed said they were happy to pay tax, if it meant they lived in a safe country, and didn't have to live in a barricaded fortress.

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