The green-left has long hankered after a 'wealth tax', using Gary Lineker as their human face / shield. Gary Stevenson - a rum cove if ever there was one - happily works himself up into a semi-coherent rant-frenzy on the topic at the drop of a hat, as every TV producer knows: he's a form of walking click-bait. And now all these people are (like so many lobbyists) projecting their fantasies on Young Andy.
But for all the charlatanism and carnival nonsense, there's something in it. There's nothing clever about passively allowing the entirety of the new economic magnate class to blag and bully its way into global personal tax immunity - not to mention immunity for their hi-tech rent-seeking enterprises. We all know these people have the best lawyers, own most of the meejah of all kinds + a large number of venal politicians, and are ruthless with it.
Before opening the floor to y'all, I have a couple of random inputs to offer.
1. HMRC: a badly underpowered, broadly unaccountable, ramshackle organisation that fosters an opaque world of thriving tax evasion on the one hand (sheer inability to get to grips with the complexities of 2026, and the depth of fraud it can only sit back & ignore), and injustice on the other, meted out to an unlucky sub-set of taxpayers it randomly does get its teeth into.
It is my strong contention that the sheer complexities inherent in a tax on total assets, would defeat HMRC right from the get-go. In the process, however, the opacity, fraud and injustice would multiply several-fold, with the high likelihood of serious political and even economic fallout.
2. Real estate: the one taxable asset class that doesn't suffer from crippling complexity is of course Land. Our good friend, the very much lamented Mark Wadsworth, spilled much virtual ink promoting Land Value Tax, the high-level theoretical attractions of which are really obvious.
This thing is as long as a piece of string because we have a low-level form of land tax already - the Council Tax[1]. It has long been my contention that George 'Boy Genius' Osborne (who is as much to blame as Gordon Brown for the present state of our economy) missed a massive trick when, in his first "all in it together" budget, he failed to create a dozen new Council Tax bands. At a stroke[2] he would have raised a bunch of £££ and injected a bit of justice at the start of his destructive "austerity" regime. And all for near-zero effort: it would have leveraged a pretty efficient existing tax structure at minimal cost and next-to-no unintended consequences or evasion. In 2010 he could do whatever he decided; but from the word 'go' and over the following 5 years it turned out that he was indeed as useless a chancellor as we've ever had.
Big topic, to which I reckon we'll be returning quite soon. Over to y'all.
ND
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[1] Recall that Heseltine invented and implemented it in just a few months. Him and his instantly available army of estate agents.
[2] see [1] above. Implementing new bands would take even less time.
6 comments:
Intent will be key, an ideological policy from the left I'd expect to be venally destructive - private school VAT for example.
CH
"the sheer complexities inherent in a tax on total assets": what did Mrs Beeton purportedly say? First catch all his assets.
As for LVT, which I used to refer to as Luncheon Voucher Tax, it seems that the original proposal was to tax the unimproved value of the land. What on earth can that mean? The natural state of most land in Britain is under a thousand feet of ice. So its value is usually nowt.
The idea sounds as vacuous and capricious as the idea of the "value of work" as used in the Equalities Act, and since used to hack off the binmen of Birmingham. I can understand why politicians - lazy, dim, ill-educated - can pass such stuff but am appalled that the courts don't say "This is meaningless twaddle so we can't enforce it".
Trouble is the policies of Blair* and his successors (immigration, immigration, immigration plus getting all the potential Brit mothers into the workforce) have raised house prices enough that someone who bought a North London terrace for less than 10k in 1971** is now sitting on million and a half plus - but will their income to pay the tax have increased 100x in the same period?
* if you look at the Halifax figures house prices didn't take off under Thatcher/Major - there was actually a price slump in the early 90s. And immigration was low.
** or even someone who bought in Chester Street, Oxford at 100k in 2000 and has seen a 10x rise in 26 years.
Do not tax more.
Spend less
The slebritties working themselves into a lather about ‘tax me, me, me’ are obviously virtue signalling. If they were serious, a cheque to the local hospital/mental health charity/underprivileged children home, GOSH, etc would do instant wonders. May not get as much media attention though I suppose….
For tax purposes in the UK, land is owned by the person or entity who holds the beneficial ownership (the right to the income or profits) rather than strictly the legal owner (the name on the deeds or HM Land Registry).
Not far from me live some travelling folk. Our local council occasionally has run-ins with them re mobile home pitches. But it turns out that small patches of land can change hands 10 times a minute just on someone's say so. TBF this pleasant easy going attitude applies to all land owners big and small. As ever the devil is in the detail.
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