Labour still lost - Lisa Nandy and her incredibly clever tax ideas

I don't quite have the quality of post for today that Mr. Drew was able to produce over the weekend. But this snippet from the Labour leadership contest got me thinking a little about both how stupid these people are but also what tax policy could mean in 2020. 

In the Mirror article, Ms Nandy says she wants all companies to pay minimum wages after benefits are calculated so that big companies have to support workers at this level and moreover to add a special tax which is in effect a top up tax for paying such low wages. . Whilst to Ms Nandy this sounds good and suitably comradely, it would create some rather odd outcomes. Tesco would likely get a very large new bill, as would any big employer. Smaller employers with higher wages, I don;t know such as say a large global investment bank or Facebook or Apple, would not get hit at all. So in effect it would be a tax on employment - just what the economy ordered. 

Of course, in a wider context a policy like this is even worse. It would further drive companies towards automation and reducing work numbers.

So how do we tax these pesky companies. I think a lot of progress has been made with BEPS (Base Erosion and Profit Shifting) which is an international agreement that has been spread worldwide. This has really pushed hard on the easy use of international tax structures and and upgrade is on the way. 

Then of course the reality becomes that you have to tax what is done in Country to have a hope. for me this means a greater lean towards consumption taxes and complex transfer pricing contracts....as well as perhaps higher import and export taxes, especially on digital goods. In return, there needs to be a reduction in employment taxes and also business property tax where the alignment is well out of kilter with value.

All of this is worthy of a longer post which I will get too - certainly more quickly than the vacuous Nandy will come to any real conclusions on tax policies!.  

The silly season...at long last

After a hard month (it is not even 1 month since the EU Referendum) of politics and tragedy, the silly season is finally here in the news.


The main headline is a Welsh clown, going by the name of Owen Smith.


No for him the hard slog of working his way up the political firmament. No, Mr Smith instead seems to seek the Andrea Leadsom path to supernova status and then trudge quickly back to the darkness of anonymity.


Mr Smith has bravely pushed aside a well-known and liked Labour politician in Angela Eagle, useless of course, but then they all are. Now he is out there, promoting his own brand of meaningless phraseology:


"Jeremy has slogans when we need solutions"


This is fantastic, do you see what he has done, created a meaningless slogan to deride his rival by doing the same thing. Genius, of a sort.


Anyhow, the grown ups in charge of the Country have little to fear from the Taffia-leading Mr Smith. And neither does Jeremy Corbyn. Labour already have in a place a well-meaning out of touch loser, why replace him with another?

Diane Abbott for Chancellor !

... for this is she, offering her mathematical prowess on money matters when being interviewed by La Toynbee on the subject of campaign funding for the Labour Leadership (11:30 in, if you can't face the whole lot):

"[David Miliband] declared £180,000: I have £1,700. Even you, Polly, wouldn’t say that David Miliband's politics are 10 times more popular than mine in the Labour Party"

Nope Diane, your popularity is measured in quite a different multiple ... even if Polly is too polite to point it out.

ND

Leadership Hopefuls Emerging From Brillo's Pad

Only two more weeks of hustings to go in the Labour leadership election ! And for those whose window on this private grief is the Beeb's This Week programme, so far we have seen, in sequence (commencing 24 June), Andrew Neil's entertaining knife-jobs on:

- Diannne Abbottt, proving she can't stand the heat in Neil's kitchen any more than could, *ahem*, our friendly Devil
- Andy err, ... ? well anyway, someone called Andy
- BananaBoy Miliband, evidently prepped by Mandy, imperiously brazening out his role as cover for torturers worldwide
- Balls, gibbering. It is said he has recently discomfited Gove and is apparently attracting favourable notices in OldLab quarters for his willingness to deny everything relating to the economy, and general all-round aggression towards the Coalition. It is also said that Tory High Command fervently hopes he will win; and after his performance against Neil we are in no doubt as to why

So, still to enter Brillo's Pad on Thursday, we are left with ... Ed Miliband!

Ed it was who first attracted attention around here in March 2009 when he was tipped by a commenter as the improbable 'John Major' candidate, in a blog-poll where his name didn't even appear in the shortlist. Subsequently, we started watching more closely and took a shine to his executive realpolitik, tipping him in a post a month later.

15 months on, he would still seem to have a mountain to climb because Big Brother Banana-boy has a commanding lead in the money and grandee-nomination stakes. Nor is this particularly inspiring. But who can really see the long-term future in the brazen-lying, wooden, machine-politics apparatchik that is Miliband D? And, conversely, where is the glaring flaw onto which Neil can batten, to leave Miliband E looking as ridiculous as the rest ?

So - Thursday night it is. Lights, camera, action.

ND

Red or Dead Redemption.

The labour leadership contest is really a matter of supreme insignificance to the country at the moment, so we won't mention it again for a while. But well done to Dianne Abbott for beating the odds and getting a ticket to the debates.
But it is worth noting one of the most skilled operators, outside of the Mandelson / Campbell / McBride operation, has pulled off another little coup.

Harriett Harman did not stand for the leadership herself. There is a feeling that she rather likes the power of being deputy leader, without the difficulty of being the actual leader. By backing Dianne yesterday, Harriet cemented her election platform of women's rights, and added some minority agenda to it too. She has pleased the left wing of the party, pleased hers and her husband's union backers, looked considerate about the wider interests of the party and, most importantly, avoided having to back any of the other candidates who are actually going to win.
She has gained an ally from the ranks of the old guard and further embedded herself into the deputies role.

Lots of pitfalls in a leadership contest. Just ask Dianne's friend Michael !
Ms Harman seems to have avoided them all, and actually strengthened her position.
No wonder the civil service called her Hattiavelli.

Go Ed Miliband !

Never mind Blinky Balls or Banana-boy -
Ed's the man for us !



ND