According to Winston Churchill, “There is no such thing as a good tax”. He could very well have been referring to the draconian changes to Non-Doms and Stamp Duty, which are now costing the Treasury £3billion per year. One could play a game of ‘Fantasy Infrastructure’ and ponder how many hospitals and schools could be bought for this humungous amount of money.
The omnipresent, politics of envy, represents the pinnacle of socialist utopian thinking, managing to be both expensive and inefficient at the same time. Like all caring, sharing lefties, Labour governments can’t wait to get their greedy hands on other peoples’ stuff so that they can whittle it away. The hapless, former Chancellor Osborne succumbed to this practice in 2014, when he caved into the usual Labour clamour about ‘soshul justis ishoos’.
At the time, The Treasury claimed that it was going to ‘rake in £billions’ by nobbling the Non-Doms to fork out for UK tax and their conceit was palpable. The words ‘Cheshire cat’, springs to mind. No surprise then that every oligarch looked out of the window at the MayDay protests, packed their Gucci bags and took a private jet to somewhere else where their wealth was better appreciated.
Contrary to popular opprobrium, we should remove the proverbial chip from our shoulders and attract as many of these international entrepreneurs as possible.
Deals aplenty and a cheap Pound
The post-Brexit era offers a fertile set-up for meaningful and long-term investment in this country, with deals aplenty and a cheap Pound, what better combination could you want? Since these are individuals who buy property, start businesses and contribute to the wealth of the nation, they are needed now more than ever.
It is a fact that 20 years ago, the top 1% of taxpayers were paying 21% of the tax take. The utopian socialists amongst us will now, hopefully, be pleased to know that this has ballooned to 29.6% of all income tax revenue, where the top 5% are lumbered with providing over 50% of the total tax take, which was £190billion this year.
‘Creepy grandpa’, Mr. Corbyn will be delighted that, ‘the burden of the many is shared by the few.’
The socialists need to ‘get over themselves and get out of their own way’. Or preferably crawl back under their stone and leave the rest of us to achieve something in life. While it’s all very well to utter chin music about ‘squeezing the rich until the pips squeak’, as the former Chancellor Denis Healey so eloquently put it in the 70s, it is short sighted and counter-productive. All that happens is that wealth creators go elsewhere, into the warm embrace of other countries such as France, Portugal and Italy, who have recently changed their tax regimes to be of great attraction to them.
Policy-making-by-dog-breakfast
The Stamp Duty reforms are another example of policy-making-by-dog-breakfast and they now cost the Treasury at least £1billion per year, which is another shocking figure and result of follie de grandeur.
It was said by someone, somewhere, that each generation has to go through socialism to experience its failings and learn by the experience.
The cracks in the Residential Property Market are showing – turnover of properties is down by 60% and the whole industry, including construction, is screeching to a halt. None of this is helping us navigate our way through the post-Brexit era, nor building homes for the vulnerable.
Lest we forget, there is an intrinsic link between the Residential Property Market, retail spending and economic growth. When one is up, they are all up. The current situation with the Residential Property Market is unsustainable and every effort should be made to try and keep it on an even keel.
Now that we’ve gone cold turkey over the fiscal heroin of Quantitative Easing and cheap money, the economy desperately needs the stimulus of a growing residential property market. This helps everyone with a mortgage, so that their debt shrinks in relation to equity, as values gently rise.
Corbyn and his cohorts are quick to attack the bourgeoisie by threatening punitive rises in income and inheritance tax (amongst a plethora of others), in order to rally the forces of their Marxist grass root supporters. Obviously he believes that the Laffer Curve is less an economic indicator and more a bend in the road!
Hark, what do I hear from the Deputy Prime Minister Salvini of Italy, if his party gained a working majority in another election, a flat tax proposition of 15% – looks like someone else is reading and understanding the Laffer theory.
And, as for the poisoned dwarf ‘speaker of the house’, the bullying and imperious, incorrigible ‘Remoaner’ Mr. Bercow, who cannot quite get over the fact that Parliament doesn’t want him to have a job for life and doesn’t feel like paying for his exalted, lavish lifestyle, where is the four foot low beam for him to walk into, when you need it most?
An economic ‘midden mire’
If there were a vote of no confidence in September, followed by a snap Election, the Labour Party (either on their own or in coalition with the SNP) could break in to Number Ten, catapulting us head first into the economic ‘midden mire’.
The subsequent flight of capital from the UK will be swift and merciless, the stock markets will plummet and this will hugely exacerbate the ramifications of a bad Brexit result.
Asset prices would drop like a stone as the Labour Party unleashed the destructive forces of extreme leftism on this country.
The bulk of middle England would be so destabilised that the inevitable recession would be extremely damaging.
Conversely, if Boris were able to get a deal through the EU or ‘shoot the Brexit Party fox’ and go to the country, in an orderly fashion, after October 31st, there is a chance that he could gain a working majority in Parliament, despite the judicious coagulation of the other political parties trying to thwart his efforts. Instead of stockpiling Spam in our Armageddon bunker, we could be enjoying a Brexit bounce and breaking out the Babycham.
They talk about trade deals taking seven years or more. Since we have the same regulatory standards as the EU, ask them to photocopy the paperwork between Europe, Japan, Canada etc., and we should be able to sort the problem out in a matter of months. QED.
Regardless of your political leanings, isn’t it encouraging and heartwarming to hear the positive overtones from the US Trade Department about the likelihood of doing fast track business with the UK after Brexit, rather than the obdurate wall of silence from our former EU so-called partners, who nurse a barely disguised schadenfreude towards us? ‘Friends in need, are friends indeed!’
The UK, Singapore of Europe?
It is hoped that the first Budget from new Chancellor Sajid Javid will be bold and radical. We, as a nation, could hopefully become the Singapore of Europe, attracting investors via the cheap Pound and encouraging them to set up their head offices in the greatest city on earth, London, which has more to offer than anywhere else in the world.
What delicious irony it would be to give a single-finger salute to all those awful, overpaid, corrupt, bureaucrats in the EU, as we overtake them in the fast lane of growth, whilst they suffer from their self imposed, impending recession, which is starting to creep over the entirety of Europe.
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