Outbreak of common sense at HMRC

From Landlord Today:

An accountancy firm is warning Airbnb landlords they may be investigated following a decision by the short lets platform to share data with HM Revenue & Customs.

The Grunberg & Co accountancy practice says that in reporting its tax affairs to HMRC - in the shape of its accounts to December 31 last year - Airbnb has also agreed to share data for the two preceding tax years.

Alexander Kossoff, a partner at Grunberg, says so-called ‘hosts’ for Airbnb may wish to ensure their tax affairs are in order as a voluntary disclosure to HMRC could help to reduce any potential fines.

The comments are surprisingly supportive of the move, but there are those who don't get it:

Paul Barrett: Short term holiday lettings could easily transfer to spareroom.co.uk or other short term letting sites although spareroom does all types of letting. If the AirBnB platform isn't used then lettings cannot be detected.

Robert Brown: In that case, HMRC will (eventually) turn their attention to spareroom.co.uk. I know that they do occasionally focus on small local holiday letting agents where there are lots of holiday lets and flex their muscles. I enjoyed witnessing this happen in a popular Open Golf venue a few years ago, with a healthy six or probably seven figure sum extracted from many home owners cashing in on five figure rentals from golfers and spectators.

Why HMRC haven't always been trawling all these possible data sources - letting agents, banks which do buy-to-let loans, HM Land Registry (to identify owners of multiple homes), local councils and insurers (where council tax bill or insurance bill is sent to a different address), housing benefit departments - remains unknown.

"Scientists call for Covid herd immunity strategy for young"

The fight back has begun!

From The Guardian:

An international group of scientists has called on governments to overturn their coronavirus strategies and allow young and healthy people to return to normal life while protecting the most vulnerable.

The proposal, drawn up by three researchers but signed by many more, argues for letting the virus spread in low-risk groups in the hope of achieving “herd immunity”, where enough of the population is resistant to the virus to quell the pandemic.

One of the lead authors is my favorite epidemiologist, Prof Sunetra Gupta. My second-favorite, Prof Michael Levett, has counter-signed it. I can't see Ivor Cummins on the list but maybe he'll turn up.

And now to the nay-sayers:

One critic said the “grotesque” plan amounted to a culling of sick and disabled people.

Nothing of the sort:

The authors of the declaration... argue that Covid-19 lockdowns and restrictions are having “devastating effects” on public health by disrupting routine care and harming mental health, with the underprivileged bearing the greatest burden. While many governments are trying to suppress the virus until new treatments and vaccines are found, the trio write that older people and others at risk should be shielded while those in the least danger should “immediately be allowed to resume life as normal”.

No mention of a cull. The general idea is instead of everybody being locked down, the vulnerable are given the support they need (help with shopping and so on) to enable them to lock themselves down, if that is what they wish to do.

Traffic lights

As I drove home, I noticed that the traffic lights at a fairly busy crossroads at one end of the main road in our village-suburb were turned off and traffic seemed to be flowing smoothly.

I parked at home and walked back and watched for ten minutes. Traffic is at its heaviest on Saturday afternoons, and when the lights are working, there is usually a queue of ten or twenty cars on each of the four approach roads. The longest queue that formed was no more than three or four cars on one approach road if the car in front wanted to turn right (the most awkward turn on those particular cross roads). Within a few seconds, there would be a gap or somebody would just slow down and let them in.

Drivers also stopped more or less immediately for pedestrians who wanted to cross; buses could plough straight through. I crossed at the pedestrian crossing (Pelican crossing) a little further up the hill. Even though those lights were turned off as well, cars stopped for pedestrians more or less immediately

It filled my heart with joy. I wonder whether the council (or whichever authority is in charge) will see sense and leave them turned off permanently? If they want to do 'something', I think a yellow box wouldn't go amiss.

"Legalise cannabis sales to tackle criminal gangs, says Tory MP"

From the Evening Standard:

Crispin Blunt, chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Drug Policy Reform, is urging the Government to control sales as he claims that 50 years of “prohibition” has failed “lamentably”.

Go Crispin!

France not entirely daft - shock

from Ecommerce News Europe:

The French Minister of Finance told newspaper Le Parisien that the proposed tax is aimed at companies with worldwide digital revenue of at least 750 million euros and a French revenue of more than 25 million euros.

He wants to target commission-based online platforms, like Amazon or Booking.com. Companies that sell their products on their own websites, like French ecommerce company Darty, wouldn’t be targeted.

Good start - the point about these platform/intermediary companies is that their value is in network effects aka rent, and rent is the main thing that governments should be taxing. You have to be able to distinguish it from true earnings, which is why companies like Darty are exempted. People only use Facebook, Twitter etc because everybody else does.

In total, there are about 30 companies that would be affected if the tax plan gets greenlighted. These companies are mostly American, but also German, Spanish and British, as well as one French company (Criteo) and several companies that are originally from France but have been bought by foreign players.

According to Le Maire, a taxation system for the 21st century has to be built on what has value today. “And that’s data”, he said. The minister also added it’s a matter of fiscal justice, with these companies paying some 14 percentage points less tax than small- and medium sized enterprises in Europe.

He misses two points. It's not so much control and ownership of "data" in itself that indicates a rentier status (some companies store lots of their own data, and good luck to them, that's not rent, that's good record-keeping), it's "other people's data" aka network effect etc. And how much tax other companies pay is irrelevant, if they are earned profits in a competitive market, then they should be taxed at lower rates (or not at all). But never mind.

"Enter the first, fourth and fifth characters of your unique word"

Sometime when you login somewhere, you are asked to enter certain characters from your unique word, which is surprisingly difficult and often takes two or three attempts.

Some clever internet chaps have realised that this is waste of everybody's time and have set it up so that you have to enter the appropriate characters in the boxes and skip the asterisks. This makes it a lot easier because you can visualise your unique word as you type the characters in. Well done them!

□* *□□*

The actual Good Friday Agreement says very little about cross-border trade

George Carty (on Twitter) trotted out a lazy misconception: "Surely the main problem is the Irish border (again) - IIRC we can't be in EFTA and also (as required by the GFA) in a customs union with the EU."

Fraggles points out in the comments: "The GFA does not state that NI must be in a customs union with the EU. It simply doesn't. Who keeps making this stuff up?"
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In such situations, I find it useful to write down what you know, and look up what you don't.
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1. Fraggles is quite correct. The full official text of the Belfast Agreement (as it was originally called) is available here. It's 35 pages long so I haven't read it all, but if you search for the word "border" it shows up ten times, but only as part of the catch-all expression "all-island and cross-border [matters]"; the word "trade" appears once as part of the expression "trade union".

Fact is, the GFA had very little to do with cross-border trade. Somebody who worked for the Northern Ireland Office (or Department or Ministry or whatever it was called at the time) under John Major (Tony Blair picked up the baton and finished off the process after he became PM) confirmed that the main aim was ending The Troubles, duh!

They did this quite simply by stuffing the mouths of the leaders of extremist movements/terrorist organisations on both sides with gold. The UK governments' own bullet points are:

* the creation of a democratically elected Assembly
* the creation of a North/South Ministerial Council
* the creation of a British-Irish Council and the British-Irish Governmental Conference

In other words, creating lots of lovely, well-paid public sector/political sinecures which were awarded to the likes of Gerry Adams and Rev. Ian Paisley etc. Every man has his price. In return, said trouble makers agreed to lay down their arms, and all in all, it has worked very well (at considerable cost to the UK taxpayer, but worth it IMHO).
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2. We know perfectly well that there was only a 'hard border' between NI and RoI because the NI police needed to minimise the amount of weapons being smuggled into NI and/or terrorists moving back and forth.

(Ever since Irish independence, the UK has always honoured freedom of Irish citizens to move to and from the UK (and vote in elections here), and there was never a reason to try and impede cross-border trade.)

The GFA enabled the border to be 'softened' to the point of irrelevance by buying off the terrorists/extremists. The only reason the UK would reimpose it is a resurgence of nationalist terrorism.

So people who say that if there's a No Deal Brexit we'll go back to the Bad Old Days of hour long queues at the NI-RoI border with armed guards and frequent inspections have completely lost the plot.
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3. If you search the full text for the word "EU", the most relevant paragraph is this:

The British Irish Council will exchange information, discuss, consult and use best endeavours to reach agreement on co-operation on matters of mutual interest within the competence of the relevant Administrations. Suitable issues for early discussion in the BIC could include transport links, agricultural issues, environmental issues, cultural issues, health issues, education issues and approaches to EU issues.

I think that Brexit falls squarely under their competence, so what is the British Irish Council doing about it? I haven't heard a peep from them. In fact, I'd never heard of them at all.
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4. More facts:

The population of NI voted by a reasonable majority to Remain in 2016.

The vote share of the two biggest Unionist (broadly, pro-Leave) parties in the 2017 General Election was 46%, against 40% for the two biggest Nationalist (broadly, pro-Remain) parties.

So a bit of an uncomfortable contradiction there!
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5. We know that borders are artificial, but a line has to be drawn somewhere and compromises made.

The UK is not a single political unit, there is a whole hodge-podge of territories which are 'British' for some purposes but not others (Isle of Man, Channel Islands - both use GBP and have same titular head of state - Gibraltar, Falkland Islands etc). Scotland is autonomous in some respects and has a fairly powerful Assembly (which they cheerfully refer to as the Scottish Government), Northern Ireland has a similar Assembly, which spends most of the time trying to get itself shut down again. And we manage just fine.

Similarly, there isn't actually a neat line round the Member States of the EU. There is a whole hodge-podge of territories which are in the EU for some purposes and not in the EU for other purposes, full list here. Gibraltar is on this list as well. And they manage just fine.

I'm thinking, surely it is not that difficult to think up some fudged arrangement whereby Northern Ireland falls into the categories of half-in, half-out of the UK and similarly half-in, half-out of the EU?

Where there's a will there's away. Problem is there is absolutely no will on EU side to do something sensible and Mrs T May is being held to ransom by the fairly extremist DUP.
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6. Cross-border trade is very important to the NI and RoI economies, making up about 5% of either side's GDP. I'm not sure if cross-border workers are included in that.

But NI or RoI trade with Great Britain (i.e. the rest of UK) is several times greater than trade between themselves.

Which stands to reason. Although the island of GB is a bit further away from RoI than NI is, the population of GB is thirty times the population of NI and fifteen times the population of RoI.

Reader's Letter Of The Day

From City AM, in response to this article:

It seems that the EU has a paranoid concern that unless it keeps Northern Ireland under its control as a kind of buffer zone, it will have to erect something like a Maginot Line of defences along its side of the Irish land border to keep out undesirable products such as US-style 'chlorinated chicken'.

Why should that be? Is there any good reason for the EU to assume that once we have become a third country, we will automatically become a hostile power, determined to use that weak point in the EU's external frontier to flod the EU Single Market with non-compliant goods?

At present, the UK has domestic laws which implement Single Market rules, and it is that UK domestic legal arrangement which is effective in keeping non-compliant goods out of the 0.1 per cent of UK GDP which is carried across the land border into the Irish Republic and the rest of the EU.

So why should the EU not be satisfied if the UK now pledges to pass and strictly enforce laws expressly designed to prohibit the carriage across the land border of any goods which the EU deemed unacceptable?

Dr D R Cooper

"Banks are not intermediaries of loanable funds - facts, theory and evidence"

Some subversive employees at The Bank of England have put out another fine report.

To sum up, "banks create money out of thin air". They do not sit their patiently collecting deposits and lending them out. They lend first, the borrower spends the money and whoever receives it deposits it back in the banking system (what else can they possibly do? If they spend it, then somebody else deposits it etc).

This will no doubt cheer up DBC Reed no end!

Women talking sense

Item 1, from the BBC:

People who believe the myths spread by anti-vaccine campaigners "are absolutely wrong", England's top doctor has said. Prof Dame Sally Davies said the MMR vaccine was safe and had been given to millions of children worldwide but uptake was currently "not good enough"...

"A number of people, stars, believe these myths - they are wrong," she said, "Over these 30 years, we have vaccinated millions of children. It is a safe vaccination - we know that - and we've saved millions of lives across the world. People who spread these myths, when children die they will not be there to pick up the pieces or the blame."

Uptake of the MMR vaccine had reached a good level in previous years but has now dropped back to 87%.

"That means a lot of protection but it doesn't give us herd immunity," Dame Sally said. "So when people from abroad have been coming in, travelling infected, it is spreading into our local communities."

I'll mark her down for the platitude 'local communities', apart from that, agreed.

Item 2, also from the BBC:

Chief Constable Sara Thornton said forces were too stretched to deal with "deserving" issues, such as logging gender-based hate incidents... She called for a "refocus on core policing".

Ms Thornton told police chiefs and police and crime commissioners: "We are asked to provide more and more bespoke services that are all desirable - but the simple fact is there are too many desirable and deserving issues."

She added: "Neither investigating gender-based hate crime or investigating allegations against those who have died are necessarily bad things - I just argue that they cannot be priorities for a service that is over-stretched."

... Since 2010 police chiefs say funding in England and Wales has decreased, in real terms, by nearly a fifth, and there are 20,000 fewer officers.

Spot on. It's not hard to understand, is it?

It's third time unlucky though:

Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott said forces could not do "more with less". Police should not have to "pick and choose" between crimes, and if misogyny was made a hate crime the government must provide the funding to tackle it, she added.
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UPDATE. Jonathan Bagley in the comments:

I know that there are many ways of recording crime and new crimes are being invented, but according to the crime survey, crime has fallen from a peak of 19 million offences in 1995 to 6 million offences in 2016. Doesn't that alone suggest we need fewer police? I've heard no mention of this.

I live in a small town in the North of England. In the early 90s there were more break-ins, more car crime and huge amount more drunken vandalism and criminal damage. Crime now, apart from some drug dealing, seems virtually non-existent and this is not a wealthy middle-class place.

Agreed, crime has been on a downward trend in developed countries for centuries. Steven Pinker has made a career out of reporting this. This has been particularly noticeable over the last few decades, when those born before they stopped putting lead in petrol had passed prime crime-committing age (allegedly, but it's the best explanation we have).

But:

a) However much - or little - crime there is, there is always too much, from the point of view of victims.

b) The economic optimum level of crime/policing is where £1 extra spent on police reduces the total cost of crime by £1, spend any more and it's money wasted. But it's difficult to measure or value distress, worry, trauma etc (the bulk of the true cost of crime), so best go on the safe side.

c) We have got softer as we have become more civilised. A few centuries ago, if somebody was murdered, it was just bad luck and few people cared too much, widow or widower remarried and moved on. Nowadays, it's a heck of a blow to a large number of relatives, friends and colleagues. So the "cost" of crime might be going up even if the absolute number of crimes is going down.

d) The Tories have been reducing police budgets and numbers too far, too fast, and/or encouraging them to focus on non-crimes as listed by Ms Thornton. There does appear to have been an increase in crime rates over the past few years - especially in London which has had a particularly right-on Mayor - bucking the long term trend.

"Walsall Council plans to install street skips to tackle fly-tipping"

From the BBC:

Skips could be placed on streets in a bid to tackle repeated fly-tipping, a council has announced.

Last year, there were more than 4,000 reports of illegally discarded waste across Walsall, with 2,000 tonnes of rubbish removed from the borough.

The local authority has now proposed putting a skip in each of its 20 wards every Saturday*. Clearing up fly-tipping cost the council more than £400,000 last year, bosses said.

And why on earth wouldn't they?

1. The cost of collecting rubbish is about 1% - 2% of the selling price of new goods sold, and so anybody who wants to chuck something away has paid for the cost of having it collected ten or twenty times over via VAT.

We take our larger items to a council recycling centre; they have signs up saying "Household refuse only". I really don't see why they draw this distinction, businesses have paid VAT just like anybody else and have the same entitlement to dump their rubbish.

2. The test of whether something is a good idea is to imagine the opposite situation, i.e. there are plenty of skips dotted around for people to dump larger items in, and let's assume most people do the decent thing and use them. Would any sane council announce that it intends to save a few quid by withdrawing the service? You'd hope not.

* I don't quite understand that sentence. Will the skips be there on Saturdays, or will they be emptied on Saturdays?

Outbreak of common sense in Islington

Opinions are divided on the topic of 'affordable housing' quotas*, and I am pretty indifferent either way, but rules are rules.

The scam in question goes like this, based on a real life example that Peter S helped me piece together:

1. Developer bought some land in London pre-2008. He planned to build 100 units, 30 affordable units were to be sold at break even and he hoped to make £100,000 profit (i.e. selling price minus construction costs but ignoring the land price) on each of the other seventy unaffordable units = £7 million profit. The amount he paid for the land was a large chunk of this £7 million, call it £5 million, leaving £2 million normal builder's profit.

2. In 2009, selling prices had fallen. The developer managed to get the affordable quota reduced to zero by submitting a new viability assessment...

3. The developer's logic was this: the profit per unaffordable unit has fallen from £100,000 to £70,000, so to make my normal builder's profit and recover the £5 million I paid for the land, I have to be allowed to sell all 100 units for the new (lower) unaffordable price.

4. The council gave in, scrapped the affordable quota and told him to get on with it.

5. The developer cheerfully did nothing for a few years until prices had recovered back to pre-2008 levels. So the potential profit was now 100 units x £100,000 = £10 million; £3 million more than he had originally hoped for.

6. The council did not re-impose the affordable quota, even though logic says they should have done.

7. That developer then sold the land to another developer for nearly £3 million more than he had paid for it pre-2008 (to reflect the additional £3 million profit which the next developer can make).

8. Clearly, if the council now tries to re-impose the affordable quota, the second developer can submit his own viability assessment, and say that if he is not allowed to sell all 100 units for the unaffordable price, he will be pushed into losses, bearing in mind the £8 million he paid for the land.

9. As we can see, viability assessments and the price paid for land are a circular argument.

The Planning Inspectorate has finally decided that overpaying for land (or falling prices) are simply not an excuse to wriggle out of the affordable quotas any more.

Islington’s housing boss Cllr Diarmaid Ward said the decision would help stop developers “manipulating” the viability process.

He said: “Islington, like all boroughs in London, faces a significant shortage of affordable homes. A viability process in planning that allows developers to rely on a flawed approach to market value that delivers little or no affordable housing makes this problem worse, and means developers are not making a fair contribution to the community.

“The decision sends a strong signal that developers need to take into account planning policy requirements when bidding for land, and that they cannot overbid and seek to recover this money later through lower levels of affordable housing.”
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* On a very small scale, I don't think it has much impact and normal supply-demand rules apply, whereby selling prices are dictated by the incomes of potential purchasers. A developer would normally sell all finished units for the same price - based on the average incomes of all purchasers (price differentiation is nigh impossible).

If some units have to be sold for a lower price (and a much lower profit), then that takes the lower-earners out of the market. The average income of the remaining purchasers is therefore higher, so the unaffordable units can be sold for a higher price and the overall average selling price is not wildly different.

It is however a beggar-my-neighbour situation. An individual developer is always better off he can wangle a lower affordable quota that other developers in the same geographical area. Taking all developers in that area together, it doesn't make much difference.

Royal Mail's Guaranteed Next Day Taking The Piss Service

Yet again, I have fallen victim to this scam, which will no doubt befall thousands of other people today.

It was a low value item (rear Mazda badge for a fiver) which I need sharpish, and as I have to take today off work anyway, I paid the £7.45 for "Guaranteed next day delivery" i.e. today.

It is a small parcel, so it would have fitted through the letter box, and just in case it doesn't, there's a big sign at the side of our front porch that is not visible from the pavement saying "Please leave parcels here", which other delivery services take literally.

Not the fucking Royal Mail, oh no, they wait until your back is turned for two seconds, sprint up to the front door and instead of knocking or ringing, shove a card through saying "Sorry we missed you, hope you don't mind taking another hour off tomorrow morning to drive to the sorting office and pick it up yourself!"

Apparently they wanted me to sign for it. So this is the Trade Misdescription from Hell. I didn't pay extra to be messed about like this, I paid extra for "next day delivery", which in the ordinary meaning of the words means, er, today.

If you compare the Royal Mail's shitty behaviour with the competing private delivery companies who apply common sense, you can only assume this arrogance is a hangover from the days when there was a state monopoly on parcel delivery and they could pretty much do what they wanted.

They did this to our neighbours recently. Even more bizarrely, their postcard said that the parcel was at house number 99. There is no house number 99 on our road.

Sensible suggestions v government blah blah waffle

From the BBC:

Brexit should not overshadow plans to boost growth, a business lobby group conference will be told on Thursday. The biggest challenges facing businesses in the UK are to do with "fundamentals" rather than Brexit, the British Chambers of Commerce says.

"Government can do more than one thing at once," Adam Marshall, the director general of the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) told BBC 5 live's Wake Up To Money...

Go on, and what sort of stuff does he say that businesses would like to see?

"The best possible Brexit deal will not matter to the UK's competitiveness if the roads remain potholed and congested, if you can't get mobile phone coverage around the UK, if business broadband is poor and companies can't get the people they need because the training system isn't working to deliver for them."

The BCC will call on the government to fund repairs on local roads, improve the capacity of railways and airports, build more houses, get rid of of mobile phone "not-spots", make the apprenticeship system stable and come up with a clear and easy-to-use immigration system.

Those all seem like eminently fair and sensible things that will benefit everybody, not just 'businesses'. And you can quantify them all to some extent, achieved/not achieved.

How does the government respond?

A Department for Business, Energy and Industry Strategy spokesperson said: "The government's commitment to boosting the productivity and earning power of people and places across the UK remains steadfast. Through our industrial strategy, we are building a Britain fit for the future, with a plan to help businesses create better, higher-paying jobs in every part of the UK."

It said its £1.7bn Transforming Cities Fund will "address weaknesses in city transport systems while improving connectivity, reducing congestion and introducing new mobility services and technology". The spokesperson added that the government had committed to raising research and development investment to 2.4% of GDP by 2027 "ensuring our world-class research and innovation base continues to thrive".

WTF does any of that mean? How will we be able to judge afterwards whether the government achieved these things or not?

Things which everybody already knew but are presented as news.

From the BBC:

Mothers in part-time jobs are being hit by a "pay penalty" and are often not given pay rises linked to experience, a new study has suggested.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies report found by the time a couple's first child is aged 20, many mothers earn nearly a third less than the fathers. A key factor was women working part-time in motherhood, the report said.

A gender pay gap between graduates has not improved since 1993, despite gaps narrowing for non-graduates, it added.

The original headline and article was much less nuanced and just wailed on about the 'gender pay gap' and highlighted that the 'gender pay gap' was larger for graduates than non-graduates.

Happily enough, somebody then sat down and actually read the report and did a more accurate write up to explain it's a 'mothers pay gap' and how it arises. The point about graduates is that their salaries tend to increase with seniority much more steeply than for non-graduate jobs, so hitting the pause button on pay rises by going part-time will lead to a bigger gap between mothers and everybody else.

Conversely, seeing as so few jobs require much physical strength*, any natural advantage that men used to have is being eroded. (*Call me a chauvinist, but how many female rubbish collectors do you see?) So we'd expect the 'gender pay gap' at the lower end to flatten of its own accord.

On the subject of graduates, also from the BBC:

Many graduates receive "paltry returns" for their degrees despite racking up £50,000 in debt, says the chairman of the Education Select Committee.

Robert Halfon will say in a speech on Monday, that between a fifth and a third of graduates take non-graduate jobs, and that any extra returns for having a degree "vary wildly". He will also suggest that too many people are studying academic degrees.

University leaders maintain that a degree remains an excellent investment.

Well duh. There are only so many jobs that really need graduates (precious few, if you ask me). If more people are doing degrees than there are graduate jobs, clearly, for the excess, the whole exercise is pointless, purely in career terms (good fun though). People were saying this twenty years ago when Tony Blair went mad and decided half of school leavers 'should' go to university.

And university leaders would say that, wouldn't they?

Reader's Letter Of The Day

From The Metro:

Regarding the axing of the £200 million London Garden Bridge [MetroTalk, Wed]. We have lots of bridges. Stick some of those giant plant pots on them and, hey presto, you have a Garden Bridge* at a fraction of the cost.

Elle, London.

Should read "several Garden Bridges", but the point stands.

Peter Lilley, still on top form

Emailed in by MBK, from ConHome:

£350 million per week is the gross contribution that Britain pays the EU before netting off the Thatcher rebate and the money that the EU pays back to British farmers, regions, and so on. The Office of Budget Responsibility puts the net figure at £200 million per week, which it assumes will be used to fund increased public spending.

Apparently, Vote Leave organisers deliberately quoted the gross figure to provoke controversy, and in the hope that the Remainers would respond by saying: “the true net figure is only £200 million per week”. They calculated that the public would be incensed that anyone can be indifferent to paying over such large amounts – whether the true figure is £350 or £200 million.

Unfortunately for the Leave campaign, most Remainers did not fall for that. They denounced ad nauseam the £350 million as a “lie”, but wisely did not cite the true net figure at all, instead implying or asserting that it was negligible, if not zero...

Belief that the referendum was won by a single big lie clearly provides solace to the losers. It excuses their defeat, while enabling them to feel morally and intellectually superior to the gullible and ignorant majority.

If the issue were just about scrupulous use of figures I would have sympathy for the Remainers. The Leave campaigners’ justification for using the gross figure – that when asked how much they earn people usually give the gross amount, not the net figure after tax – is valid but unconvincing.

For my part, I invariably used the net figure of £200 million per week in debates, articles and leaflets throughout the campaign. I did not meet anyone who, on learning that the net figure was “only” £200 million not £350 million per week, decided not to vote Leave!

But, in virtually every referendum debate, my Remain opponents asserted, in all sincerity – because that was what they had been lead to believe - that the “true” net figure was negligible or zero.

He only pops up once every few years, but it's usually good stuff.

Outbreak of common sense at the TPA!

Wonders never cease!

From City AM:

The TaxPayers' Alliance has suggested that business rates are a “bad tax” and could be replaced altogether.

The campaign group proposed several reforms to the current system including automating revaluations annually to avoid so-called “cliff edges” when business rates suddenly jump...

The TaxPayers' Alliance said it was time to review the entire system, and to consider replacing it completely with a land value tax.

Correct. If you strip out the bad bits from Business Rates, SDLT, Council Tax and so on, what you are left with is Land Value Tax.

Joined up government.

1. Although Stamp Duty Land Tax is a tax on land values, it is not Land Value Tax because it is only triggered when somebody does something positive and is not an annual tax. It is therefore a bad tax.

2. The government's subsidy for land values, Help to Buy, is a very bad subsidy, firstly because it is a subsidy, and secondly because it is a subsidy to the main thing the government should be taxing i.e. land values.

So we have two bad things, which actually cancel out. We could get rid of both.

Let's look at one individual purchaser:

a) Buys a new build for £400,000 (approximately double the UK average excl. London).

b) Gets a Help To Buy loan of 20% of the price = £80,000

c) Pays SDLT of £10,000 up front.

d) That loan is interest free for five years, so the notional interest saving @ 2.5% per year = £2,000 x 5 years = £10,000.

He wins £10,000 on the Help To Buy swing and loses £10,000 on the SDLT roundabout.

This works out slightly 'progressive' relative to house prices/land values (or sellers thereof), i.e. at prices below £400,000, the subsidy is worth more than the tax and vice versa.

The Tories don't like 'progressive', of course, so they introduced a special Help To Buy for London, where the interest free loan can be 40% of the price paid. Helicopter money for people selling land in London! The break even point for that works out at £500,000, which is approximately the average price paid for a home in London.

Outbreak of common sense at the London Assembly.

From City AM:

Scrap council tax and business rates and replace them with a land value tax to encourage development, says London Assembly member

London’s housing shortage could be partially alleviated by replacing business rates and council tax with a tax on the value of land, a member of the London Assembly has argued today in a new report.

The tax changes could lead to the release of nearly 2,000 hectares of land for development, which would provide enough space for 275,000 new homes in the capital, according to the research from Tom Copley. The role of the London Assembly is to ensure the Mayor delivers on their promises.

It's City AM so they are wilfully misreporting as per usual. The report clearly stated that Stamp Duty Land Tax would have to go as well. Things in London are so skewed that SDLT on residential sales raises as much Council Tax, and SDLT is arguably a worse tax. Being City AM, they round off their article with two tired old KLNs, "What about valuations and how do we find out who owns what?". Duh. LVT is just Council Tax or Business Rates with more accurate valuations.

Disappointingly, they didn't adopt all of what I submitted, so they don't propose getting rid of section 106 agreements and the Community Infrastructure Levy, both of which discourage new construction (this is clearly something which the London Assembly has the power to do), let alone getting rid of Inheritance Tax and the TV licence fee (which are the obvious next steps but would require some devolution of powers or back room deals).