Mr Cameron yesterday claimed that the alternative was to “put up taxes”. He told Sky News: “We have a choice here. If we don’t collect taxes properly and make sure people pay their taxes properly we look at the problems of having to raise tax rates. I don’t want to do that, so I support the changes the Chancellor set out in the Budget which is to really say that not paying your taxes is not acceptable.
“It is very clear that they can only do this if there is a debt of over £1,000, they can only do it if there’s £5,000 or more in the account after this has been completed. The general principle – do we want to pursue every avenue of making people pay their taxes they are meant to pay before we put up taxes, because that’s the alternative – absolutely, yes we do.”
No, you don’t have to. Currently all HMRC has to do is toddle along to a magistrate and they can get an order allowing them to take such cash. The errant taxpayer being charged the costs of gaining such an order of course.
That’s a perfectly reasonable method of collecting the tax due. Allowing the State to simply dip into an account without a court order is such a vile breach of civil liberties that you should be ashamed of even thinking about enacting it.
The next time I’m suffering from some vile intestinal complaint I shall make sure not to wash for a few days: to prepare for your puckering up to kiss my freckled arse over this.
Damn, what’s the point of having conservatives is they pull shit like this?
“Freckled hairy arse? Where’s the selfie as proof? And Cameron is not a Conservative, he’s a false-flag social democrat.
But the premise is in any case incorrect. The amount collected in this manner will be trivial and consequentially the tax increase to compensate for not collecting it would be imperceptible, maybe a penny on twenty Bensons. Here’s your penny, now sod off.
…. unless it becomes highly speculative and you have to take action to get your money back.
given the staggering competence that HMRC exhibits, I suspect that wise people will park most of their money on the continong and just have a 5k pin money account in the UK.
I reckon that French banks offering GBP-denominated internet-based savings accounts would do a roaring trade.
I only interact with HMRC once a year, to make voluntary NI class 3 contributions from abroad. Every time they send me “how to pay” instructions it indicates how to pay by cheque, which is less than useful, and do not provide IBAN and BIC numbers, like it’s 1985 or something.
Furthermore, and this is priceless, they applied my payment last year to the wrong year. Now given that voluntary class 3 is paid in arrears, I made a correctly indicated payment in 2013 for the 2012/13 UK tax year. Which they applied IN ADVANCE for the 13/14 tax year. So then they send me a request for paying about 15 or 20 quid for the 13/14 year, this being the difference between the amount for 12/13 and the current year.
I shall now proceed to sit and wait for HMRC to drain thousands of people’s accounts in error based on the incorrect tax code that everyone seems to have.
“Damn, what’s the point of having conservatives is they pull shit like this?”
You’ve nailed about 10% of UKIP’s support. All those people who look at them and go “no, you’re supposed to fucking oppose this” and look at Farage and see someone who they’d rather give a chance.
It will go as all things like these do.
First it will “only be used in rare cases ”
Then it “won’t be raising as much as anticipated ”
Then only “amounts of £800 or more, leaving £4,000”
Rinse and repeat…
£600 & £3,000
£400 & £2,000
Etc
Eventually it will just be whatever we feel like, whenever we bloody well feel like.
Until the revolution comes and we put them against the wall.
Ritchie seems to be very quiet on this one. A dream come true for people like him.
What KR Lohse said.
Same here in Spain. All populist, pandering to the voter who still votes, I’ll give you what you want….. Couldn’t fit a ciggie paper between them. Not even in abortion where the debate is really only until what date.
The ‘safeguards’ will slowly disappear and it won’t even need an Act of Parliament to do it, just some sort of ‘administrative order’ signed by a Minister when everyone is on holiday.
And no, Cameron isn’t a Conservative, not in any definition of the word. This proposal doesn’t even come close to passing the “sniff test” for anyone calling themselves a Conservative.
Wanker.
David Cameron is someone who gives credibility to Icke’s idea that world leaders are space lizards in mansuits.
There’s only one argument I can think of in support of this measure: Richard Murphy doesn’t like it!
“There’s only one argument I can think of in support of this measure: Richard Murphy doesn’t like it!”
A stopped clock reads correctly twice a day.
@ Paul
Murphy is opposed to it, and explicitly said so when it was announced.
Yes, that’s right, it’s such an abuse of civil liberties and due process that even the man who would rewrite the tax code so that every transaction could be voided if someone he liked didn’t think it was ‘fair’, thinks this goes too far.
A natural extension of this approach has already been suggested, that is for your employer to hand over gross salary to HMRC who then take what they want and hand the rest over to you, see this Telegraph article from 2010.
This sort of thing already happens in the US:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-f-will-the-heavy-hand-of-the-irs/2014/04/30/7a56ca9e-cfc5-11e3-a6b1-45c4dffb85a6_story.html
I’ll agree to it as long as as HMRC agree that every deduction later found to be illegitimate is deducted from the HMRC officers’ pension.
I’m an expat but i keep all my savings in the UK… not anymore. Each year I file a tax return saying I don’t owe them diddly but all it’s gonna take is some jobsworth who has spent too much time on murphy’s website to decide I owe them, send me 4 letters that inevitably get lost in the Chinese post and then rape my savings account. My capital flight to Hong Kong starts asap.
They’re all commies now.
The way HMRC perform, Ritchie’s tax gap will become positive.
Anecdotal evidence, but a recently retired teacher taxed at 40% on her £9,000 pension – her sole income.
Or the recently bereaved lady of 83 who has paid nearly £5,000 too much tax is told she has to register online as self-employed before she can get a tax refund?
Like all recent laws, they wouldn’t be so bad if they cut both ways. If I could merely think that an MP’s expenses were excessive,then transfer a compensating amount from his account to a Citizens’ Fund. well fine.
Or if I could identify a bit of waste – say, the odd billion or two by Osborne or Cameron – and hoik 10% out of their personal fortunes into the Fund, I wouldn’t mind.
But I don’t suppose it will be like that.
Abso-fucking-lutely Dongguan John. Closed my UK bank account and shipped all funds out yesterday.
My UK account holds a small amount for sheer convenience of transferring money to people in the UK without incurring any fees each time.
There is no way I would even think of moving any reasonable sum to a UK bank now.
I took over a company changed the name and company reg no and this month the inland revenue halved all employees code numbers and took double tax because they thought they were working for two companies. Pratts of the first order, Here is a second arse to kiss much prettier than Tims
Ironman – still think you need to vote Conlabour to keep the Labservatives out?
I am increasingly struggling to believe that Cameron can be so politically inept. Talking to a number of people over the last day or so, there is absolutely zero support for this.
He is less than two weeks away from elections; it is almost as if he wants the bad news to be as bad as it possibly can be?
And then, after consultation, this will come into force in April 2015! Expect a lot more “noise”..
I genuinely can’t see that the Conservatives have a cat in hell’s chance of winning in 2015 with these guys at the helm; which basically means there should be everything to play for.
What Cameron is basically saying is:
“Let us rob other people at will, so we don’t have to rob you quite as much”.
The rub being, there is no “other people”, or, if there were, there will not be for long. Cameron is just asking people if he can rob them at will, but in a way as to try and hide the fact.
He is a wretched monster, proof you can hardly get a fag-paper before him and the Socialists where it matter.
Perhaps it should be called the King John tax?
@Paul Coombes
Quite. My first thought on hearing of this proposal was that it was a Trojan horse for the “We’ll take your pay check and give you an allowance” scheme you point out.
Nah, call it the Fagin tax, and get Cameron to do a song and dance number with his little elves and sprites from HMRC:
You see, Oliver…
[sung] In this life, one thing counts
In the bank, large amounts
I’m afraid these don’t grow on trees,
You’ve got to pick-a-pocket or two
You’ve got to pick-a-pocket or two, boys,
You’ve got to pick-a-pocket or two.
Political Conservatism has never been much of a thing in Britain. In the US, the movement is based on some actual political principles. In the UK, the Conservatives are just the party for authoritarians who think they should be running the country because they come from the right social background — as opposed to Labour, who are authoritarians who think they should be running the country because they come from the right ideological background.
Which, of course, is why to vote UKIP.
I haven’t had a bank account in the UK for fifteen years. I don’t live there, I don’t make any money there and I certainly don’t pay any taxes there. I’m just surprised that it’s only Murphy that has proposed the vile American policy of taxing all its citizens, no matter where they be located. I wouldn’t be surprised if the shiny-faced spiv floats that idea next, and I bet the child Miliband would think it a good idea too.