Glastonbury founder could avoid £80m in inheritance tax
The festival could be worth £400m and Sir Michael Eavis, its founder, has moved most of his financial interest to his daughter and a family trust
But, but, it’s charitable!
Financial experts suggested that Eavis may have decided to transfer the assets after tax advisers told him that HM Revenue & Customs would not accept a valuation of his companies for IHT purposes based upon the festival having some “quasi-charitable position”. While Glastonbury operates with a strong charitable ethos — last year it gave more than £5.9 million to good causes — it remains a private company and is not a charity, so HMRC is likely to value it as such when considering an IHT bill.
Yes, but being able to distribute £9.5 million a year to your favourite causes is wealth. So, it should be taxed as wealth, right?
Wait, this guy?
Beyoncé might be headlining, but Glastonbury is set to become a “sounding board of political discontent” this week, according to the founder of the Somerset festival, who believes public anger against the government spending cuts is reviving a sense of the event’s political roots.
Michael Eavis, who launched the first Glastonbury festival 41 years ago and recently lamented the appearance of the Wombles in this year’s line-up, said that in future years – once the effects of the cuts are fully felt – increased public anger could reverse what he sees as a disappointing trend of apathy:
“I think it [the festival] could well become more political. We’ve always been a sounding board for lots of unrest… If people are really faced with dire circumstances, that will get them angry and motivated, and that’s the way we’re heading at the moment.
“It [politics] gives Glastonbury soul and gives it back its purpose. As a Methodist, I place these values very highly, and recently I’ve been lamenting a bit of a decline. Tickets are good value, but not everyone can afford them. I hate to admit it, but the political platform has been reducing. The overriding reason people come now is to have a good time.”
To be fair, I realised he was a prick as soon as I noticed he has a knighthood and a CBE. It’s like the British Lion mark for wankers. Speaking of wankers,
Art Uncut, a branch of the anti-tax avoidance campaign UK Uncut, says it intends to target Bono, lead singer of U2, who are the festival’s Friday night headliners. The protesters will highlight the band’s 2006 decision to move their tax affairs from their native Ireland to the Netherlands. Art Uncut plans a series of actions at Glastonbury, although it says it will stop short of disrupting the set.
Meanwhile, other new-wave campaigning groups – including Climate Camp, 38 Degrees and False Economy – are also expected to attend the festival. Political comedian Mark Thomas will be headlining on the cabaret stage and a “free university” will be set up in a green space to discuss books and political writing.
If you were forced to choose between watching Mark Thomas’ “comedy” routine for an hour and sawing off your own foot with a rusty Swiss Army Knife and no anaesthetic, which foot would you choose?
Yet again an instance of money (or in this case a platform) reputedly for charity being used for activism. Ought to be banned again. Can you be a methodist and a multi-millionaire? Obviously yes. Is tax avoidance morally correct if you are a nice person?
*sigh*
Trusts pay tax. They pay tax on income and gains and are subject to a charge every 10 years on any increases in value to the sort of things that would be subject to IHT.
The ‘headline’ tax rate for the 10 year charge is 6%. This is based ‘loosely’ on the idea that we have “three score years and ten” in an average lifetime so over a 70 year period, a trust would be subject to a total of 7 x 6% = 42% which is slightly higher than the IHT rate of 40%.
When assets are transferred to a Trust the transferor pays tax.
Unless (and this would also apply to transfers to his daughter, a holdover election is made. This essentially transfers any latent CGT to the recipient.
It is only the misinformed who think that Trusts are some magic way of not having to pay tax.
Glastonbury is set to become a “sounding board of political discontent” this week, according to the founder of the Somerset festival, who believes public anger against the government spending cuts is reviving a sense of the event’s political roots.
Spending cuts? Dear God.
Glastonbury’s nascence was with 60’s drug addled hippies & unsurprisingly, little’s changed.
I’m trying to work out if I went to the first one or the second. Or maybe both. We’d done the Isle of Wight (Dylan) , Reading (Led Zep) & Weeley (nr Clacton- God knows who performed) so it’d would have been just another one. The first seems likely because Bolan was a mate of the Yank geezer lived upstairs, so that’s how we knew it was on. But maybe we did the both. The line “If you remember the 60s you probably weren’t there” applies equally to the early 70s. You went to these things to sit in a field & get wrecked. Who performed was largely irrelevant. You likely didn’t hear them because the sound systems were atrocious. The mud was a later innovation. The weather gods smiled more brightly on us, in those days. Maybe the sacrifice of virgins placated them. Where would you have found a virgin after 1980?
While Iran and Russia are contemplating where in Britain should be visited by a swarm of drones, may I recommend “Glasto”?
P.S. My AI spell checker suggested “Glasgow”, also worth considering.
Interested – it’s vintage twattery from 2011, back when the Tories were pretending to do an austerity.
Dearieme – I doubt Iran’s government is contemplating much more than picking up its own teeth atm. They really wanted that ceasefire, but it looks like the Likudniks want to continue the war.
They must have been raging when Trump took the nuclear excuse off the table.
bis,
To the best of my knowledge, Led Zeppelin didn’t play Reading, do you mean Knebworth?That was 79 and I still have the program somewhere.
The copper on the gate spotted us for sqaddies straightaway, not just the haircuts, we were carrying lots of beer and as he pointed out everyone else was carrying drugs.
A guy I know has a business supplying telehandlers for hire, and about now pretty much his entire stock is in there shifting stuff around. A few years ago I was talking to him about Glastonbury, and he told me that for all the eco-bollox they talk, the whole festival is powered by a series of massive gensets, all running 24/7 on diesel. He said they have to tanker the fuel in every day, they get through so much. But they do it in the middle of the night, so its not too obvious…..
“The line “If you remember the 60s you probably weren’t there” applies equally to the early 70s. You went to these things to sit in a field & get wrecked. ”
The last big ‘free festival’ took place just down the road from me, at Watchfield in (now) Oxfordshire, it might have been Berkshire at the time. 1975, so 50 years ago this year. I wonder if the locals will have a party to commemorate?
https://www.ukrockfestivals.com/watchfieldfestival-menu.html
The problem with Glastonbury, musical festivals and even a lot of live music, is that it is becoming a performative activity that follows from the era of it being an actual exciting, cool thing.
Should I expand that? Tours used to be about promoting albums. You played the gig, did some radio about it, it created buzz. I had to look it up but I saw a pretty big artist at the NEC in the mid-80s and the ticket was about the same as an album. They were also often not the safest of things to do. Most girls I know wouldn’t go to a gig without a bloke. Glastonbury in the mid-80s was unsanitary and not particularly safe. Going to Glasto marked you out as above average bravery.
What happened to Glastonbury it that from about the mid-90s, they clamped down on security and made it more pleasant and the BBC arrived, so everyone who wanted the badge of “above average bravery” but without earning it started going. It got safer and safer, more and more expensive, to the point that grebo kids from Swindon couldn’t even afford to go. The average age of someone going to Glastonbury is 49.
Now some people still probably think “above average bravery” about going. But most young people don’t have that point of reference. They know it’s a dad rock thing that it’s about as risky as going to Glyndebourne Opera nowadays.
People are paying £400 to camp, listen to landfill indie, distorted by the wind. And to see a huge band with frazzled vocals because of their singer’s age, on a screen because it’s so far away. I saw Macca one night on TV and people were all “oh, he’s such a legend”. Well, OK, but his voice is fucked. Why would you pay to hear this rather than sticking Band on the Run on? Same with Elton John being Vic Reeves’ Club Singer. Does anyone really like this, or is it purely to tell people they went?
It’ll be like Harley-Davidson which went from cool motorbike that the cool guys own to being bought by people in their 50s because it was a cool motorbike when they were kids to now being a thing that people in their 50s own. And in general, most kids don’t even care about motorbikes.
If I was Emily Eavis I’d flog it off soon, while idiot at a record company will pay for it. It’ll be dead in 20 years.
@Jim
I went to Watchfield. My first and only festival. I mainly remember lots of naked people, and waking up in the middle of the night not knowing where I was and thinking I might have died.
Oh, and we found a fiver by the side of the road when hitching back home. That bought a fair bit of Stella in those far off days.
@BiND
It may have been Bath. This is ’69 not ’79.
That’s the one that had Led Zep.
If every mumbling drunk I’ve met in a Bath pub who said they’d been there had actually been there then it would have been the size of the Isle of Wight, not the rugby pitch….
A friend of mine was at the 1970 IOW festival when Hendrix played.
He said he woke from a self-inflicted, drug-induced semi-coma to hear Hendrix thanking the audience at the end of his set. No problem, he remembers thinking, I’ll see him again.
Three weeks later Hendrix was dead.
The last (and only) “gig” I went to was Destination Docklands in 1988. It was backed with Lunnners who went because some local thing was on, swamping out us fans who’d travelled overnight from 200 miles away. Until very recently, when it finally fell apart, I still had the T-shirt.
“Tours used to be about promoting albums.”
Er, and shagging.
Glasters is brill, notwithstanding that Eavis can sometimes be a bit righteous . Been three times but the only acts I can remember are James doing an excellent turn on the main stage late on (Saturday?) night 1990, and a Japanese guys who just screamed primally, also 1990. I stayed on for few days afterwards, one of those ‘lost socks’ that hovers round that sort of thing. Remember that I hitch hiked back to West Bromwich for the England Germany game, which was 4th July so must have stayed at Glasters for 9 days after the end. Hung out with some Scottish hippies from Dumfries – found they don’t like gypsies, call them ‘dids’ (diddycoy?). Lots of thieving, industrial scale on the Monday after, people just going from tent to tent. Got hired to pick up litter – especially ring pulls – bad for cattle. Found lots of drugs while being paid to clean up. Living was easy in the remains of a very big festival – for firewood we just burnt all the stalls (which were now abandoned). I remember thinking that there were many more than the cited 80,000 tickets and indeed many (self included) did not have a wristband, but nobody seemed to mind – met Eavis himself and he saw I didn’t have one but was cool about it.
Went again about 10 years later and was struck by how English it was, and less without wristbands but still many and the breaching of the perimeter had become a bit ‘edgy’ with professional criminal types digging holes, though we had tickets this time. Can’t remember any of the acts.
Also went to the last Stonehenge Free Festival (1984), and though much smaller than Glasters, that was really properly a really real free festival, like Barter Town, with gentle Wiltshire coppers leaning on the fence but not coming in. Up on the stones on solstice morning with Hawkwind performing live down the hill. It made the centre spread of the Daily Mail and I think I see myself among those crowding round the stones.
I love a fezzie, me.
If you want to get stoned out of your tree, surely there are easier ways than going to a festival and spending the weekend shitting in your own shoe.
Much the same as for Cream gigging the Rainbow, Tim
Of course, since wherever it was drew the same people, sounded much the same, smelt much the same, had the same hustles, the same dreadful toilets, they all effectively blur into the same place at the end of much the same journey.
I stopped going when I had to pay to get in, the sheer cheek of Eavis and Mean Fiddler putting up a proper fence and employing real security guards? Bastards…