Now, where did Wes Streeting get this idea from? And where, come to that, did his estimate of the tax that it might raise come from?
It so happens that the £12 billion figure that he refers to is exactly the sum that I proposed might be raised as a result of the equalisation of income tax and capital gains tax rates in the Taxing Wealth Report.
Might it be that Wes Streeting’s advisers have been reading my work?
It’s from Advani and Summers at CenTax. Shitty, horrible, work but that’s the source.
He is comically egotistical.
I assume sensible people think this would raise about nothing, or a negative amount? Bit early to be taking the imaginary credit.
I saw a news item today that said (I think) HMRC forecast that a 10% rise in higher rate of CGT would significantly *reduce* tax receipts. The only option that would increase tax receipts was a 1% increase in the lower rate of CGT.
I didn’t think it would raise 12 billion North Korean won let alone pounds. Indeed the entire Taxing Wealth Report has been comprehensively debunked numerous times. Strange though as normally I don’t think he’d give Streeting or anyone associated with them the time of day.
ISTR that Dennis Healey – a man of considerably greater intellect than Mr Streeting (and just about anybody else in the Labour government) – said that he never managed to come up with a wealth tax that didn’t end up costing more to implement than it took in tax.
That did not stop the present inmates with the VAT bomb they aimed at public schools.
Tax isn’t really about raising money when you can just borrow it from ‘stupid bond markets’. It’s about punishing people you don’t like and pleasing your own nasty, envious base.
…
That’s because they didn’t have the intelligence of Mr Healey…
It was that fucker Healey who imposed retrospective death duties on my parents’ estates. God rot him. As people used to ask “Is there really such a thing as an EX-communist?”
Here in Oz, Jim Chalmers is drooling at the thought of taxing the old family home when the kids inherit it.
As you point out, they don’t change.
Healey ran out of money, as all Labour chancellors do. And that was with tax rates as high as 98%.
Yes, intelligent and intellectual, with a congratulatory First in Greats; but foolish in politics, joining the Communist Party in 1937(?) – at the time of Stalin’s purges! – and then joining and remaining in the Labour Party.**
He was a clever silly: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19733444/
**I recall asking a Thatcherite don in the 1980s why he had joined the CP in the 1930s. He replied, IIRC: ” Then, I was moved by the poverty around me. Now, I can’t believe how stupid I was!”
Gosh, how did you find one of those?
Plenty around back then…
Was that ever really about raising money?
This would have made him really popular in Labour (the party of the envious) I imagine.
But raising money isn’t the point, it’s entire purpose is punishing people who have assets.
Pro rejoining the EU and for wealth taxes. Clearly marking out the territory where he can pull voters from the Lib Dems and the Green party. He needs to be as anti-Reform as possible to to achieve that so that probably means a highly renewables focused and denial of physics of energy policy will follow. Mad Ed’s job would be safe. How he comes down firmly with a foot on both sides of the fence for immigration issues is the one to watch. Will it bring tears to our eyes or his?
Like the Tories, they’re fighting over the captaincy of a burning ship. If Labour and the Tories were brands, they’re BHS and Woolworths.
You don’t see many of those anymore, do you? Where we are in the ongoing Great British preference cascade: I think Reform have sealed the deal with centre rightish normie voters now. Your Auntie Pat and neighbour Derek feel safe telling people they’re voting Reform. Farmers love em. More work needs to be done for Reform to win outright, the coalition needs to be a little broader.
The Tories and Labour are in British Steel territory – distressed, loss making enterprises now actually owned by the Communist Chinese, but trading on legacy name recognition in the hopes of a bailout. I can’t see a way back for either as national parties of government. They took a terrible beating in Scotland and Wales.
The Greens are way behind Reform, but still making rapid progress to permanently eating a chunk of leftwing, foreign, delusional yooni students votes. They can get much bigger, Polanski is a good salesman and knows exactly what these types want to hear. And he can expect warm coverage, and free air time, from most of the impartial British media.
Restore? We can all do maths. There’s no bandwidth available in the British political spectrum for shouty-right-wing, except at the expense of Reform. It’s very unfortunate that Rupert Lowe, Zia, and Nigel fell out. I still can’t quite wrap my head around three grown men, all well acquainted with professional standards of managing disagreement, getting into such a heated dispute that it ended up with the police being called, and a new Spite Party on the right of British politics. Was alcohol involved? Rupert, Zia and Nigel should do the decent thing, apologise to each other, and bury the hatchet for the greater good of our country, which is in desperate need of saving. I hereby volunteer to broker this peace, and invite all parties concerned to a neutral Frankie and Bennies location. Or maybe Nandos, but I think they’re overpriced.
There’s an argument that Restore helps Reform, because Restore makes Reform the moderate right.
Yes, Reform will lose some voters to Restore, but no longer being the extremists – without having changed their policies or stance – will probably help them attract more voters from the legacy parties.
Hope not Hate helpfully claims that Restore are, you’ll never guess, fascists!
The Spode candidate for Makerfield. Don’t vote for her, or she’ll dress in leather uniforms and hit you with sticks? I suppose?
Gosh, think she’d win if she did.
I think Reform have sealed the deal with centre rightish normie voters now.
Probably and I hope so; but not at all certain, as Reform could yet falter or even implode.
The Tories and Labour are in British Steel territory – distressed, loss making enterprises…
Just as there’s a lot of ruination in a nation, there’s a lot of ruination in the Conservatives and Labour. Their traditions and institutions run deep…
For sure, but I think the ruination of the Tories is past tense. Over 14 years of shredding their own credibility.
In Labour, Continuity Blair brought the electorate a near instantaneous flashback to why they hated and rejected Labour in the mid Aughties in the first place.
The winds of change blow strange, into the face of time.
Streetwise Streeting is tacking shitlib left (Rejoin, tax the rich) because there’s nowhere else for an ambitious Labour politician to go.
The sensible vote already ditched them for Reform, Muslims are lining up behind Gaza candidates. The Greens are eating their “stupid white female with a yooni degree and cats” vote. Labour’s Parliamentary cohort is full of low-IQ woke twats. Streeting can’t turn right, he can only go left in the hopes of securing the rump vote Labour can still sell to – public sector parasites, embittered EUphiles, greedy but gullible people who still believe there’s a greater fool going to pay all the taxes their insane spending demands require.
Streeting might not be a particularly impressive man compared to successful people in the private sector, but compared to the Labour front bench he’s Winston Churchill.
It’s from Advani and Summers at CenTax. Shitty, horrible, work but that’s the source.
But can we be sure they didn’t nick it from Spud and then do some “goal seek” research?
CGT at 24% (mostly) raises £15bn. Raise that to the 45% top income tax rate and, if you refuse to believe in behavioral effects, that becomes 15 x 45/24 = 28. That’s £13bn more.
Knock off a bit because some of them will only be paying at 40% (and because a few of them will only be paying at the basic rate, which would only go up from 17% to 20%), and you get £12bn ish.
It’s therefore impossible to come up with a higher figure than £12bn, unless you claim that people will actually choose to trigger more capital gains for the joy of paying tax at a higher rate. And no-one on the Left is going to be claiming it would raise any less.
So no, it doesn’t have to be stolen from Murphy; it’s just the most basic back-of-a-fag-packet calculation possible.
(sorry, mistype – basic rate would be 18% to 20%)
Not quite – the idea is that the CGT will result from forced sales to meet massive bills for IHT or for re-fire-proofing the castle because last time they used the same team that clad Grenfell Tower or building a new sea wall or… and the higher the rate of CGT the more shares they will have to sell to raise the same net amount.
It’s basically the same sum as if/when my younger son insists that he “needs” to move from his flat into a house the amount I shall have to draw out from my pension fund will increase as the tax rate on withdrawal (probably higher than the rate of tax I saved when paying in but …) increases but based on the nonsensical fiction that the rich are a bottomless pit that Ms Reeves, or Murphy, can mine for cash to dund their extravanganzas.
the idea is that the CGT will result from forced sales to meet massive bills
And who’s going to be buying? Who has the money?
Oh, BlackRock, I suppose. And wgs and chinks.
There’s hardly any CGT on sales to pay inheritance tax, because of the CGT base cost uplift to market value on death.
Unless they’re planning on getting rid of that as well.
(unless you sell assets that you already owned, to pay the CGT on other assets that you’ve just inherited; but that’s not common)
You don’t pay CGT on IHT forced sales, as assets are revalued upon death.
Though indexation is also mentioned along with equalising the rates, which would knock off a bit of the tax revenue. I wonder if anyone has ever looked into whether the change from rates aligned with income by indexation applied to the current system actually increased revenue? It would certainly have simplified the paperwork.
Probably why the weasel words “up to” £12bn are used.
The other wheeze mentioned is if you move assets abroad, that will be deemed a sale for CGT purposes and you have to pay up.
Already done it. Planning to retire next year and got to decide whether to move assets here or join them abroad. If they’re going to more or less double the tax it will probably decide things.