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I'm an accountant. I know what NIC is. It might not occur to you that Employer's National Insurance is National Insurance, but it does to me. If they wanted to be clear that they only referred to Employer's National Insurance, they could have been,. Using the excuse that it was hidden in the...

What they said was that they would not increase NIC, and they said it both verbally and in their manifesto. The sentence in the manifesto was "Labour will not increase taxes on working people, which is why we will not increase National Insurance, the basic, higher, or additional rates of Income...

They promised in the manifesto not to raise National Insurance, and they promised in the campaign not to touch IHT for farmers. They didn't promise anything about Winter Fuel allowance so far as I know, but considering the rumpus they have been making for years about the Tories' plans (real or...

The MPs are working on the assumption that all the wealthy people connected with this country, even the ones like the Hinduja family and Jim Ratcliffe who are resident overseas for tax purposes, will happily pay the 2% on their worldwide assets. I wonder if that assumption is justified...

That's another pet hate of mine. 200 pupils in a year? Why? Why the insistence that schools must be enormous, far too big for any of the staff to know more than a fraction of the pupils? Why not smaller schools - instead of 1,000 or 2,000 pupils in a school, make it 200 or 300 and give...

We'd be best off with a great variety of schools. Big schools, small ones, educational sausage factories, technical schools, acadamies, private schools, special schools, and yes, even comprehensive schools. Starting out with the principle that all children should have the same education, is...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/11/04/labour-councils-academy-schools-education/ https://schoolsweek.co.uk/labour-plans-to-curtail-academy-freedoms-in-schools-bill-amendment/ And we can at least argue that academies are no worse, because if they were they would be closing. If...

They're going after the state schools as well. There appears to be strong support for closing academies, for the same reason as they closed grammar schools - because they think it's better that everyone's education is equally poor rather than some have poor education and some have good...

If there are schools with fewer pupils and smaller class sizes and still people don't want to go to them, then it suggests that making children go to them is bad news. "This school is appalling, let's expand it" is not my recipe for success.

I don't disagree the principle about fake investment companies in Jersey. I just disagree that your solution could be practical, especially to the degree that you are talking about. Companies cannot practically be made responsible for the ultimate beneficial ownership of their shares. If...

But it's too broad a brush. If UK companies can't have foreign ownership then companies like HSBC and Shell and Starbucks will have to cease operations in the UK, or else do it entirely as an overseas company thus (presumably) dodging corporation tax altogether.

UK property is now taxed under UK tax law wherever the owner may be based. As for ownership of shares, the practical result of banning UK companies from having indeterminate foreign owners would be that any company that wanted to go public, would do it on someone else's stock exchange. Quite...

The bigger problem with most public sector pensions (obviously not the Local Government one) is that they aren't funded at all. There is no pension fund for the NHS, for example. They pay this year's pensioners out of the current staff's contributions, and the annual deficit is because the...

Are there any official statistics about how many of these cross-Channel immigrants are genuine asylum seekers desperate to get away from France, and how many are would-be economic migrants who can't get in legally? If there aren't, it's inevitable that the two will be conflated. However, let...

I don't see how there is a lack of legal asylum routes, with about 700,000 legal immigrants in each of the last two years. The reason these asylum seekers are coming indirectly from long distances but more directly from France, is because as individuals they believe they would not be allowed...

Presumably Lammy is suggesting that Starmer wears his wife's clothes?

You only get child benefit removed if you want it removed. If you have too much income to be entitled to child benefit, you can still receive it anyway and pay it back on the end of year tax return. It shouldn't be forcibly taken off you. If you want to means test, then the "easy" way is to...

Mind you, last year there was a £300 bonus for all so the amount they will lose this year is £500 - £600 per household. The quick and easy way to save a bit of money without the furore would have been to pay it as they do now but make it taxable. Pensioners at basic rate would pay 20%, higher...