Do they think we are stupid?

 The rumour mill is that Rachel is considering introducing National Insurance on rental income. How ironic! For as long as I can remember, the government and HMRC stance is that rental income is not earned income and therefore it has consequences in how it is taxed and treated. For example you can't use rental income to make pension contributions (that can only be from earned income).   Also unearned income bubbles to the top of the tax stack (order of taxation) so is most likely to treated at the highest level of income tax.  By making rental income (hopefully profits rather than income) subject to national insurance it will almost certainly have unintended consequences.  Firstly if you are past State Pension age you dont pay National Insurance. it would therefore open up the government to litigation if they make rental income subject to National Insurance for OAPs.  I can just see the negative headlines ! It is estimated that there are 1 Million Buy to Le...

 Why is energy in the UK so expensive?  It's currently contributing to the de-industrialisation of the UK economy and the demise of pubs.  Our energy is even more expensive than broken Germany. Part of the reason is the hidden stealth taxes in the form of the Green Levy. 16% of electric bills and 5.5% of gas bills.  This money is given to companies like Siemens to subsidise wind turbine construction. The argument currently goes that renewable energy is cheaper than non renewable yet our bills are higher than pretty much anywhere in the world. This high energy price means chemical plants, steel plants, data centres are not economic if they are located in Britain.   Pubs and restaurants are closing due to a combination of high energy prices and high labour costs. Yet consumers are subsiding renewables through the Green Levy. As renewable output increases it means that the business case for energy which provides consistent output (base load) eg nuclear becomes...

 Rumours are rife that Rachel plans to introduce Capital Gains Tax on the sale of your home.   Currently there is Private Residence Relief which means your home is exempt from Capital Gains Tax however if that changed would it be legal? Currently people move home every 23 years on average.  In my youth I moved home probably every year but once kids came along that all changed.  I have lived in my current home for 25 years and have no plans to move (other than to flee high tax Britain). My wife's parents have lived in their home for 60 years. So their house would be subject to pretty much 100% capital gains.... So if Rachel introduces the tax in 2025, that means my home, which has appreciated significantly in value over the last 25 years, could be subject to an eye watering tax bill.  Capital Gains Tax no longer has indexation relief (allowance for inflation) so tax would be liable on the whole value of the gain (roughly 80% of the property). However the sta...

 I was surprised to read that Hackney council had "seized" (repossessed) seven properties. No Section 21. No Section 8. They simply turned up and seized the properties back. No court warrant - nothing. The grounds for seizing them was that the tenants were fraudsters. Now I've had a fraudulent tenant in the past.  I couldn't simply seize the property.  My fraudulent tenant even managed to get legal aid via Shelter to fight me and run up a huge legal bill. If this situation happened to me again I would make sure criminal proceedings were brought against the tenant for fraud. Fraud is a criminal act.  For example if the tenant makes up disrepair claims , then make in clear in the legal documentation that this is fraudulent. You can then bring CRIMINAL proceedings. Shelter encourage the tenants they are representing to stray from the truth - basically they are encouraging fraud. I have evidence of this as the tenant in question I evicted left all the Shelter paperwork -...

400 pubs closed in England and Wales in 2024.  There are still about 39,000 pubs but 2025 is set to see more than 400 more close their doors forever.  The British pub is a dying institution. Why are so many pubs closing? Very simply ....taxes, high labour costs (due to employment taxes) and energy prices. Well Sweden is well known for being expensive for beer yet taxation in the UK is higher than Sweden!  Swedish taxes are 48.2% yet Britain is 54.2% for draught beer. Contrast that with Spain which is just 4.8%. Let's start with a pint of beer.  Let's say it's £6 per pint. Firstly there's VAT at 20% on a £6 pint. So £1 goes to Rachel. Next there's alcohol duty.  Some good news here. It was 61p but has been reduced since Feb 25 to 48p.  Yes you are paying VAT on the tax..... Although it's not all good news.  Alcohol duty is linked to RPI so will increase again on the 1st Feb 2026. RPI is currently 4.4% and the Bank of England expects inflation to rise hi...

Having just watched a rather aggressive and heated debate on GB News about non UK nationals claiming benefits based on the latest ONS and DWP data, I thought I would fact check against the ONS data. The debate was between Robert Bates (Research Director for the Centre For Migration Control) and  Jonathan Portes (Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the School of Politics & Economics of King's College, London).  Jonathan Portes was of the opinion that the data said foreign nationals were less likely to claim benefits than British citizens whereas Roberts Bates interpreted the data in the complete opposite manner. Here's the facts 1.298  Million foreign nationals are claiming Universal Credit  (approx £6.23 BILLION per year). Foreign nationals accounted for 21.5% of unemployed working age individuals between Jan and March 2025.   524,598 were receiving in-work Universal Credit (the definition of in-work is that they were working less than 16 hours ...

 It's clear the current Labour government have absolutely no idea about consequences of actions. One of the few rules of life I have learnt is that "Measurement drives behaviour". Taxation is MEASUREMENT. People are not stupid like politicians think and if you measure them in some new way their behaviour will change.  Pure Schrodinger's cat stuff. This is the foundation of ecomonics which is a social science. So Rachel quietly changed the rules on pensions last Autumn. Pension pots were subject to taxation before but at the marginal rate of the beneficiary but were outside of the scope of inheritance tax. The government was getting their tax anyway - just in the future. From 6th April 2027 pension pots will be part of your estate and therefore subject to inheritance tax and beneficiary taxation. This has lead to some crazy consequences. If you died 1 day before your 75th birthday and you had assets of £0.5M eg a house and your pension on top of these assets - let'...

 The state of UK government finances is definitely cause-for-concern. Sadly Labour was elected.  They are making the gaps wider whereas what we need like a Milei like character with a chainsaw to undo decades of damage done by moronic politicians. The numbers speak for themselves. GDP is £2.6 TRILLION Tax income is 35% of GDP (although some data suggests it's as little as 31%). Government expenditure is 45% of GDP So there's a shortfall of  £260 BILLION each year. So successive governments have been hitting the credit card and racked up a colossal £2.7 TRILLION in debt. That's around 103% of GDP. The interest rate on this debt is 5.5% so we are currently spending £148 BILLION in interest payments each year servicing the debt.  That's 16% of tax receipts are spent on servicing the debt. The wasteful and inefficient NHS costs £189 BILLION so that's nearly as much as the NHS costs. So let's look into the future.  Let's ignore inflation, ageing population, incre...