DEBATE: With just 16 days to go until Brexit, is there any point to the Spring Statement? March 13, 2019 With just 16 days to go until Brexit, is there any point to the Spring Statement? Yael Selfin, chief economist at KPMG, says YES. While Brexit is likely to dominate minds again this week, and continue to bring a fog of uncertainty over the outlook for the UK economy, the Spring Statement is still important. [...]
The left should listen up: Tax reform is a progressive cause March 13, 2019 In 2012, the columnist Mary Dejevsky wrote a piece for the Independent arguing that the centre-left should advocate a flat tax. It was in response to the publication of the Single Income Tax, the final report of the 2020 Tax Commission, convened by the TaxPayers’ Alliance (TPA) and the Institute of Directors, and chaired by former [...]
EU drops plans for digital tax as pressure builds for global reform March 12, 2019 The EU has scrapped plans to roll out a digital tax on tech giants due to opposition from several member states. Romanian finance minister Eugen Teodorovici today told representatives of EU governments the plan has been axed as no agreement could be reached after months of talks, Reuters reported. Read more: EU digital tax could [...]
The Conservative party needs to rediscover its economic way March 12, 2019 For most people, the Conservative’s 2015 “long-term economic plan” is now a distant memory. But as someone who was deeply immersed in that election campaign, I still sometimes wake up at night reciting its contents. Though much mocked for its repetition, the plan was more than just a catchphrase. From deficit reduction and tax cuts [...]
Deal or no deal, let’s make the UK the most attractive place for business March 12, 2019 What happens if there’s no Brexit deal? Over the past year, we’ve had various answers to this question – most ranging from the alarming to the apocalyptic. But while we’ve heard an awful lot about the problems, we haven’t heard much about solutions. That’s why our think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies, has just [...]
AI’s success story still has a few missing chapters March 11, 2019 This article is not written by robots – we promise – but apparently the day when they could be is already upon us. We have just finished reading about the GPT-2 text generator which, according to this Spectator piece, “not only does text analysis and augmentation, but generates highly sophisticated content”. “It can effectively write articles,” [...]
The UK’s competition policy must be fit for a world of tech giants and hidden cartels March 11, 2019 Competition is the oxygen of the capitalist system. From Adam Smith on, there have been warnings of the threats to economic health if competition is restricted by would-be monopolists or cartels. In the UK, the system is policed by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). It rarely hits the headlines except for occasional controversial cases like [...]
HMRC launches first investigations using new corporate money laundering powers March 10, 2019 HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) has launched its first criminal investigations under a new money laundering offence, freedom of information requests reveal. The tax authority is investigating a handful of cases under the corporate criminal offence of failure to prevent the facilitation of UK tax evasion which was introduced in the Criminal Finances Act 2017 [...]
Billions of pounds available by backing Theresa May’s deal, says Philip Hammond March 9, 2019 Chancellor of the exchequer Philip Hammond has said getting behind Theresa May's Brexit deal would free up billions of pounds in extra public spending or tax cuts. Hammond also dismissed the importance being placed on the Irish backstop, which could force the UK into an EU customs union in order to avoid a hard Irish border, claiming they are "not [...]
Should the rich be taxed more? March 8, 2019 | City Talk Compared with other developed countries, the UK has a very high level of income inequality, something which many of us feel uncomfortable about. According to the Equality Trust, UK households in the bottom 10 per cent of the population have, on average, a disposable (or net) income of £9,644, with the top 10 per cent [...]
