Category Archives: Tax

Privatisation of local government begins – and why it will cost us far too much

Michael Gove: he’s using the few months of government left to the Tories to do as much damage to public services as possible.

Michael Gove has taken another major Tory step towards making public services unaffordable – and his party unelectable.

He has transferred more than £14 million of Middlesbrough Council assets to the Middlesbrough Development Corporation, a private company chaired by Tory Lord Ben Houchen.

So it seems the bankrupting of local councils was a deliberate Tory policy, intended to force the sale or transfer of more public assets into private hands.

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This is problematic on at least three levels:

Firstly, the MDC’s parent organisation, the Tees Valley Combined Authority, is the subject of long-running allegations against it – as described in a report commissioned by the Tory government.

Next: loss of assets means loss of revenue. In local government, assets are property that are used to provide services – that sometimes come with a charge. If they aren’t available to local government any more, then it means less money will come to councils.

Finally: this means the public will be asked to pay more for public services – because the council will have to rent the assets it has lost, back from the new owner.

This is simply a way of passing public money over to the extremely rich, who don’t even have to pay for it. And we all know:

Here’s a quick TV clip in which Houchen was nailed by the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire, proving that he is a liar and his corporations can’t be trusted:

Here’s the bottom line:

Funnily enough, the process described above was discussed on This Site, only a week ago, after economist Gary Stevenson told us why privatisation puts up our taxes. I wrote:

Neoliberal governments since 1979 have sold off all the property they own, meaning that – in order to provide services – they have to rent property from the rich people to whom they sold it all.

This is, of course, a ridiculous proposition because renting property from rich people is much more expensive than owning it oneself. We can see this from the sale of council housing; now councils don’t have any low-cost, low-rent houses, more and more people are becoming homeless because they can’t pay the sky-high rents demanded by private landlords, or the sky-high mortgages demanded by lenders.

So ordinary working people are now having to pay enormous taxes in order to allow our governments to pay for these services at exorbitant prices, because they’ve given all the means of providing these services to the rich.

Gary’s answer is to tax the rich, so they have to sell off their ill-gotten government assets in order to make ends meet.

The problem is that Tories like Michael Gove want the rich to own public assets and charge the Earth for the use of them; it’s an opportunity to say public services are too expensive and close them down, hugely disadvantaging the poor and laying them open to exploitation – by the rich.

Now that Gary has exposed the strategy, we can all see it for what it is.


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Some of you may be able to get more than £1,250 by claiming this tax allowance

If you’re married or in a civil partnership, and one of you is earning enough to pay 20 per cent in tax while the other is not, you need to claim the Marriage Tax Allowance.

Here’s Martin Lewis – so you know this is on the level:

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Here’s why taxes are high – and politicians are wrong to say we don’t need more

HMRC: if our tax inspectors concentrate on rich people instead of the poor, we’ll ALL be better-off.

This is brilliant stuff from Gary Stevenson that debunks the dogma from politicians – in both the Conservative and Labour parties – that taxes need to be slashed:

Is that clear?

In brief: neoliberal governments since 1979 have sold off all the property they own, meaning that – in order to provide services – they have to rent property from the rich people to whom they sold it all.

This is, of course, a ridiculous proposition because renting property from rich people is much more expensive than owning it oneself. We can see this from the sale of council housing; now councils don’t have any low-cost, low-rent houses, more and more people are becoming homeless because they can’t pay the sky-high rents demanded by private landlords, or the sky-high mortgages demanded by lenders.

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So ordinary working people are now having to pay enormous taxes in order to allow our governments to pay for these services at exorbitant prices, because they’ve given all the means of providing these services to the rich.

And when we hear talk of more taxes, we logically conclude that it refers to us paying them – after all, wealth means dodging taxes; the rich pay very little in comparison to the rest of us.

Gary is saying we need to make sure those very wealthy people have to pay more taxes – at a level that will force them to sell the assets they have bought from the government and hoarded away from the rest of us.

That’s a pretty tall order!

But persuading them – nudging them, if you like (remember the nudge unit, long-term readers?) – to sell is the only way to get taxes down for all of us.

If our governments own their own assets again, then they will be able to provide the services we need at a much lower cost and our taxes can fall again, for a realistic, justifiable reason.

That way, we will all enjoy more prosperity.

That is why the likes of Jeremy Hunt and Rachel Reeves are absolutely wrong to say they want to cut taxes. They mean they want to cut taxes for poor people, and the only way to do that is to cut public services.

And you’ll still be paying more, because the government will be using privately-owned assets to provide its services.

The problem is, they don’t want to increase taxes for rich people, partly because they are rich people, and partly because rich people give them donations to keep them from forcing those rich people to give money to the Treasury.

That’s why they lie to us that higher taxes are a bad idea.


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The bigger Budget picture – that British politics is glossing over – is terrifying

Jeremy Hunt: he was all smiles when delivering his Budget but the underlying implications will harm almost everybody in the UK who has to earn a living or draws a pension.

They’re trying to hide something from you, you know.

According to Torsten Bell, over at the Resolution Foundation, there’s more to it than the winners – National Insurance payers – and losers – pensioners, landlords and pensioner-landlords.

Jeremy Hunt’s speech, he wrote, paints a picture of “a country that is somehow managing to combine higher taxes, crumbling public services and debt levels that are struggling to fall”.

He warned that “British politics is trying to generally gloss over this bigger picture pre-polling day, not least given the tax rises and spending cuts pencilled in to follow”.

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Apparently the tax rises and spending cuts will be necessitated by the fact that Hunt has now splurged on two sets of tax cuts – now, and back in the Autumn.

Hidden in the details are the consequences: “£14 billion a year of lower debt interest was eaten up by lower tax receipts,” meaning Hunt – or any new Chancellor coming in after an election – will want to find a way to make up for that loss, probably with more taxes.

But they’ll then run into the problem of how to pay. The population is increasing rapidly – a fact that he didn’t dwell on in his speech, but one that may mean a million more people living here by the end of the decade and, yes, it’s due to immigration. This will mean more income for the Treasury, sure – but not an improvement in living standards as the amount people keep for themselves will not increase.

And there’s gloom over the number of us who are going to be too sick to work – due, again, to Tory political policies. “This knocks 0.5 per cent off employment, unwinding the GDP boost from a bigger population.” And it seems likely that a Tory or Labour government will simply try to deny sick people any state benefits in the hope that they’ll die off, as so many others have over the last 14 years.

With the economy in the doldrums, Hunt should have held off on more tax cuts – his whole package will cost £65 billion over the next five years. Instead, he picked Labour’s pocket – using two of the income streams Keir Starmer’s party intended to use to fund its own policies, if it wins an election.

So he scrapped the non-dom tax regime and extended the windfall tax on energy firms. That accounts for one-third of the tax cuts. The rest is being funded by borrowing, meaning that the Tories are once again marking themselves out as the party of financial IRresponsibility.

The National Insurance cuts may seem nice for employees – at the moment. But “£8 billion is being raised by the freezes to thresholds for employer NI… In time this will feed through into lower pay levels for employees.

“And then we come to the biggest group of losers: pensioners, who are already exempt from NI but affected by freezes to Income Tax thresholds. All eight million taxpaying pensioners will see their taxes increase, by an average of £1,000 – an £8 billion collective hit.”

Pensioners contain the largest remaining group of Conservative voters. This Writer wonders whether those Tories will continue to vote tribally in the face of this betrayal.

So does Torsten Bell: “This is the Conservative core vote losing out, as the next chart spells out. Whether this is an intentional choice to pivot towards those the Tories are struggling to win over, or a bit of an accident, is far from clear… It’s one hell of a political gamble.”

In fairness, though: “The focus on working-age employees reflects that they already pay higher rates of tax than pensioners or landlords. Furthermore, pensioners’ income growth has outstripped that of working households for some time.”

Now comes the burn.

“Personal tax increases combine with chunky rises in the corporation tax take (which is being sustained at its highest level this century) and wider economic changes to ensure this will be the greatest tax-raising Parliament since the Second World War. Tax relative to GDP is rising from 33.1 per cent in 2019-20 to 36.5 per cent in 2024-25 even with the pre-election tax cut rush.“But the tax rises don’t stop on polling day. Highly unusually, £19 billion of tax rises have already been announced that will  come into effect after the election. So the tax take is set to rise further to 37.1 per cent in 2028-29 (the highest since 1948). The increase since 2019-20 amounts to £3,900 per household.“Further tax rises are not all that is coming after the election. Even with loose fiscal rules, the tax cuts announced by Jeremy Hunt are only affordable by pencilling in major spending cuts to come. Real per-capita day-to-day spending for unprotected departments (think prisons, courts, FE colleges and local government) is set to fall by 13 per cent between 2024-25 and 2028-29 – equivalent to cuts of £19 billion and three-quarters (71 per cent) of the cuts inflicted on these departments in the first austerity parliament (2010-2015). The idea that such cuts can be delivered in the face of faltering public services is a fiscal fiction.

“More plausible, but deeply undesirable and damaging for growth, are plans to cut Public Sector Net Investment from 2.5 per cent today to 1.7 per cent of GDP by 2028-29 (a £26 billion decline). For too long Britain has been living off its past, rather than investing in its future. On current plans, we risk repeating this mistake in the decade ahead.”

The conclusion is scathing:

“The big picture for Britain has not changed at all. It remains a country where taxes are heading up not down, and one where incomes are stagnating. In fact, they are set to remain below their level at the last general election when voters return to the polls – the first time this has happened on record.

“Big tax cuts may or may not affect the outcome of that election, but the task for whoever wins is huge.

“Not only will they have to wrestle with implausible spending cuts, but they’ll also need to restart sustained economic growth – the only route to ending Britain’s stagnation.”


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Jeremy Hunt’s Budget fails to cut the tax burden after all

Jeremy Hunt: from the look on his face, this might have been Mr Bean’s Budget. Mr Bean-counter?

At long last, the Tories have unveiled the final Budget of their 2010-2024 government – and what a sad example of political opportunism it was!

Chancellor (for the moment) Jeremy Hunt was widely expected to use it to sabotage a future Labour government by imposing tax cuts for no good reason and then challenging Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves to explain which taxes she would restore to pay for Labour’s planned economic programme.

And what vital public services does Hunt propose to end? It was unlikely we would ever be told because nobody cares; he won’t have to think about it if there’s an election soon.

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Fair play to Labour neoliberal Angela Eagle for using Prime Minister’s Questions to ask which Tory achievement prime minister Rishi Sunak views with the most pride – the highest taxes since World War II, or the longest period of wage depression since the Napoleonic War.

Sunak responded by citing his damp squib furlough scheme that he contends kept jobs safe during the Covid crisis. He didn’t respond on the issues Eagle mentioned because he didn’t have to; they will be for someone else to tackle.

Hunt was wheeled on at 12.30 and promised permanent tax cuts – so our expectations were proved correct.

He started by referring to people on Universal Credit who have to take out loans – falling into debt by so doing – while waiting for their claims to be approved. He’s increasing the repayment period to four months. Big deal! They shouldn’t have to take out a loan in the first place and only have to do so because the Tories impose a five-week delay on payments.

He’s extending an alcohol duty freeze – it was due to rise by three per cent this year. But will prices stay the same or will manufacturers and pubs simply raise their prices and take higher profits.

He’s extending the fuel duty freeze as expected, maintaining the 5p cut. He reckons it will save the average driver £50 next year – but will it? Fossil fuel giants and supermarkets are also expected to raise prices anyway and take the cash as profit.

The Household Support Fund to support people on low incomes is being extended for six months. One must take it that this is in the absence of any plan to improve household incomes on a permanent basis.

He referred to the National Debt, saying it will fall to “just” 92.9 per cent of GDP in 2028-9. It’s meaningless; the debt was 250 per cent of GDP at the end of World War II and Clement Attlee’s – socialist – Labour government of 1945-51 ushered in a period of expansion that had not been seen before or since.

He said the economy is set to grow faster than similar countries; nobody cares. Where is the money going? It isn’t going to the people who will use the money but to the Tories’ rich friends – who hide it in banks.

Hunt claims his government is providing more investment, more jobs and better public services.

On investment, he says businesses are investing £30 billion more than during the last Labour government. Gosh. What’s that after inflation?

He cutting investment taxes for businesses by more than £10 billion – money that will go to shareholders and CEOs and won’t do the rest of us any good at all.

He’s providing £200 million to extend the Recovery Growth scheme for small businesses. And he said he’d increase the VAT registration threshold to £90,000, taking thousands of businesses out of paying VAT – another loss to the Treasury, although possible a benefit to the economy, depending on how those small businesses spend the extra cash.

He announced new devolved powers to local areas to support projects there, despite claims of corruption in at least one project that is already running.

He says the government is on track to deliver the building of a million new houses during the current government. Strange – the news has been full of stories about developers delaying building work.

He’s giving £100 million of Levelling-Up funding to support “cultural projects” in communities. What will be the knock-on effect for the economy?

He says the UK has a huge innovative technology economy. If that’s true, why have wages stagnated over the last 14 years? Why has the economy as a whole stagnated too? If these industries are doing so well, why has the government not intervened to ensure the benefits are spread as widely as possible?

He says the government will explore how people can take their pension pots with them when they change jobs. This would be good – but This Writer won’t hold his breath waiting for it.

Turning to other growth industries, Hunt refers to nuclear energy – which is a contradiction in terms as nuclear energy is highly-polluting.

In the creative industry, he’s increasing tax relief for visual effects in movies, and 40 per cent relief on film studios’ business rates. These are expanding industries – soon to be second only to Hollywood in the world, Hunt says. Why is he cutting their taxes when they are clearly doing fine and well able to pay? This is economic sabotage.

He announces new tax reliefs for theatres, saying this should be of particular interest to the Shadow Chancellor who specialises in acting like a Tory. This is a jibe that should strike home – but it renders all his talk of higher taxes by Labour hollow; Labour is a Substitute Tory Party.

Oh, there’s investment in AstraZeneca, the drugs firm that developed one of the controversial Covid-19 vaccines. With questions unanswered about the effect of the vaccines, is this wise?

Public services: He refers to investment in 20,000 police officers halving burglaries and violent crime – which is a lie. The Tories cut police by more than 20,000 and numbers haven’t recovered.

He says spending on public services has increased – by one-third, in real terms, in the NHS. Where has the money gone, then? We’re not seeing it in provision.

Oh – he says the money needs to be used wisely. He’s keeping a planned one per cent growth in real terms, but wants to “reform” public spending.

In the NHS, he’ll spend £3.4 billion to modernise IT systems in order to unlock £35 billion by slashing the time lost in form-filling, carrying out operations and reducing missed appointments. In fairness, that seems good. How much of it will be lost in private-sector profits?

Apparently the NHS will have nearly £6 billion in additional funding. Why, then, is there no more money for junior doctors who earn only slightly more money per hour than the bouncer at This Writer’s local pub?

The Chancellor has been mentioning lobbying by fellow Tory MPs; this is election-year campaigning – he’s trying to flag them up as useful for their communities. But are they? Who lobbied those MPs for the measures he has announced and how will they improve living standards among the rest of us?

Taxes: Hunt says the money we earn doesn’t belong to the government but to the people. This is nonsense; money is the oil that lubricates the economy and governments always control the amount we have because they control the amount we are taxed.

To prove this: Hunt went on to announce taxation of smoking and vaping, in order to discourage it by forcing smokers to lose more of their cash. See how it works? The money you keep is always dependant on a government’s priorities and that is why the richest people in the UK have increased their wealth massively over the last 14 years.

Non-dom taxation has been a political football in the run-up to the Budget. Hunt is abolishing the current system – as expected, to derision from the Opposition benches. He’ll replace it with a “residency-based” system. New arrivals from April 2025 will not have to pay tax for four years, but from that point onward, they’ll pay the same taxes as the rest of us.

Finally – the biggest announcement was a cut of two per cent in National Insurance – from 10 per cent to eight per cent for employees, and from eight per cent to six per cent for the self-employed.

It’s a £900 cut for employees and £450 for the self-employed (showing how those of us who work for ourselves are struggling?) – but what will be lost as a result?

He didn’t say. This is a Budget that is heavy on the tiny details of individual funding announcements and light on the details of public services that will be cut.

Oh, and I’m hearing that the overall tax burden is still rising because tax thresholds – the amount of earning that people can do before paying tax – are still frozen. So much for the “tax-cutting budget”!


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Want to know why you won’t inherit your parents’ house? Here’s Gary Stevenson

For sale: older people are selling their homes to pay for care in later life – to rich people who can afford them. Younger people can’t afford to get on the housing ladder (other estate agents are available).

Gary Stevenson’s appraisal of why people don’t get to inherit houses and can’t buy them is nothing more than accurate observation of trends in society.

Your parents think you can afford to buy a house because they could afford to buy theirs – so they sell theirs to pay for care in their twilight years. Meanwhile, you can’t afford to buy a house because they have become much more expensive and your generation is poorer than theirs.

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The reason for that is, money is being drawn up, away from the poor and the middle-class towards the rich.

His solution to this is correct too, as far as This Writer is concerned.

Taxation has long been acknowledged as a way of re-balancing standards of living; it is only over the last few decades of neoliberalism that this has been abandoned in favour of shrinking state services to force us into buying inferior privatised rubbish instead.

All we need is a government that is willing to use taxation for the good of society as a whole, rather than the enrichment of the few.

It won’t be a Conservative government, or a Labour government under Keir Starmer.

But it is possible to have such a government after the next general election.

All you have to do is engage your brain when considering the policies of the candidates in your constituency.


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Want to know the real reason for inflation? TAX

HMRC: if you’re rich, you don’t have to pay your taxes and probably won’t be investigated for it – but if you’re poor you can guarantee they’ll come after you for the tiniest amounts.

Does the UK have the worst tax collection system in the world?

It would explain our recent inflation problem – with huge amounts of public money going to the rich (for nothing), who aren’t paying tax back on it.

Taxation limits inflation by taking money out of the economy to balance the amounts being put in by government spending plans every year.

If HM Revenue and Customs doesn’t bother to tax the people who pay the largest amounts, then the economy is flooded with too much money and inflation rises. Right?

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Now we find that HM Revenue and Customs aren’t even bothing to investigate rich tax dodgers any more:

This is from the Guardian article:

The number of civil investigation cases opened by a HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) fraud unit investigating offshore, corporate and wealthy taxpayers has fallen by more than half in five years, figures reveal.

The Observer reported last month that HMRC has not charged a single company under landmark legislation to crack down on tax evasion. Campaigners warned that HMRC was undermining its own deterrents by failing to use its criminal enforcement powers.

The new figures, obtained by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, suggest that the tax authority’s civil enforcement in its fraud investigation service has also declined alongside its use of criminal powers.

Civil investigations opened by the offshore, corporate and wealthy unit, part of HMRC’s fraud investigation service, fell from 1,417 in 2018-19 to 627 in 2022-23.

Civil inquiries and investigations declined sharply in 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic interrupted HMRC’s enforcement activity. But despite a significant rise last year, the number of cases remains well below pre-pandemic levels.

The number of civil cases that were formally opened by the fraud investigation service, which can examine the tax affairs of any taxpayer, fell by 28% in the same period, from 17,424 from 2018/19 to 12,585 in 2022/23.

The article also states that HMRC says its fraud investigation service is focusing on the highest-value tax fraud and the figures do not take account of overall compliance activity, with 300,000 compliance “interventions” opened in 2022-23, securing £34bn in additional tax revenue.

HMRC says that since 2018-19 it has opened more than 1.5m compliance interventions, securing £136bn. HMRC says work is continuing on estimating figures for the offshore tax gap.

But here’s the catch: the vast bulk of this “compliance activity” is focused on the poor, not the rich – because if you’re poor, you’re easy pickings and won’t put up much of a fight when money is taken off you by the government. Am I right?

Is it good government? Or is it gangsterism?


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What really caused the inflation crisis? Here’s Gary to explain why rich people have your money

The real cause of inflation: the super-rich sucked up government cash that was given out to keep working- and middle-class people alive during the Covid crisis – by being the providers of the services and supplies everybody else needed. But that was a crisis and it should be time to normalise the situation. Why won’t politicians do it?

According to Gary Stevenson, governments like those in the UK and US caused the post-Covid inflation crisis by giving away thousands of pounds to keep us all going when the economy was locked down.

The problem was that those of us who normally work for a living had to then use that money to pay our bills (that’s not including This Writer; I just carried on writing Vox Political all the way through and lived on the money I earned from it, plus savings – those were happier days) while the rich, who issue the bills that we have to pay, just sucked up all the cash.

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They then started using that cash to buy what they could – not luxury items, because they were forbidden from doing it due to the shutdown of the economy, but so-called economic assets like houses. This stopped the rest of us from being able to buy them by keeping prices high – as Gary has discussed in previous clips.

Notice: he doesn’t say there was anything wrong with governments spending the money in the way they did; people needed cash to survive and it was inevitable that providing it to them from the Treasury, rather than the economy, would increase the national debt and massively increase wealth inequality between the poor who spent the cash and the rich who received it.

But because the circumstances were extraordinary, and the result was an unbalanced economy (increased inequality), the government should then have taken action to re-balance the economy by using the levers available to it to re-distribute the wealth.

It should have taxed the money back off the rich. Logically, the government could have got away with calling it a windfall tax because that’s what it would have been.

That hasn’t happened.

And neither of the ‘Big Two’ political parties – Labour and the Conservatives – are even considering such a rebalancing of the economy. Instead, they are both planning to bake it into our lives for a long time to come.

So we can say that Labour and the Tories both intend to increase wealth for the richest and poverty and debt for everybody else – and that includes those of you who are middle-class, sitting there smugly thinking you’ll be all right (you won’t).

There’s only one answer, but This Writer doubts many people will take it up.

You have to think for yourself.

That’s right; you have to get details of the political plans of every candidate standing in your constituency in the general election and you have to work out which of them – if any – intend to re-balance the economy to prevent us all falling into this debt trap.

How do you fancy that?

And politicians? Here’s a challenge for you:

Are you going to produce manifesto commitments to tax the money back off the super-rich – who don’t need it, remember – and re-balance the economy or are you too scared of them to dare upsetting them?


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Alleged PPE profiteer Michelle moans after husband is accused over business tactics

Ill-gotten gains? Michelle Mone posed on the deck of her husband’s £6 million yacht, ‘Lady M’ – which may have been bought with government money, paid for PPE equipment during the Covid crisis – that didn’t work.

Michelle Mone, the Ultimo bra businesswoman who became a Tory peer and then allegedly made millions pushing useless PPE on the government through the illegal ‘VIP lane’, is not happy.

Apparently her husband Doug Barrowman may soon be nicked by HM Revenue and Customs for tax avoidance:

Lady Mone seems to think her husband’s woes are due to the efforts of tax expert Dan Neidle, who was most recently seen explaining why Post Office Limited may become insolvent after allegedly fiddling its own taxes relevant to the sub-postmasters scandal.

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Apparently he’s about to publish “serious allegations” about Barrowman and his business:

Mr Neidle has been happy to draw attention to Lady Moan’s rant, so one supposes she can’t say he hasn’t given her the right of reply. Here it is:

Has he advised corporations on tax avoidance? He says no:

Still, let’s keep an open mind and see what she says, yes?


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Post Office Limited is in tax trouble and may go insolvent #PostOfficeScandal

How convenient for the Post Office!

So the Post Office accounts were mis-stated, meaning there is a huge tax liability that has wiped away profits made by the firm. That in turn means bonuses paid to executives should not have been handed out. And it means the organisation may also be insolvent – so the public purse will once again have to fund the incompetence of a government-owned mess.

There’s the question of tax paid on the money POL took from sub-postmasters to “balance” the alleged thefts – money that should have been paid back to the people the company wronged, of course.

What about the non-tax-deductible costs of prosecuting these sub-postmasters under false pretences – costs that date back more than a decade?

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What about its legal fees in fighting the sub-postmasters’ court case – a case that should never have had to be brought?

And finally there is the question of funding by the government – as a shareholder – to POL; this money is taxable too.

Mr Neidle has published a thread on ‘X’, explaining the matter further:

So, not only is the Post Office insolvent, not only is it incompetent (in failing to file proper tax returns for more than a decade – at least), but it is also likely to ask the public – who already pay the Post Office for the services it provides – to cough up the huge shortfalls in cash.

Funny, that. When sub-postmasters were wrongly accused, they were forced to pay the money back, prosecuted and some went to prison. With this firm correctly accused of tax fraud (or so it seems), should we not be seeing executives and accountants forced to repay their ill-gotten gains, prosecuted and imprisoned, rather than be punished for it ourselves?


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