The Long Goodbye

The Tories seem intent on dying as they lived. Incompetently.

With potentially only a couple of months to go before the next election, the Tories have finally decided to pull their finger out, take heed of the public mood, and swing into action.

After years of procrastination, promises and prevarication this sclerotic government has, at last, committed itself to ridding Britain of thousands of uninvited foreign parasites, undesirables, and spongers who have been arriving on these shores in droves and leeching off our fine nation’s goodwill for far too long.

The Tories are not messing about. Not only is our no nonsense government going to send these bloodsuckers packing. But they are even making them buy their own plane tickets.

Take that Johnny Foreigner. Good luck, and good riddance.

Last week the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, announced the abolition of the non-dom status.

I’ve always found Hunt a bit creepy to be honest. He gives the impression of being the sort of man who picks his wife from a catalogue.

But this policy does seem popular, especially with the Labour front bench. Which isn’t surprising, because that’s who Hunt nicked it off. And it shows.

Portrayed as striking a blow for fairness and social justice, the cancelling of non-dom status is actually the most senseless act of self harm since that time Kurt Cobain popped out to the garage to check that his gun was still working.

People are sometimes confused about what being a ‘non-dom’ actually means. It essentially allows mega rich foreign nationals to live in some of Britain’s (let’s face it London’s) priciest post codes, without being taxed on any profits earned from their overseas assets.

For instance, imagine a rich Indian businessman, who owns a steel plant in Mumbai, but lives in London.

Under the old rules, he wouldn’t be taxed in the UK on any profits earned, from manufacturing his steel, back in India.

And profits are currently soaring, because his Indian plant is now making all the steel that the UK used to make, at the Port Talbot Steelworks in Wales. That was until it was shut down by the Tories, to save the planet. Or something. 

That businessman would however, still be taxed on any profits earned from any investments he’d made, or by companies he owned, in this country. Which could be nothing, or could be quite substantial.

And of course he would also pay tax, usually in the form of VAT, on any money he spent, while he lived here.

So imagine our mega money bags spends a million pounds a year on stuff, not an outrageous assumption. He might not be paying any income tax in the UK, (Boo!!) but he is paying 20% VAT on that million quid. (Hurrah!)

So that’s £200,000. In tax.

I tried to look up what the average amount of income tax British people pay, but it all got a bit confusing and complicated, and I grew fatigued, but it’s fair to say it’s less than £200,000. A lot less. If you want to work it out for yourself here’s a link.

The point is that once we’ve got rid of our Indian steel magnate, the British government won’t have that £200,000 to waste on chemically castrating perfectly healthy gay children to spend helping hard working mums pay for much needed childcare.

So the government will have to find someone else to pay for it instead. And can you guess who that someone else might be? Yup. It’s you.

Of course the mega super rich aren’t just spending their money on fur lined Teslas, gold plated diamonds, and Salt Bae’s £700 steaks.

They also have whole armies of hangers on, accountants, lawyers, dog walkers, social media consultants, chefs, pillow case technicians, and fluffers to pay for.

All of whom do pay income tax in the UK. But not any more, because just like the Welsh steelmakers, all those jobs, will likely disappear. Or at least be relocated, to Milan or Dubai.

So well done Jezza. You’ve proved that when it comes to jobs, the Conservatives are an equal opportunity unemployer. It doesn’t matter if you’re working in upmarket retail on Bond St, or heavy industry in Bridgend, the Tories will put you out of work, just the same.

Also, the rich tend to live somewhere. And unusually for recently arrived overseas visitors, it’s not often in an over crowded seaside hotel, at the taxpayer’s expense.

Instead they prefer to buy high end properties in the swankier parts of town. And they have to pay tax on those. A lot of tax.

Any property worth more than £1.5 m, the sort of gaff favoured by these Richie Riches is rated at 12% for stamp duty. If our greedy guts foreigner already owns a property in the UK, which is quite likely, they would also have to pay a 3% surcharge, making 15%.

Let’s imagine our foreign squilloinaire buys a fairly modest, for the super rich, four million pound house in London.

They would be required to pay around £600,000 in property tax.

£600,000! That’s a lot of money.

Almost enough to do a ‘Big Shop’ in Waitrose.

Look. I understand a lot of people are glad to see the back of the non-doms. I get it.

Let’s be honest. No one likes the super rich. Of course not. They are gaudy. Vulgar. Ostentatious. And just like Jeffrey Epstein, they love to hang out with Bill Gates.

And like any true blooded, fair minded Brit, I’m all for grudge fuelled bitterness, rancour, and envy.

But not when it costs me money.

Like it or not, the reality is the super rich won’t be paying 40% income taxes on their mega money wherever in the world they go. They just won’t.

So surely it’s better that they come and spunk their mountains of disposable cash up against the wall here in the UK, rather than just go and spend it all in Dubai or Rome?

But you say. It’s all a bluff. These people are too charmed by the British way of life to ever leave. They love the weather, revere our tent lined thoroughfares, and delight in having their Rolexes snatched off them in Chelsea by machete wielding youths on mopeds. They’re not going anywhere.

But that’s exactly what happened last time. There used to be 85,000 non-doms in the UK. But after the Tories last introduced new rules in 2017. 30,000 up and left. Taking their money with them.

Of course the truth is, that as ever, we’re being offered a distraction.

The basic reason for Britain’s stagnating, torpid, and ossified economy isn’t that a few foreign billionaires are paying too little tax. It’s that thanks to the Tories overseeing the highest tax take since 1948, dinner ladies in Bolton, and shop keepers in Eastbourne, are paying far too much.

No wonder the UK’s per capita GDP is tanking. We are inviting the world’s poor to come and live here at taxpayers expense, while chasing away the world’s rich.

I genuinely find this level of Tory stupidity baffling.

If you are a rich Kuwaiti who regularly spends millions in the hot spots of Knightsbridge, lubricating the British economy,  investing cash, and employing British citizens, then sling your hook.

If you’re an acid throwing Afghan sex offender  with three failed asylum claims. Have free housing, medical care, and a lawyer on us.

It’s madness.

Just a note. No. I am not attempting to exhume the ghost of ‘Trickle Down Economics’. It’s not a thing, and has been discredited. Also, I know that many of these foreign nationals buy their houses through a limited company to reduce stamp duty, so don’t bother telling me. If the stamp duty rates weren’t so egregious, their accountants might not be so keen to use that as a workaround.

Hunt claimed that his budget was ‘a budget for growth’.

And he’s not wrong. It’s going to significantly grow the number of Labour MPs sitting in the House of Commons.

At one point during his speech Jeremy Hunt came over all 2020 and claimed that

‘the NHS is the biggest reason most of us are proud to be British’.

Forgetting for a moment. Lion bars. The Falklands War. Sodastream. And the fact that we are the happy nation, that finally managed to put a stop to Phillip Schofield.

Once he’d softened us up with a spot of pot banging, Hunt acknowledged that the NHS has a ‘productivity problem’.

Which is another way of saying it’s very low on the international curing cancer charts, but tops the league tables when it comes to killing babies.

But not to worry. Brainbox Hunt is on an efficiency drive, and has come up with a brilliant new way to stop the NHS wasting public money.  He’s handing the NHS an extra £3.4bn of public money.

It seems Hunt is prepared to do literally anything to save taxpayers’ cash. Except not spending it.

Hunt’s other genius plan to save our glorious NHS is to enlist the help of AI.

Which makes sense. For many unlucky British patients, NHS treatment is already pretty much, The Terminator.

But unlike Google Gemini, this new AI won’t suddenly make all the NHS doctors black and asian. Because most of them are already black and asian.

Mainly because we refuse to train up our own doctors. And would much rather steal them fully qualified from poorer, developing countries. Colonialist much?

But let’s not be too cynical. After all, the smooth running of the National Health Service is already reliant on the very latest, cutting edge technology. Or it would be, if this was still 1987. Which, *checks diary* it turns out, it isn’t.

The NHS is the only major health service in the world which continues to use fax machines and pagers. And not just some of them, loads of them, 79,000 pagers, and 600 fax machines, at last count.

I’m pretty sure that somewhere in Wales, there’s a hospital that’s still making its surgical gowns, with the aid of a Spinning Jenny.

While Jeremy Hunt has been busy fixing the NHS.  Rishi Sunak has been tackling another leading cause of preventable death.

With mobs of bullies routinely taking over our streets, attacking our Jewish community, stabbing our gay people in parks, murdering our MPs, and intimidating our parliament, Sunak, was both brave, and unequivocal when it came to identifying the threat.

Right wing extremism.

Sorry? What?

Yup. According to the Prime Minister (at time of writing) the biggest threat facing civil society today is a fantasy army of jack booted white supremacists, mythical clan members, and fictional Nazis.

Maybe, I’m being unfair. He did also mention Islamic extremism. And obviously Sunak was just trying to be even handed.

And he rightly didn’t want the people who’ve been blowing up our kids, bombing our transport systems, or preaching genocide on our streets, to think he was picking on them.

So fair enough.

It’s like if Churchill had made his ‘We’ll fight them on the beaches’ speech in 1940.

But to protect the feelings of snowflake Waffen SS, he had lumped Hitler’s forces together with

‘The evil Snow Queen’s mythical army of imaginary dryads, boggles, minotaurs, spectres, ogres and harpies’.  Which he claimed were even as he spoke, ‘Amassing, ghastly on the very borders of Narnia’.

(It helps if you imagine the voice. Oh. Go on. It’s actually quite fun.)

This right wing threat is a fantasy.

Even the government’s own Commission for Countering Extremism explains that Islamist extremists are using legal threats to deter researchers, and so

‘‘research on radical groups is skewed’ to the tiny number of far right agitators’.

I worry our idiotic elites will expend so much time talking up the threat of right wing extremism, vilifying conservatives and persecuting the majority, that they will eventually, wish it into being.

Potentially giving themselves yet another excuse, as if they need one, to declare a crisis of democracy, censor our speech, curtail our freedoms and call for the suspension of rights for ‘low information’ voters. Like us. Well, me.

Maybe that’s the plan. It certainly seems to be the playbook that the anti-Trump left are employing in the US right now. So expect even more of it under Labour.

Because everyone knows it’s all over for this Tory government.

Like a married couple, past their sell by date, embarking unenthusiastically on their therapist mandated Date Night, the Tories have lost all passion, all purpose, and can barely even bother going through the motions.

We have had over thirteen years of Tory rule.

Thirteen. Unlucky for some. Yes. Us.

What have we got to show for it?

A broken economy. A divided country. A younger generation which cannot afford to buy a house. Rampant crime. Streets full of homeless. Record illegal immigration. A two tier police and justice system. Five million unemployed. Eight million on NHS waiting lists. Threadbare armed forces. Mass low skilled immigration. And pot holes.

The Tories even presided over the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

Look, I know it technically wasn’t their fault. But the last person Her Majesty saw before she conked out was Liz Truss. And I bet that didn’t help.

We are in the fag end of this Conservative Government. (Look it up my American friends. It doesn’t mean what you think it means.)

And with Hunt’s final useless budget, Sunak’s inadequate and misdirected attempts to talk down extremism, and their seemingly never ending catalogue of cock ups, car crashes and catastrophes, it’s clear the Tories are intent on dying just as they lived.

Incompetently.

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I should really be plugging my own stuff here, but if you were around a couple of weeks ago you may remember I mentioned a book by Alwyn Turner about Edwardian England called Little Englanders. Well anyway, I’ve read it now, and it’s brilliant. Really laugh out loud funny in places and with so many parallels to today. They managed to get through it, and we willl too. Anyway, recommended.

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All the best

LSO