Show Them A Menu With Prices

A very interesting conclusion to the Radio Four series Hecklers, summer filler of the slot normally occupied by The Moral Maze. This edition was about the non-domicile tax rules.

I honestly thought that one of the defenders of this racket was going to burst into tears as he flailed about trying to cope with the concept that, yes, these rules are in fact a subsidy, just like the ones that governments in the Sixties and Seventies used to pay to loss-making factories and the like, except that those were to protect the jobs of large numbers of tax-paying Britons rather than to protect the lavish lifestyles of a tiny number of tax-dodging foreigners.

He was like the private schools lobby whenever anyone dares to point out that almost all such institutions would close overnight if it were not for gigantic public subsidies through the tax system, utterly unused to being spoken to in such terms, and practically reduced to blubbering if anyone does so.

The non-doms manage to run businesses in numerous other countries without needing to live in them. But then, only the United Kingdom and the Irish Republic have this bizarre concept of domicile, making London the only one of the great cities of the world where such arrangements are in place.

And these people consciously wish to live in one of the great cities of the world, or else why do they all live in or very near to London, rather than anywhere else in Britain? So the idea that they would move if they were made to pay tax is absurd – where would they go? And in any case, they wouldn’t take their investments with them: I say again, they already have investments all over the place.