Domicile of Dependency

The two-child benefit cap is sacrosanct, the withdrawal of the Winter Fuel Payment is at best something that cannot be helped (although Rachel Reeves has been advocating it in principle for many years), the increase in employers' National Insurance contributions has to destroy charities and small businesses while making it impossible for big businesses to take on staff or to increase wages, working farmers of many decades' standing who formally inherited their parents' farms have to be forced to sell them to giant American agribusinesses, workers' bus fares have to be increased by 50 per cent, and not one penny piece is available for the WASPI women, whose plight the SNP will put to the vote on the floor of the House of Commons next week.

Yet Reeves, she of the cancelled parliamentary credit card, has been moved by, "the concerns that have been raised by the non-dom community." As long ago as 2010, non-doms were banned from sitting in the House of Lords, thereby conceding the point that the whole arrangement was as dodgy as hell. The abolition of non-domiciled tax status would be a moral imperative even if that abolition did not raise a penny, or even if it cost more than it raised. That abolition would make the United Kingdom uncompetitive with where, exactly? Those who defend this fiddle do not normally take such a view of people who maintained allegiances to foreign countries, not even when those were purely cultural, such as in relation to cricket, never mind when they involved depriving His Majesty's Exchequer of revenue.