Guido is speaking to Microsoft UK later this month on the subject of blogging. Microsoft is more allied to New Labour. It occurs to Guido that the Brown upgrade is like the Labour party’s Windows Vista to Blair’s Windows XP.
New but worse, with some superficially dazzling gimmicks that don’t really work or do anything better.
At one point in Gordon’s battering at PMQs he claimed that hardly anyone had signed the petition for an election on the Downing Street website. Click here to sign.
Gordon on Monday kept repeating that he needed time to set out his “vision”. As Freedland points out this morning in the Guardian, he has had 13 years to figure out his “vision”, what is his problem?
Guido wonders if Gordon Brown is not only physically vision-impaired but politically vision-impaired as well. He is now reduced to making counterfeit copies of Tory policies. After 100 days he has not shown any vision for change beyond the old tax more, spend more agenda.
So who did really well yesterday? Not small businessman, wacked with an 80% hike in capital gains tax when they sell their business at retirement. Alternatively if they work themselves to death dealing with regulatory red tape and hand the business on to their children, Brown and Darling will take, compared to the Tories, an extra £560,000* off the bereaved children. So much for rewarding enterprise.If you own two homes you just got a handy reduction from 40% to 18% on capital gains. Is it a coincidence that almost all MPs own two homes? The constituency and Westminster home owners already benefit from a tax-free allowance worth £40,000 annually to pay their mortgages. Now they can sell the taxpayer funded second home and only pay the reduced capital gains – a 55% tax cut for MPs. Mr and Mrs Balls are paid by the taxpayers quarter-of-a-million a year between them, so hard done by are they that they still claim tens of thousands extra in mortgage subsidy on top. Now with the new changes they will be able to sell that second home you paid for and they will pay only 18% tax on it. No wonder they are laughing…
UPDATE : A co-conspirator reminds Guido not to forget the Miliband boys successful efforts to award themselves an IHT tax cut. David Milband is today living in a £ 1.5 million ultra-fashionable-Primrose Hill townhouse at the centre of a complex inheritance-tax avoidance scheme. He shamelessly exploited a loophole which he used to reduce his death duty bills.
When his father Ralph died in 1994 aged 70, leaving a large estate, the Miliband boys agreed a ‘deed of variation’. The cunning move meant that 40% of the equity of the Primrose Hill home was transferred to Ed and David, who were each given a 20% share in the house neatly evading the tax bill.
*Could be an incorrect figure, see the debate in the comments. Guido is not an accountant.
As the sharper readers have pointed out, it was no such thing. In fact it was just essentially a re-presentation of, what Alastair Darling let slip this morning on the Today programme, was an already scheduled raising of the IHT threshold from £300,000 to £350,000. It additionally removed the necessity for spouses to visit a financial advisor for one aspect of estate planning. There was no new tax cut. It was a U-turn in rhetoric only.
Darling and Brown will still be rubbing their hands every time a middle-class, family-home-owner dies, the uninvited smiling guests at the funeral wake to present the bereaved with a tax bill.
Guido apologises for any confusion caused.
