With Rishi still facing political headwinds over his wife’s non-domiciled tax status, the Labour front bench are all over airwaves this morning boasting about how they’ll abolish the entire scheme and “create a fairer tax system” which “sends a clear message” to would-be tax dodgers. A policy move which took them long enough to cook up; just two weeks ago Starmer was still refusing to commit to it.

Now they’ve finally decided it’s worth announcing just to have a dig at the Chancellor. Back in 2015, then-shadow chancellor Ed Balls caused a major headache for Miliband when he insisted scrapping the whole thing was a bad idea which would end up hurting the taxpayer:

“I think if you abolish the whole status, then probably it ends up costing the UK money because there will be some people who will then leave the country.”

Three months later, the party U-turned and announced they would bin it after all. Maybe this time it’ll stick around. Or maybe, like the ‘British Recovery Bond’ and Starmer’s pledge for ‘common ownership’, it’ll magically be forgotten after a few months…

In the meantime, keep an eye out for Labour activists masquerading as independent ‘tax experts’ blabbering about how this is a great idea. When the non-dom story first broke at the start of the month, law firm Clifford Chance’s former head of tax Dan Neidle appeared in the FT and Sky News to attack Sajid Javid for his own non-domiciled status back in 2006. No mention that he’s a Labour Party veteran of 35 years and standing as a candidate for Labour’s National Constitutional Committee…