Staggeringly HMRC has handed its annual internal “Expert of the Year” award to the staff member who helped design Reeves’ disastrous Farm Tax. You couldn’t make it up…
The taxman’s Head of Inheritance Tax Analysis James Mee today said he was “proud and humbled,” specifying the award was “for my work in providing ministers with the analysis they needed to announce several major IHT reforms at last year’s Autumn Budget, including restricting agricultural and business property reliefs and extending IHT to unspent pensions.” All disasters…
In a fawning post Mee, who previously worked at the OBR and Treasury, added he “wouldn’t have been able to do this without the help of lots of colleagues in HMRC, HMT and the OBR… you know who you all are – so thank you.” The blob is blobbing…
The government this week published its laughable impact assessment into the inheritance tax changes which refuses to consider any negative wider economic impacts from reduced investment while claiming “the policy is not expected to have a significant impact on family formation, family stability or family breakdown.” Tell that to the farmers…
UPDATE: Director of External Affairs at the Country Land and Business Association Jonathan Roberts told Guido:
“We congratulate James on his award. To celebrate, I would like to invite him to visit one of the 70,000 farm businesses expected to be permanently damaged by this policy. Once there, I would be happy to introduce him to some of the 200,000 workers across the family business sector who will lose their job.”
Speaking on Times Radio, former Home Secretary David Blunkett spoke about overdiagnosis of mental problems:
“Let’s distinguish those who are really severely mentally ill, diagnosed with things that require prolonged medical and diagnostic treatment. My wife and I talk about this a lot, because she’s a retired GP, about the fact that you can be sad without being ill. You can be momentarily depressed because your boyfriend or girlfriend’s just thrown you and you’re not mentally ill. You can even have mild issues, which can be dealt with with the right kind of support, but it doesn’t make you mentally ill. So we’ve got a real task, I think, to get the psychology, if you like, of this over. But there are things where you definitely need medical intervention, and there are other things where you need good friends, you need good connectivity, and you need a job.”