Current affairs - Land Value Tax Campaign

Should Labour ditch Brown?

Written on 26 July 2008. Posted in Politics.

Following Labour’s defeat at the Glasgow East by-election, there is naturally talk about whether to replace him. The problem for the party is that nothing any government can do will prevent the coming recession, and Labour is bound to get the blame. Now it is not exactly true to say that they caused the present economic problems. What they are to blame for is never having put in place the...

Labour loses one of safest seats in by-election

Written on 25 July 2008. Posted in Politics.

Labour’s loss of Glasgow East to the SNP should surely be seen as marking the end of the New Labour project? It is probably too late for the party to save itself before the next election. Even if Brown was replaced, the party has become too homogeneous to give room for another way of thinking to emerge. It will need to be out of office for at least a decade for that to happen. What happens...

Problems of bringing LVT to public notice

Written on 25 July 2008. Posted in Taxation.

Following on from the comments above, a further difficulty is that the media seem increasingly unwilling to publish or discuss ideas that fall outside the conventional way of thinking about things. A couple of weeks ago, the former Conservative Chancellor Sir Geoffrey Howe talked about the need to change the way tax law is made, citing some of the recent changes which have proved so troublesome....

U-turn on multinational company tax changes

Written on 22 July 2008. Posted in Taxation.

Yet again, the British government is in trouble with tax. The Daily Telegraph business section reported today (22 July 2008) that… “in a letter to the CBI, the Treasury apparently relented on its plans to levy new taxes on multinational companies. With two already having opted to move their headquarters away from the UK and more threatening to follow suit, the business lobby’s...

UK Government budget deficit growing

Written on 20 July 2008. Posted in Politics.

Figures for June show that the UK’s budget deficit has now reached the point that the Labour government will have to breach its own self-imposed borrowing rules. Naturally this has invited plenty of comment, most of it slightly off the point. On the right, it is suggested that too high a proportion of GDP is in the public sector and that cuts are needed. Nobody these days is arguing that taxes...

UK unemployment rising and set for worse

Written on 18 July 2008. Posted in Economics.

Some 15,500 people lost their jobs in June, according to the Office for National Statistics. It is the biggest increase since 1992, and means 45,000 people have already lost their jobs since the start of the year. Economists warn of worse to come, as the economy slows sharply in the coming months and possibly dips into recession at least as bad as that of the early 1990s. Vicky Redwood of Capital...

Credit crisis explained in pictures

Written on 18 July 2008. Posted in Banking.

For an explanation of how the present credit crisis originated, click on this link. Mortgages were being packaged, good and bad together, and sold on to investors, just as a shifty street market trader might sell boxes of apples with the good ones on top and rotten ones underneath. It has to be said that a lot of these “investors” were being remarkably stupid or naive not to check to...

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

Written on 13 July 2008. Posted in Economics.

In early July, we told our visitors to expect to hear more about the US mortage organisations Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. As it is turning out, there is plenty to hear as the financial disaster unfolds. In case you are wondering what these organisations are, information on the companies’ own websites explains…

The Swedish Tax Gap

Written on 11 July 2008. Posted in Taxation.

According to the Swedish taxation board, Skatteverket, there is a large gap between the amount that it believes it should be collecting and what it actually manages to gather in, amounting to 5% of the gross national product. It is referred to as the Tax Gap. As nearly everywhere else, most of the tax is levied through charges on labour, goods and services. Skatteverket states that “The tax...

EU condemns British budget deficit

Written on 10 July 2008. Posted in Politics.

An article in the Daily Telegraph today (10 July) reported that “Britain’s economic difficulties came to attention at a meeting of European Union finance ministers, who have voted to condemn Britain for flagrant breach of the Maastricht spending rules, irked that the UK government has not even tried to keep its budget deficit below the treaty limit of 3pc of national income. By its own...

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