Tendring Topics……..on line
Oh to be a Non.Dom – in a new Financial Year!
After
I took early retirement from Tendring Council’s service in 1980 I earned a
considerable income from freelance writing.
I wrote and had published five commercially successful books on domestic hot and cold water supply and drainage. I wrote the plumbing section of a number of
d-i-y manuals including the ‘Readers Digest Householders’ Manual’. I wrote and sold dozens of feature articles
to magazines and periodicals on domestic hot water supply and drainage, on
local government, on camping and caravanning in the UK and mainland Europe and
on any other subject about which I had at least some knowledge and
experience. For several years I wrote
Advertising Features for Essex County Newspapers, and for ‘Look East,’ a publication promoting commerce and industry in East Anglia .
I also wrote a weekly column, ‘Tendring Topics’ for the Coastal Express’ for twenty-three years.
Some of this work was for overseas
publishers. I remember writing about
Dedham’s and Harwich’s association with the USA and about the historic village
of Bosham near Chichester, one-time home of both King Canute and the ill-fated King
Harold killed at the Battle of Hastings, for a magazine for retired citizens of
New England. I had a lucrative
arrangement with an Australian publisher who sought permission to print
articles of mine that had already appeared in Do-it-Yourself Magazine in England .
I declared every
penny I earned, including those from overseas, to Inland Revenue and I claimed
reasonable expenses. I paid quite a lot
(by my standards) of income tax each year.
I didn’t complain. I enjoyed what
I was doing and the tax was only a fraction of my income.
I would have
been a lot less happy had I realized that there was a privileged minority of
very wealthy people who paid no income tax on money that they received from
overseas. They were the ‘non-doms’ whose
‘domicile’ was said to be elsewhere than in the UK .
It seems that ‘non-dom’ status can be inherited and that having a clever
lawyer is much more important than where you or your parents actually live or
may sometime have lived.
Now it’s one
of the issues that may affect voting in the general election. Ed Miliband says that if he becomes Prime
Minister his government will abolish ‘non-dom’ status altogether. Apparently though the shadow chancellor has
said that to do so would bring in very little extra revenue, and Ed Miliband’s
political opponents claim that it would lead to all these wealthy and talented
‘non-doms’ leaving the country and domiciling themselves elsewhere.
It is a sad
reflection on the zeitgeist of our wonderful ‘free market’ society that
discussion about ‘non-dom’ status has been solely concerned with whether or not
the Treasury would benefit from its abolition.
I have heard no-one say that it is clearly wrong for a privileged
minority of very wealthy individuals to be exempt from taxation to which
ordinary ‘hard-working tax-payers’ (about whom David Cameron claims to be so
concerned) are subject. Morality, it
seems, has nothing to do with it.
It is always
interesting to hear what Nigel Farage has to say about any subject other than
the European Union. Recently he was
discussing Britain’s defence policy and I was just a little surprised to hear
him say that he was all for our spending two percent of our national wealth on
‘defence’, as requested by NATO. It was
the as requested by NATO that astonished
me. Mr Farage believes that the
government should comply with ‘the will of the people’. He’d like to see an immediate in/out
referendum on the EU because he is quite sure that the Outs would win. He’s certain
that the British people don’t want to be ruled by ‘foreigners’.
He could be wrong
about that but, in any case membership of the EU is one of the few matters about
which the British electorate has been consulted in a referendum. Surely there are several matters of national importance
about which we have never been
consulted. One of them is membership of
NATO and another, closely related, is our ‘special relationship’ with the USA . I’d have thought Nigel would be demanding a
referendum on these subjects before demanding yet another on EU membership. Doesn’t NATO consist almost wholly of
‘foreigners’ and isn’t the special relationship a little one-sided?
We blindly
followed the USA into the
invasion of Iraq , and the
USA and NATO into an unwinnable conflict in Afghanistan . The USA
entered World War II against the Nazis only when Hitler declared war on the USA in accordance with Nazi Germany’s treaty
with Japan .
We’ll never know if the USA would have engaged in war in Europe had he not done so. I think it at least possible that the USA would have
decided that their war was against
the Japanese and in the Pacific. They’d
have thought about Hitler only after they had defeated the Japanese.
We do know
that the USA gave us no support when the Falklands was invaded by Argentina,
and actually led an armed and unprovoked invasion of Grenada (the island in the
Caribbean, not the town in Spain!) then part of the Commonwealth, in order to
force a regime change.
Nigel Farage
is righteously indignant about the cost of our membership of the EU. Perhaps the BBC’s Radio 4 ‘More or Less’ team could discover if our membership of NATO and the
Special Relationship have cost us more in cash than our membership of the
EU. Without a shadow of doubt our
participation in those two USA-led ‘colonial wars’ in the Middle East have cost
us much more in dead and wounded!
All of this
simply confirms in my own mind that Farage has no objection to British foreign
and defence policy being dictated from the other side of the Atlantic but he
dislikes our co-operating with our European cousins and developing into a
federal super-power able to co-operate (or compete) on equal terms with the USA , the Russian
Federation and China .
Do
you remember how the coalition government, supported in this instance by New
Labour, offered concession after concession short of complete independence, to
the Scottish nationalists in a successful attempt to secure a majority NO vote
in the recent referendum? Desperate
measures were needed because opinion polls suggested that the YES voters might
be successful. It was a tactic that
they may now be regretting. A number of
English towns and regions are demanding autonomy comparable with that of the
Scots. At the same time it seems likely
that SNP candidates will triumph in the forthcoming General Election and, since
Scotland remains part of the
UK ,
may prevent the Conservatives forming a government with a comfortable majority
in the House of Commons.
The
leaders of the main political parties are now taking desperate measures to
gain, or retain, a few votes. I
mentioned David Cameron’s promise to would-be home buyers of thousands of homes
‘on the cheap’ a blog or so ago. They’ll
be cheap because the developers won’t be required to build any ‘social housing’
or contribute to the provision of public services in the area. Now there’s the idea of lending would-be
tenants the few weeks rent-in-advance that nowadays landlords demand. It’ll certainly add to the burden of debt
that most people have to carry these days.
There’s
a promise to freeze rail-fares (though a BBC analyst says that it’ll actually
mean a fare rise!), to pay large firms and public authorities to allow some of
their employees a few days off to do voluntary work, to make more
apprenticeships and so on, and on, and on!
They make wild promises about what they’ll do – but they’re even better
at rubbishing the claims of their opponents.
The SNP threatens to rob the Labour Party of what were once ‘safe
parliamentary seats’ in Scotland . So ED Miliband has toured Scotland today telling electors that the SNP’s proposed
programme can only be carried out by raising taxes and making even deeper
austerity cuts than the Tories have. Mind you, Ed Miliband has recently been at
the receiving end of just such a ‘rubbish your opponent’ campaign. It’s a bit complicated and depends on lots of
‘mights’, but I’ll do my best to explain.
It
is just possible that Labour might
win enough seats in the election to have more parliamentary seats than any
other party, but not have an overall majority.
It is also just possible that the SNP might gain enough seats to make up an overall majority and might be prepared to support a minority
Labour government. They would obviously
expect a quid pro quo for this – and it is possible that the price they might demand for that support might be that the Labour
Government does not renew the Trident Nuclear submarine fleet with its ‘ultimate
independent nuclear deterrent’. If they
did so then Ed. Miliband, in order to become Prime Minister, might accept that condition. According to the Conservative Defence Minister
he has already ‘stabbed his brother in the back’ to become leader of the Labour
Party so he’d have no hesitation in ‘stabbing his country in the back’ to
become Prime Minister.. David Cameron says
he supports his Defence Minister in this assertion and proudly announces that only the Conservative Party will present
the electorate with four brand-new state-of-the-art Trident submarines. Goodness, is that a threat or a promise? It's certainly as good a reason as I know
for not
voting Conservative.
.
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