11 April 2015

11th April 2015

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.

United Kingdom Independence………but from whom?

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.

 The Fruits of Desperation

            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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