Labour’s War On Business Has Just Begun

Last week, the British Government made what has been called a u-turn on plundering our farmers. The proposed limit at which the 40% inheritance tax kicks in will been raised from one million pounds to two and a half million. Generous or what? Let’s look at this another way. You are a shopkeeper walking home with the weekend’s takings of five thousand pounds. Two men walk up to you, one sticks a gun in your face and demands you hand over your money; you do so. He looks at your takings and says “We don’t need all this, you can have three grand back”.

Is he being generous?

Then his partner says, “No, we’ll settle for a grand” and hands you back four thousand pounds. Is he being more generous?

Taxation is a fact of life, including inheritance tax, which used to be called death duties. Aaron of Lincoln was the richest man in England; when he died in 1186, the Crown seized his entire estate. Earlier this year, Lewis Goodall called for a 100% inheritance tax on all of us. There is a word for this: communism. That appears to be the goal, or if not the goal then the inevitable result of the Labour Government’s insane policies, and there are many people outside of government who are happy with this.

A cartoon from July last year. The worst is yet to come.

Last month, I had to sit through a (mercifully short) speech by a tax consultant who had previously worked for the Inland Revenue. Afterwards, when I mentioned some of the concerns of business people about what is coming, he dismissed them. You should not. So what is coming?

As many UK vloggers have pointed out, the insane policies pursued by Rachel Reeves have driven so many wealthy people out of Britain that the Inland Revenue will now be concentrating its efforts on the middle classes, in particular small businesses and the self-employed. Over the past few years, the Revenue has invested massively in artificial intelligence and data tracking systems. They are now literally spying on your bank accounts and on all your financial dealings on-line including eBay and social media.

A truly Draconian piece of legislation is the aptly named FEAR Act, an acronym for Fraud, Error And Recovery which received the Royal Assent on December 2. Among other things, it allows the Government to take money out of a person’s bank account and in certain circumstances to suspend someone’s driving licence. Did anyone ever hear of such lunacy?

While most people will not be targeted so, small businesses will be. Making Tax Digital has been called the biggest change to self-assessment in over thirty years; it was first announced in 2015. How many projects, even government projects, are a decade in the making? For sole traders and landlords making 50k plus, everything will change.

Currently, these people submit one self-assessment tax return annually. Now, in its infinite wisdom, the British Government has increased this to five – four quarterly returns and a final one. Some people have suggested the reason for this is that there will be heavy penalties for late payment of tax. Whether or not that is the real reason, the penalties are indeed Draconian.

Of course, there are some people who are still making big profits, like the companies involved in housing, guarding and otherwise catering for the thousands of bogus asylum seekers who are continuing to pour into this country in small boats, not to mention the immigration lawyers who are making big bucks representing them at tribunals and appeal after appeal.

Unless we can get rid of this Government at the next election, or unless a significant number of its players have a change of heart, the UK will be finished as a nation. If you don’t believe that, take a walk down your local high street and count the number of empty shops. While companies go bust all the time, what we are seeing now is off the scale, and it is overwhelmingly small companies including shops and sole traders who end up on the scrap heap. Larger companies will for the most part survive because the Government regards them as a cash cow, but smaller ones which perhaps one or two people have spent years building, can go to the wall or go to Hell as far as Labour is concerned.