Brown Bread, Toast, Pegged It, Checked Out, etc

I have sympathy for not knowing the details of the rules. Trusts are a minefield, but in her situation knowing what she knows about the press it seems a serious lapse of judgement to not pay for specialist advice.

And the one-eyed replies are a decent demonstration as to why xitter is a terrible place.

Going on Twitter was your first mistake.

Avoidance itself spans a range… putting money in an ISA or pension is tax avoidance, and it goes right through to dodgy schemes that can be challenged by HMRC if they are deemed contrary to the intent of the law . I guess the easiest distinction to say (if not to apply) is that sometimes an avoidance mechanism is explicitly created by law.. usually to incentivise a certain behaviour, such as saving for retirement... whereas other times people manufacture artificial schemes to do things that the legislation never countenanced. Such mechanisms can be out there for nefarious purposes, of course.. and generally they favour the wealthy because most people just don’t have spare cash lying around to invest in the things where the tax allowances are. Tax law is manifestly biased in favour of checks notes the people who write tax law.

If parliament said ‘if you buy a bunch of properties you don’t pay this tax’ then it’s clearly an intended mechanism. Nominally, one supposes, to incentivise investment in housing (it’s economically illiterate, of course, but so is pretty much every tax, allowance and scheme that we get told is to tackle the housing issues). Yes, obviously, it’s specifically only going to benefit the very wealthy… but, nonetheless, it’s a democratically legislated tax exemption, not a loophole, and there is nothing whatsoever wrong with Hunt availing himself of it unless we have some record, perhaps, of him speaking out against the rule or, in general, decrying tax laws that benefit the wealthy. Maybe we do, probably we don’t… he doesn’t strike me as the type.

I’m just not very surprised that the Tory press is misogynistic and judges Labour politicians by different standards to Tory ones. So I can’t get very outraged by it being demonstrated.

Has anyone checked in on Tricky? There is no way he's not got opinions on this.

I'm going divert slightly and say that for once, Starmer has played this well. Supported her, to mitigate anger from Raynor's side of the party, had the process in place quickly and gracefully accepted her resignation as appropriate. I would expect all worked out behind the scenes. A couple of years mea culpa on the back benches before a potential return. Some on the left will still be disgruntled of course. Now switch the attack to Farage and his tax affairs.
Absolutely the minimum damage.

Died in your shell.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp98zg2k2xko

Hattoff

Not Living on the Ceiling

That one's a bit of a shocker, I loved Ricky. His fight v Kostya Tszyu is one of the greatest boxing matches I've ever seen.

You can leave your Hatton?

The Died of Hyde?

Actually the reason for my internet handle.