Robin Hood and the so-called “Robin Hood Tax” have very little in common. Robin Hood stole from the rich oppressive state (aka the Sheriff of Nottingham/Prince John) and gave it back to the people whose it had been in the first place, whose labour had generated it, before it was unjustly “taxed” away.
This “tiny” tax (which for all its supposed miniscule size is claimed to be able to generate $400bn per year!) works by taxing every single financial transactions, such as buying shares, trading currencies, and derivatives from across the …

Under Conservative plans to bury the “Zac Goldsmith is a non-dom and Michael Ashcroft might be” news stories, all members of the UK Parliament – both the House of Commons and the House of Lords – will be required to be, or be treated as, a UK taxpayer.
A new law will be introduced immediately after a Conservative general election victory making all peers and MPs have to pay UK taxes.
This is precisely the sort of move that is necessary both from a PR and political point of view. It shows …

The Lib Dems just can’t seem to separate themselves from the tax-and-spend mentality, can they? Not matter how much Nick Clegg tries to make his party grow up, they just can’t get past the “juvenile” stage. Maybe it has something to do with the type of person who joins the Lib Dems…
But anyway, back to the point.
As is a Lib Dem tradition, they are proposing more tax rises. Maybe they’re just being honest, you could say. If only. Rather they’re trying to institute a tax of envy, applying to anyone …

Isn’t Labour supposed to be the party of the poor? Don’t they proclaim that their raison d’etra is helping the poor? Then how can a Labour government propose to cut the income of the poorest families in the UK?
The reason for this is to “save the taxpayer money”. But how much will this supposedly save? £160 million – peanuts, in other words, in comparison with government expenditure. But how much will it cost many of those on low incomes who claim the housing allowance? Up to £15 per week, £780 …

Gordon Brown is facing yet another bankbench rebellion – but this over something he put in place before he even became Prime Minister, back in the 2007 Budget (but didn’t come in to force until after the 2008 Budget): the abolition of the 10p tax rate.
This was – and is – opposed by the Conservatives and the Lib Dems at the time and since. But Labour MPs have now – more than two years after it was announced and more than a year after it come in to force – …

I love the phrase, support the concept, and want it to be rolled out wherever public money is spent.
It’s our money, and we should be able to be properly informed in what it is actually being spent on. Getting that information at the moment is virtually impossible and actually understanding it completely beyond most of us (definitely for myself anyway).
I want to be able to see precisely what my money is spent on by my parish council, district council, county council, the government, and all other taxpayer funded services. Am …

It’s nice to see some:

The big discussion in British politics for the foreseeable future will be how to tackle the debt crisis and deliver quality public services when spending is tight, and Gordon Brown has taken his party to the sidelines of that discussion. Believe me, I have seen what happens when political parties refuse to face the facts of the modern world. It condemns them to irrelevancy for a generation.
That does not mean the Conservative Party can escape our own challenge. We, like Labour politicians, have fought shy of …

… when the Chancellor of the Exchequer needs to hire accountants to work out how much tax he should be paying. Of all people, you would have thought that the Chancellor would understand the tax rules and be able to work out his own tax burden!
It shows that:

The tax system is too complicated, and/or
The Chancellor doesn’t under the tax system.

Neither are exactly good for Darling (or Brown)!
For what it’s worth, I can’t see that much of a problem with these Cabinet ministers claiming for tax accounting – they do, after …

… says two thirds of the electorate.
Rather than the Labour Party way of taxing, spending, borrowing, taxing and then spending some more, people are seeing through the false benefits of this and seeing the long-term damage that they have caused.
Britain didn’t save any money when times were good and the economy thriving. In fact, the opposite action was taken. Instead of fixing the roof whilst the sun was shining, Labour let rooftiles fall off and foundations rot, but put in new luxury carpets.
Now we are paying for it. Suffering badly …

Of pretty much all of the proposed ways to fund university education, I think that the NUS’ is actually the best. They propose a graduate tax, based on income, rather than the excessive charges that universities seem to want students to pay – from the £3,000 each year today to £6,500!
This at the same time as they are claiming a salary of around £194,000 per annum for their services.
A graduate tax would mean that those who earn most from their degree pay most – and mean that students no longer …