Many have said, for many years, that there is no longer any difference in Left or Right. No difference between Tory and Labour, no difference between Republican and Democrat, no difference in the type of dictatorships at all. They are now finally proved, without a shadow of doubt, entirely correct.
I admit to laughing, at first, at the Socialists in America insisting that their new ‘right-wing’ government is all pally with, of all places, Soviet Russia. Isn’t that what they’d want? A deeply socialist influence on the mop-haired madman they’ve just put in power? Well, apparently Russia is now ‘right wing’ which leads us to imagine that the future they want for America is far left of Russia.
That is scarier than any story I could ever write. Even Kim Jong Jingly-Jangly would balk at that idea.
Anyway, this one is about the UK. About the alleged Conservative government (we call them Tories, which is what the Irish used to call highway robbers and it seems they were somewhat prophetic).
Their new Chancer is about to kill new startup businesses even faster than the Brown Gorgon ever did.
The Brown Gorgon brought in the idea of ‘tax on account’ whereby you pay this year’s tax and next year’s tax too. It was phased in for businesses that already existed but start one now and you pay double tax in your first year. This is why I am not keen to make a profit in this first year. You have to build your business slowly. If you are an overnight success in your first year you are dead in the water in your second year.
The Tories have done nothing to change this. Not a goddamn thing. They won’t, they are Redder than their opponent’s rosettes these days. Corbyn is probably in awe of the shit they are coming up with.
Now they want to hit the self-employed (their natural voter base) with a massive hike in tax. Oh they call it ‘National Insurance’ and claim it’s not income tax but it all falls into the same black hole of profligate waste. It’s just extra income tax.
These are the champions of entrepreneurs? Really? Not only are they happy to continue taking double tax from every attempt at a new business and kill them after their first year, those that survive will have to survive on less. Which means most will end up on benefits. That is modern Conservatism. More benefit drones, no more new startup businesses. Suits their masters.
There has been much bleating from Lefties about ‘Tory cuts’. There have been no cuts. The NHS budget has never, ever gone down. Only up. The ‘Bonfire of the Quangos’ never happened. The ‘Great Repeal Bill’ never happened. ‘Austerity’ never happened. I no longer believe any of it ever will.
‘Brexit’ isn’t really going to happen either, is it? Does anyone out there believe a single word any current politician utters? If you do, I have bad news. 100 is not the top of the IQ scale. You are not near the top.
You can whine about Trump all you want but at least he is doing what he said he would do. No other politician can say that. Didn’t O’Blimey promise to close down the Guantanamo Bay prison on his first election? It’s still there.
If you are not voting for UKIP or Marine le Pen or any other so-called ‘far right’ candidate then you are voting to live in North Korea. Oh they are ‘far right’ for sure. The ones telling you that are so ‘far left’ even Chairman Mao would have widened his eyes. No mean feat…
When the current batch of lefties talk about ‘far right’, they mean ‘normal’. Middle of the road stuff, where the laws make sense and government isn’t trying to live in riches while everyone else scrabbles for the crumbs on their bird feeders. That is where ‘far right’ is now.
I am self-employed. I have no paid holidays. If I stop work for two weeks I stop earning for two weeks. I have no pension other than what I paid into while an employee. I cannot spare the money for a pension plan.
There is no ‘maternity leave’ nor ‘paternity leave’ in my work. Okay, I’m too old to be a father again but a 20-year-old setting up a business will find that part hurts.
I have just started up a business – Leg Iron Books – and if it made so much that I was in the 40% tax bracket in the first year, then at the end of the first year I would pay 80% tax on that year. Tories have done nothing – NOTHING AT ALL – to change that. Second year, I’d be bust and on benefits. How does that help the economy?
It doesn’t. Like vampires, they suck you dry and move on to the next mug who thinks he can challenge their big-business paymasters. Try to start a business under a Tory government and they will smack you down faster than the darkest of the Communist regimes. They are not Tories. Calling them ‘right wing’ means you must be so far to the ‘left’ that Stalin needs binoculars to see you.
If you plan to start a new business, for pity’s sake don’t do it in the UK. No matter what government we get here, they will do their damnedest to slap you down.
Finally, why is America so keen to slap down Trump?
He’s not a career politician. He hasn’t been indoctrinated in ‘the way to best control the tax cattle’. He’s making mistakes but the whole of the job is new to him. I think he might turn out to be the best thing to happen to America… if they let him.
That’s really why they don’t like him.
underdogs bite upwards 
My American friends said they voted for Trump as the last hope of changing the direction of their country before it was too late. I felt that he stood out of a real love of America and a desire to put things right. He didn’t have to do it, he had plenty of money and a comfortable successful life so why else out yourself through all that.? Also he raised a close loving family who have never been involved in any scandals. He doesn’t owe any favours and, unlike the Clintons, he is not bought and paid for. Sure he has and will make mistakes, he has all the Democratic Party against him, some Republicans and most of the MSM so it won’t be easy but he is so different from any other President I think he will make it work and that’s what they fear most. I wish him luck.
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I wholeheartedly agree with you!
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I first heard this complaint from a Greek taxi driver a couple of years ago. As part of their EU-imposed austerity programme, he was compelled to pay tax up front on his ESTIMATED earnings a year in advance. What would happen if his earnings did not come up to expectation? He did not know. I wonder whether our old friend ” EU regulation” is behind this? If so, will HMG ” take back control”?
Someone I know well recently started drawing an annuity, paid once yearly, which, for some reason, could not be aggregated with other pension income and taxed in PAYE coding. This year she had to pay not only for income received in the year to April 5 2016 but up front for income which will not be received until January 2018.
There is a reasonable degree of certainty that the money will come in but what happens if the insurance company goes bust in the meantime.
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If your earnings drop, you can claim the tax back. I’ve had a rebate every year for the last 6 or 7 years. It happens because they split my tax code between the cleaning job and self-employment. I can’t be ‘not self-employed’ unless I take all my own books off sale, even if they only bring in pennies. So they always overtaxed me.
I looked at it as a kind of savings account. No interest, but then banks pay so little interest now that the difference was minimal.
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It gets worse. At the behest of their masters in Brussels, the current traitorous government is taxing everything they can think of, including phone lines, and levying VAT on things like food and electricity. They have ramped up the cost of their equivalent of NI (which for the self employed is a fixed sum, regardless of earnings, and which for people with seasonal businesses is simply unaffordable) to the point that the guys I know who have small businesses tell me that if they paid everything government demands, they would run at a loss.
The sooner Greece defaults on its debts and gets ejected from the Euro, the better it will be for everyone.
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You’re quite right – it was imposed by the EU.
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Politicians really do think we are stupid. Take the poison dwarf fish stating that PM May not acceding to all SNP demands re the EU single market is forcing the SNP into a second independence referendum! WTF, the whole point of the SNP is the break up of the UK, it is all
Sturgeon has dreamt about since she was a teenager yet May is forcing her, reluctantly, towards another referendum? Yes they really think we are stupid.
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She’s not being forced, as you say. She’s using it as an excuse.
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Hitting the self employed with NI is not a new idea. It was introduced by Gordon Brown and called IR35 if you remember?
Simple really. Companies don’t like dealing with sole traders, so many insist you are a one man limited company. This allows you to set up a company with one director – say, you – a company secretary – say, Mrs you – and two shareholders you and Mrs you.
You avoid paying NI by giving yourself and your Mrs dividends instead of salary. There’s no NI on dividends. The Gorgon didn’t like that hence IR25. So now, if you’re a one man limited company and distribute dividends you cn, under certain circumstances, be treated as if they were paid as salary which attracts not only NI but employers NI as well. It’s designed to force you into taking a ‘proper’ job.
One problem I have with your argument comes from the article you quoted “The Chancellor is reported to be planning a rise in National Insurance rates for the self-employed in tomorrow’s Budget to bring them closer to the level paid by those in salaried jobs.” Where is your argument that self employed people should pay lower NI than employed people? How is this unfair, rather than simply equitable?
And another thing : “‘The reality is that there isn’t parity – the self-employed struggle with pensions, find it harder to get a mortgage, get fewer maternity rights and so on. Life is a lot tougher.” Yes, life is different if you’re self employed. I was self employed for twenty years before retiring at 52. How did I manage it so young? Well, simple really – I earned a damn site more that I would have done as an employee which compensated for the accompanying risk factors. Tougher, no. Different, yes. It requires disciplined financial control.
You’ve made one big mistake with your new venture if you’re paying 40% tax. You ought to be a limited company. Corporation tax is paid in arrears. Your tax on profits for the year ended March 2017 would be payable next January and your first three years tax would be based on the profits of the lower of the first three years thus giving you tax breaks to get started. And bear in mind that business start up costs are tax deductible.
I sympathise, but you’re simply wrong. Tax is complicated and, at the risk of sounding condescending, is beyond the comprehensive grasp of the average layman. You really, really need to get yourself a good accountant. It’ll pay for itself.
(Incidentally, I’m a chartered accountant!)
PS: If you’re not VAT registered then you should be. It’ll help your cash flow.
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Where is your argument that self employed people should pay lower NI than employed people? How is this unfair, rather than simply equitable?
In which case, the self-employed can expect the same benefits when it all goes wrong. Except that we don’t as I discovered to my cost. Paid in all those years and the only help I got was JSA. Fuck all else, so no, I do not expect to have my pocket picked to the same extent as the employed, because I stand to get less if or when I actually need that safety net. And I had to fight to get the pittance that I did manage to squeeze out of the bastards.
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I refuse to get into another argument with you because you don’t listen. Just read what I wrote. It answered your question…
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I did read it. I understood it perfectly and made a perfectly valid point.
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I refer you to my previous answer
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I’m a long way from higher rate tax on this business. In fact, this first year will end with a small loss. Deliberately. Next year will be a little better, the year after a little better again, and so on.
Last time I had a big redundancy package to start with so I could take the double tax hit in the first year. If you can get past that first year it gets easier – second year tax is paid so what they want is the third year’s tax on account.
The bugger is at the end, if the business drops off suddenly. Then you have no income and still one more tax bill. That was a hard year.
Sure, you can claim it back in the following tax year but you still have to get through that first one with nothing.
Anyway, I survived it and I’m on the way back. This time I’ll take it slow and pile up a bit of reserve – disciplined financial control was never my strong point 😉
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The other sting is that you have to try and work out what you might earn. If you under estimate, you not only have to top it up, the bastards can screw you for interest on the difference.
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Leggy, I think that alongside the error of not employing an accountant, you are also making the mistake of assuming that the Government is acting in enlightened self-interest here. It is not; it is in fact acting on whatever the interests of those who are bribing the politicians are.
IR35 is a case in point. A long while ago, the Government used to employ a lot of highly skilled civil servants, whose job it was to offer impartial advice on all manner of things, and to conduct work on behalf of government. In a short-sighted attempt to cut costs, most of these people were gotten rid of in favour of employing external contractors on government projects.
Pretty much all of these contractors were operating as contractor workers; paying no NI etc, but receiving no holidays or any of the other perks of standard employment. In return, they had no security of employment and were thus an extremely flexible workforce.
Just recently, the government (mostly the thuggish brutes in HMRC) has decided that these contractors represent a segment of the working population hitherto undertaxed, a failing that they aim to put right. So, the definitions of IR35 are being amended such that pretty much all of these contractors now fall under it, and thus must pay as per normal employees despite receiving none of the normal perks.
This is stunningly unfair, and as almost none of these people have the means or motivation to take on HMRC in the courts and win (HMRC also has an annoying habit of ignoring court verdicts that go against it), the decision is going through pretty much unchallenged. As a result, there are now hordes of former contractors looking for permanent employment, and a forthcoming dearth of people willing to take on contracts, not even at pay rates of 30-40% above the previous levels.
HMRC has thus shot the government in the foot; to rake in an extra few tens of millions, it will have cost government over double that, as well as destroying the pool of contract labour that government was relying on to complete a large number of government projects.
Governments aren’t at all smart, is the message.
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I’m not yet earning enough to pay an accountant. The day will come…
No, they’re not smart at all. They are going to hike driving insurance and grab more from private landlords too. Which means higher transport costs and higher rents.
They can’t seem to grasp that when they hit ‘the rich’, it’s us at the bottom who always, ultimately, pay the bill.
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And there was me thinking they were hitting everybody. Silly me…
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Very true, my late husband was a contractor for about 20 years, usually working away from home in England, we lived in Scotland then after several years abroad. IR35 ruined the market as no way you could pay all that and travel costs. He was incredibly lucky that the company he worked for offered him a permanent job, we moved to England and he worked for them for 10 years before his sudden death. Contracting was quite a small world and I don’t know of many others who found permanent work as most were in their late 40s/50s. Why they had to meddle with a system that worked in everyone’s interest I will never know!
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It was the politics of envy. Labour don’t like free enterprise. They want everybody in employment and in unions. The only exception was themselves. Everyone else was to be screwed and controlled.
I retired when IR35 came in and then 9/11 killed all the jobs because the yanks panicked. After that rates dropped, tax increased and you had to travel further for work. I gave it a couple of years then thought to hell with it!
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And I forgot to mention – you don’t pay 40% tax on all your income if you hit the threshold. Only on the bit over the threshold which is £43,000 (£32,000 threshold plus the £11,000 personal allowance) so if you’re making £50,000 you pay 20% on £32,000 plus 40% on £7,000
On the other hand, small company corporation tax is at 20% up to £250,000 dropping to 17% in 2020/21.
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