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@DanielPriestley You were brilliant here, I’ve shown this clip to so many people

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@UKHospKate @andyburnham Nothing on his supposed support for 10% VAT for hospitality

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Manc-a-Lago

[Politics UK @PolitlcsUK]

🚨 NEW: Andy Burnham will create a "No 10 in the North" that will move parts of the Downing Street operation to Manchester

[@FT]

[Daniel Priestley @DanielPriestley]

The next PM is excited to harness the energy of @garyseconomics’s mob.

This will mean the UK will become the next failed experiment on wealth taxes.

How can I be so sure that wealth taxes won’t work? Let me count the ways they will be a disaster…

- the UK is already the highest taxed place to be a top earner or wealthy. More taxes at the top will push more away than it collects.

- The engine room of the economy is digital assets that can based anywhere. The only wealth that will be taxed is old money fortunes tied up in real estate… the new fortunes will leave the anti-wealth UK.

- wealth is highly subjective. It’s never a clean number like income or an actual sale. Wealth is a forecast, a projection, a useful guess. Hence it can be litigated and debated - and it will. Wealth taxes tie up the courts.

- it’s not being introduced because it works, it’s being introduced because people are angry. Mostly they are angry at Elon, Jeff, Mark and Larry… all the American Billionaires who will be buying up deflated UK assets after wealth taxes set fire to their valuations. The mob wants blood that is out of reach.

- there’s not that much to tax. The UKs billionaires are already leaving. The total wealth held by billionaires in the UK is sub £700B (less than Elon’s wealth). There’’s only technically 150 of them remaining and most have already started to leave. I’d be amazed if the tax collects more than a few billion.

- this tax is going to end up destroying the middle class. Mark my words… when the rich leave the middle class have to cover the gap that they leave behind. One way that will happen is that they will use the wealth tax framework to tax nice family homes, mind sized businesses, decent sized pension pots. It will be a race to the bottom.

- Wealth taxes have been tried 15 times and tolled back 12. The only places that have wealth taxes don’t have IHT or CGT. Wealthy people pay less than they otherwise would have. It’s a wealth tax in name only. The UK has wealth taxes now in practice (School VAT, IHT, Stamp Duty,etc) but not in name.

Anyway, if it is the will of the people then so be it. I will be advising entrepreneurs to look elsewhere though - it simply doesn’t make sense to build something of value in a country that despises value creation.

[Josh Hunt @iAmJoshHunt]

I'll tell you what I don't like, Darren. I can't speak for everyone, but these are my thoughts…

I don't like a tax burden at its highest level since 1948, under your government and the last, producing the weakest growth in a generation. And worsening public services to boot.

I don't like a 46% hike in the minimum wage for under-21s in three years that's helped push UK youth unemployment to 16.1%, above the eurozone average. I want young people paid more, earned through growth, not handed down by decree that squashes the rungs above them and tells a skilled forty-year-old their two decades of graft are worth precisely the same as someone walking through the door on Monday morning.

I don't like industrial electricity prices that are the highest of any IEA country reporting. Full stop. UK steelmakers pay 40% more than their French competitors. You don't build a future of advanced manufacturing on those numbers.

I don't like a planning system that takes longer to consent a pylon than to build one, business rates that punish high-street enterprise, and employment costs that turn every hire into a risk.

I don't like watching world-class British research get commercialised in Boston and Palo Alto because the capital, the talent and the regulatory patience aren't here. They're fleeing.

I don't like long-term borrowing costs at their highest level in over 25 years, eating into every budget for schools, hospitals and defence before a penny is spent.

I don't like the OECD saying that we're going to be the hardest hit economy as a result of a conflict in the Middle East that's got nothing to do with us. All because we've made ourselves weak and vulnerable.

I don't like a government that confuses 'raising money' with 'creating wealth'. Or 'standing against unearned wealth' with taxing to death the people who actually make things happen in this country.

You don't lift children out of poverty by strangling the economy that pays for their schools. You do it by letting Britain grow again. Letting it play to its abundance of strengths.

In this case, I feel the best way is for government to get the hell out of the way.