John Caudwell, Social Care

                                               Tax

Monte Carlo and Monaco from Cap Martin, Laurits Bernhard Holst (1848-1934)

Photo Credit: Russell- Cotes Art Gallery & Museum [CC BY-NC-ND]

The billionaire founder of Phones4U has threatened to leave Britain and move to Monaco if Jeremy Corbyn becomes prime minister.

John Caudwell, 65, who sold his mobile phone business for £1.5 billion in 2006, said that if the Labour leader won a general election “we’d just go and live in the south of France or Monaco. Why stay here and be raped?”

…Labour has proposed a 50 per cent tax rate on people earning more than £125,000 and a 45 per cent rate for those earning over £80,000 a year. At present the higher rate is 40 per cent on earnings between £50,000 and £150.000, and 45 per cent above £150,000.

In 2013 Mr Caudwell said that he had paid £253 million in tax since 2008 which, he argued, was 66 times more than Google.

…According to the Sunday Times Rich List 2018 he is the UK’s 87^th richest person, with an estimated £1.6 billion.

(The Times, 2019)

 Your point about Google is fair. But you have one thousand six hundred million pounds and you’re grumbling about the possibility of paying a few extra million. Just go.

The Old Man, Francis Reily (b.1858)

Photo Credit: Atkinson Art Gallery Collection
[CC BY-NC-SA]

*Tax rises should be introduced to fund a system that provides a standard level of social care for all elderly people in England in the same way as the basic state pension, a senior Conservative has said.

The Tory MP and former minister Damian Green added that older people should be encouraged to top up their care by paying additional elements.

In a report for the Centre for Policy Studies, a think tank, Mr Green calculated that introducing a free entitlement to basic care at home would cost about £2.5 billion extra a year. To pay for this he suggested that the winter fuel allowance, a tax-free payment of between £100 and £300, be withdrawn from pensioners who pay higher rate income tax. This would raise about £350 million a year. The rest could be funded with extra money from the Treasury’s spending review or, in the longer term, by imposing an additional national insurance rate of 1 per cent on the over 50s. This would mean older taxpayers paid an extra £308 a year and would raise £2.4 billion.

The report suggested that a standard entitlement to universal social care would include a set number of hours of care at home per week or a bed in a care home with a minimum level of service, with people able to make top-up payments for extra services.

(The Times, 2019)

                 Why isn’t the winter fuel allowance and the television license fee means-tested?

*One of Private Eye’s entries for the 2019 Paul Foot awards for investigative and campaigning journalism was Tom Kelly of the Daily Mail.

The Daily Mail’s Tom Kelly infiltrated the industrial scale phenomenon of the fake tax demand, whereby innocent people were harassed over the phone by callers claiming to be from HM Revenue and Customs, demanding they immediately transfer thousands of pounds in “missed” tax payments or face jail. Kelly showed how scammers making up to 10,000 calls a day had extorted thousands of pounds from vulnerable people.

(Private Eye, No 1497)

  If you are at home alone and you don’t know the person ringing you just put the phone down.