Tax Policy Associates

> The data in the article proves Gary's point. Not only is income tax brought in less now, but more taxes are VAT Does the article data show that? Looking at the tax % graph the ratio between Income+NI and VAT+Stamp duties has been pretty constant (apart from a brief time in the 70s) https://taxpolicy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/image-1.png.webp > In other words, the poorer people in society are taking on a bigger share of taxes. Seems unlikely. The article shows that high earners are paying are far greater share of income tax. Poorer people would need to be buying a crazy amount more stuff to offset that with VAT. The UK is in a fairly unique position where its GDP per capita has been stagnant for decades. Which means it's slowly sinking under inflation. It's been going on for so long that the people at the bottom of the boat are now drowning (which I agree is deeply unfair). But no amount of redistributing people between the decks is going to actually fix the problem.

One of the biggest problems with the DMCA is that it is unaccountable for those submitting legal claims anonymously. They should have to identify themselves to submit a legal claim of ownership. > https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2024/02/17/the-invisible-campaign-to-censor-t… To remove something from google's search they copy the text, they create a fake website / company with a URL with copied text then submit a DMCA claim saying theirs is the original. Google automatically rubberstamp approves it and the URL/text they want removed from the search index is removed. There's a simple and easy solution: there should be "know your customer" for claimaints for laws requiring companies to follow up on legal claims like DMCA reports. KYC is obviously socially accepted and easily implemented since it's being required for so many other things. The whole basis of an adversarial legal system is that you need two legal persons on either side. This is a context in which you have to wonder why it isn't already like that.

My wife and I watched Mr Bates vs the Post Office, recently, it was one of those watches where you spend a lot of time yelling "How the fuck?! What the fuck?!" at the screen because the malice and dishonesty was so deliberate, so persistently maintained, lest the "brand" be sullied. I've been following this story for years, I know BBC's Panorama covered it in 2015, and was really surprised there wasn't more of an outcry in the UK about such blatant unfairness, guess technical cases like this are really helped by a TV drama with quality actors making it easily accessible to the general population, as soon as ITV aired the miniseries, the petition to have Vennall's CBE stripped jumped from 7K signatures to 700K+, and she said she would return it. (not the golden handshakes and "performance" bonuses though lol) I just can't believe that no-one has been held criminally accountable (yet) for the sheer (to quote the judges in the civil case) affront to justice that this represented - whether it was Post Office Limited (POL) misleading (well, lying to) the courts, or Fujitsu employees lying in prosecutions, or POL deliberately withholding evidence in their role as a prosecutor (wild that this power to prosecute as transferred from Royal Mail to the spun off entity), and some of the cynically legalistic games they played (like asking the judge to recuse himself for being biased against them, to further delay the outcome of the civil suit). And the crap they pulled with the Second…

Paywalled. Alternative source at https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2026/07/25/scotland-48p-top-rate-laffer-curve…

Also at £100k you start to lose your tax-free personal allowance. The commitment of successive governments to avoid raising taxes on "ordinary working people" has created a bizarrely inconsistent tax regime for above-average earners, where people earning £65k could end up paying a much higher marginal rate than people earning £165k. https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2024/10/17/reform-income-tax-end-the-scandal-…

There is no logic to it. It's just the US going insane and Americans nodding along. https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2025/04/02/no-vat-isnt-a-tariff-but-the-us-wo… https://iccwbo.org/news-publications/news/are-value-added-taxes-a-barr… https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/31/as-trump-reciprocal-tariffs-near-econo… etc, etc. The only reasonable reply as a consumer and/or cloud-service purchaser: Economic wide-scale boycott of the US.

I’m 33, in the U.K. and my marginal tax rate is currently 66.7%, because the support you get for having children gets withdrawn between £60000 and £80000. If a promotion came up I would take it but it’s also at a point where I’m considering already dropping down to four days a week because of this. I don’t live in London so my life is very affordable. Save myself money on children’s nursery for a few years too… https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2024/03/10/infographic_marginal_rates_2024/

I think this is usually a problem which is more easily solved by better funding tax authorities and installing better oversight rather than by making it easier for people to not pay tax. I think most people's tax affairs are pretty clear-cut to assess (e.g. if you are an individual earning an income or run a small business). People who structure their tax affairs in convoluted ways where it becomes non-trivial to work out what the correct amount of tax they should be paying is (or even a question which can't really be answered until you are in caught) generally have a lot of money or are trying something stupid (e.g. trying to pay yourself your salary as a loan through an offshore company where the tax authority are obviously going to think this is illegal, see https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2024/01/18/barrowman_fraud).

A PR firm accused of spamming people from fake profiles created using stolen photos of real people issues a take-down notice of article alleging their bad business practices. Original article here: https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2023/11/23/shady_scam_mogul_press/

In case that gives the wrong impression, UK marginal tax rates are a ridiculous mess, and come down below 60% again when you earn £125K+. https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2023/09/24/70percent/

They offer token settlements, require the victim to provide lots of evidence they wouldn't have, and expect them to pay for their own lawyers to invoke legal arcana that would get them a just compensation. https://www.taxpolicy.org.uk/2024/01/11/hss_scandal/

Well, the usual millionaires fleeing data for the Uk is the Henley & Partners report[0] (a wealth management firm, which is not a reputable source for these statistics, they simply want to attract clients, so its advertising). That reports 16,500 millionaires leaving the UK in 2025. This report has been critisiced, with the data likely compeltely or partially fabricated [1]. [2] provides a graph for millionaires by year (note covid data unreliable) and you can see the number remains steady, so therefore if there was net migration it must be made up for by new millionaires anyway. In fact [3] (with UBS data) suggests the number of millionaires went up by 20% between 2017 and 2025 in the uk, despite 2% migration. [0]: https://www.ftadviser.com/content/e80ff28f-97fb-4e85-811f-c07c067b772a [1]: https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2025/07/27/henley-partners-millionaire-migrat… [2]: https://taxjustice.net/press/millionaire-exodus-did-not-occur-study-re… [3]: https://taxjustice.net/press/millionaire-exodus-claim-backtracked-but-…

You haven't actually cited any studies, just "I haven't heard anyone say anything". We have transaction taxes in the UK, on shares (stamp duty) and on property (stamp duty land tax). They are awful. SDLT used to be lower, around 1%, but it crept up as it's an easy tax to raise politically, the top band is now at 12%. [The government's own modelling of SDLT is incredible](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/responsiveness-of-commercia… A 1% change in the effective tax rate results in almost a 12% change in the number of commercial transactions and a 5-7% change in the number of residential transactions. This effect still happens at lower thresholds, it's just less dramatic, but it's still distortionary. If you tax something, you get less of it, and why do you want people to move less? If you prefer anecdotes, these days it's very common to rent in the UK until you can buy a longer term home, rather than buying a starter home. I know very few people who _haven't_ done exactly that, you don't want to pay SDLT on somewhere you'll only live for a few years. Stamp duty on shares (0.5%) is also widely panned by experts: https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2024/10/15/how-to-reform-stamp-duty-on-shares… It raises very little, distorts the market hugely, it is a large reason that companies choose to list overseas. Sales taxes are a (bad) form of consumption tax (VAT is…

> That point is that capital tends to move away from places with high taxes toward those with lower taxes passed a certain threshold. What's in dispute is where that threshold is, and how steep the curve before/after it. (It looks more like this, in other words: https://taxpolicy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/image-18.png) Per Wiki: "A 2011 study by Trabandt and Uhlig published in the Journal of Monetary Economics estimated a 70% revenue maximizing rate, and estimated that the US and most European economies were on the left of the Laffer curve (in other words, that raising taxes would raise further revenue). A 2005 study concluded that with the exception of Sweden, no major OECD country could increase revenue by reducing the marginal tax rate." > You mean like this Norwegian "test"? Others have pointed out that the (uncited!) numbers in this advertisement targeted at the mega-wealthy seem to be plain old made up (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45930222), so yes.

The Henley and partners analysis isn't very good, but nor is this, both are from biased sources. It seems to amount to "that isn't a large proportion" rather than looking at the trend. Dan Neidle[1] and the FT[2] have already done much better debunking of it, although that doesn't mean there isn't truth to it, just that Henley and Partners's report doesn't prove anything. Chris Giles at the FT did a good summary[3] [1] https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2025/07/27/henley-partners-millionaire-migrat… [2] https://www.ft.com/content/28ebf57d-af22-48a0-91b9-880e3f1fb778 https://archive.is/w6New [3] https://www.ft.com/content/0a24be5e-395e-43db-a91f-4b4f02d99f1a https://archive.is/Le05V