Labour Budget Inheritance Tax Architect Is UK’s Primary Wealth Tax Campaigner – Guido Fawkes

Labour Budget Inheritance Tax Architect Is UK’s Primary Wealth Tax Campaigner

mdi-fullscreen

Any Labour consideration of a wealth tax is likely to draw on the work of the UK’s chief wealth tax campaigner Arun Advani. Co-conspirators will remember the economist/activist as the architect of the government’s disastrous Farm Tax…

The wonk – who runs the high-tax campaign outfit CenTax – drew up extensive proposals for the IHT changes which appeared in the last budget. Some of the changes were based on comedically misguided analysis by Advani which claimed only 77 non-doms would leave the country as a result. He has now rolled back on his support for the discredited non-dom IHT changes of which he was also a key architect…

Advani was also a principal contributor to the “Wealth Tax Commission” out of the LSE and University of Warwick which proposed in an influential 2020 report a one-off wealth tax bombshell to rake in “one-quarter of a trillion pounds over five years.” They advocate for one of two models: a “one-off wealth tax payable on all individual wealth above £500,000 and charged at 1% a year for five years would raise £260 billion; at a threshold of £2 million it would raise £80 billion.” The proposals would be given cover by the incoming director of the ‘neutral’ Institute for Fiscal Studies Helen Miller, who said: “The case for a one-off wealth tax is simple. If it were unexpected and credibly one-off this would be an efficient way to raise revenue and could be used to address existing wealth inequality.” As with all of Advani’s schemes there are major flaws. The report admits that “delivering a one-off wealth tax from inception through to full operation would be a major undertaking,” likely to take some four years. Many prospective victims would scarper in that period and few would believe that the tax would be ‘one-off.’ The greedy Labour left would be back for more…

Arun has gleefully boasted of his links with the government – he said at Labour Conference last year that he was “optimistic” because the Labour government is “genuinely listening” to his ideas. The government has repeatedly failed to rule out a wealth tax after Neil Kinnock suggested it was considering one on Sunday. Expect them to be leafing through Advani’s one-off proposals as we speak…