Once again, Reform’s ‘Robin Hood tax’ seems to be a multi-billion pound giveaway to the already extremely wealthy

Reform UK is up to their usual tricks in terms of misleading us about the impact of their “make the very rich even richer” economic policies.

This comes from their announcement of a “Britannia Card”, the details of which are available here. But in summary, this card would allow anyone who wants to move to the UK, or already has “non-dom” status – meaning that they chose to make another country their home for tax purposes – opt out of paying any tax at all on their wealth, income or capital gains earned abroad if they are prepared to make a one-off payment of £250,000. It’s basically a way for the very rich to buy themselves a ticket out of a lot of our tax system.

These payments would then be divided up and given tax-free to the lowest 10% of full-time workers, giving them something like £600-1000 each.

It’s being called a Robin Hood tax– redistributing much-needed money from the rich to the poor. What’s not to love about that?

Well, quite a lot.

Tax Policy Associates runs through several concerns.

Firstly, it’s quite obviously a blatant method for the mega rich to buy themselves out of their normal obligations. £250,000 sounds a lot to most of us – but is it to the truly wealthy? Especially given it’s a one off payment.

Let’s imagine someone who would otherwise be due to pay tax on £1 billion. £250,000 represents a 0.025% fraction of their wealth. Basic income tax payers in the UK have to pay 20% tax on anything above their personal threshold, and up to another 8% if they need to pay national insurance. Quite the difference.

And the basic rate tax payer needs to pay this continuously – whereas the £250,000 is a one-off payment.

This comparison isn’t really a fair reflection of what would happen as the situation for non-doms is still, even after recent changes, rather more favourable in terms of off-shore tax than what normal British citizens have to pay.

Nonetheless, it has been calculated that it would still constitute a whacking great loss to the UK state, exempting the super rich from providing a tax intake of substantially more than the £250,000 lifetime fee would.

Tax Policy Associates calculate the immediate cost to the state – and hence the benefit to the very rich – of this as being at least £34 billion over four years. That’s because all the people who are already in Britain currently subjected to tax, but are eligible for the Britannia Card for a one-off payment, will stop paying that part of their tax.

The proposal would give a windfall gain to a relatively small number of very wealthy people who were planning to stay here and pay UK tax, but will now pay the £250k fee instead. That’s tax that now won’t be received, and there will be no wider economic benefit (because these people were already going to be here).
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The £33.9bn reflects tax raised from a small number of very wealthy people who would opt to buy a Britannia card and so pay no tax – it’s therefore revenue immediately lost by Reform UK’s proposal.

Their analysis goes into why they think even this is an underestimate.

The director of another think tank, CenTax, agrees:

But Dr Arun Advani, director of think tank CenTax, told The i Paper that the proposal would cost taxpayers £34bn over five years, citing estimates from the Office for Budget Responsibility for 2024/25 to 2029/30.

Even if non-doms spend £2.5bn on “Britannia Cards”, the £34bn in lost tax receipts effectively means foreigners would get a tax cut of at least £31bn, he said.

“Cost to the state” of course inevitably means even more cuts to state provided services or increases for other types of tax – those that more normal citizens have to pay.

As the i Paper reports:

Dr Advani said the £34bn cost was a “big problem” that would force Reform to raise taxes, cut spending or increase borrowing.

The Labour party agrees, calling it a bonanza for billionaires.

…Ellie Reeves, the Labour chair, said it was “quite simply a bonanza for billionaires”.

“Not only is this a golden giveaway to the rich, but experts warn this will leave a massive black hole in the country’s finances that working people will be left to pick up the bill for,” she added.

Tax Policy Associates details two other problems they see with the policy.

First, it would discourage most the high-skill professionals we increasingly need to benefit our country from moving here. They wouldn’t be able to afford the immediate £250,000 payment – and if you don’t pay it then you have to pay full tax on your foreign income – which is actually a big tax increase from today’s rules.

Whilst the proposal makes the UK more attractive to the very wealthy, it makes the UK much less attractive to the highly skilled and highly paid professionals we want to attract into the UK – for example doctors, coders, senior scientists and entrepreneurs. The effect of the Conservative and Labour reforms is that these new arrivals would be exempt from tax on foreign income for four years without paying anything. That’s attractive because high earners will often have assets/savings back home, and having those savings taxed in the UK is unattractive.

Secondly, you have to convince those taking advantage of the offer that the one-off lifetime payment for tax exemption will indeed last forever. The non-dom tax situation has been changed a lot over time by various government. Tax Policy Associates struggle to believe that many of the super rich would take a punt on the idea that the lifetime offer is in fact going to last their lifetime.

It also highlights something about their immigration policy. Reform tend to be virulently anti-immigrant. But the stated purpose of this proposal is to attract foreigners to our shores. But only extremely rich ones. So they do seem to like a certain type of immigration – it’s just very much limited to their billionaire friends.

None of this “give more money to the mega-rich” impact probably comes as a particular surprise to many people though given the general tendency of their economic policies to favour the rich far more than that average working person they pretend to care so much about. Reform UK is a party / business of the rich, for the rich.

Reform councillor to face standards committee for skipping more than 40% of his meetings

A Reform councillor in Powys, Karl Lewis, is not living up to the stated standards of his colleague elsewhere Jo Monk who said that councillors who miss meetings should quit (before missing most of her own meetings and not quitting) having only attended 59% of the meetings he was supposed to.

This is low enough that he is due to be hauled in front of the council’s standards committee in order to explain why he’s skipped so many of his elected duties.

When the democratic services officer phoned Lewis about this: “He said he would get back to me about it”.

And then, inevitably, didn’t.

Reform shares an photo of an road in Texas, USA in order to criticise Labour’s record in Bracknell

The Reform party in Bracknell apparently posted this extremely strange graphic on their Facebook when fighting the town council by-election.

Reform Facebook post showing a photo of a flooded road

I’m really not sure what the icons on the right are supposed to represent – a ban on plunging your toilet? – but the general idea was for the photo to highlight “Labour’s neglect of our roads”.

The only issue with that is that the road depicted is in a totally different country. It’s a stock image of a road in Texas, US.

Well, actually, that’s not the only issue to be honest. Apparently the duties of the town council position being fought for actually have very little to do with roads anyway. Roads are the job of a borough councillor – a totally different job.

Labour councillor Bailey says:

Reform, meanwhile, care so little about our community that they’re busy producing campaign materials about the state of roads in Texas. The Reform candidate also does not seem to be aware that roads are the responsibility of Bracknell Forest council, not the town council which he is standing for.

So it’s yet another instance of Reform making promises that their candidates will do things that they could not even in theory work on given the position they’re seeking.

Reform’s latest candidate for Mendip ward is an ex-police officer who was sacked for ‘inappropriate misuse of his position of authority’ having ‘truly lost his moral compass’

Stuart Ball is the Reform candidate for the forthcoming Mendip Ward council election.
He’s an ex police officer.

However, becoming a councillor wasn’t a conscious career change choice on his part. He was dismissed from the police force on account of his wildly inappropriate behaviour.

The impropriety consisted of a “misuse of his position”, which is especially concerning for someone who claims they want to be a public servant.

The story itself is almost comically strange, if this wasn’t a person who was standing for a position of power anyway. PC Ball found an actual ball in a shop that the assistant rightfully told him wasn’t for sale so PC Ball the assistant of an imaginary crime.

…his son had found a basketball while the family was shopping in a Sports Direct in August 2018, which staff said was lost property and not for sale.

The panel heard that Mr Ball claimed “finder’s rights”, ordered a shop assistant to the police station, and got into a “heated” exchange with the shop manager who asked him to leave.

The manager took the ball to Wells Police Station the following day and complained about Mr Ball’s behaviour, whereupon Mr Ball accused the manager of theft and threatening violence.

A statement from the chair of the misconduct panel that investigated the issue said:

This was a ridiculous and disproportionate spat over an item of trivial value.

“PC X’s demonstrable behaviour in the shop was bullying, disrespectful and a wholly disproportionate and inappropriate misuse of his position of authority as a police officer.

The allegation against PC X is that he dishonestly tried to criminalise people for offences he knew had not been committed in order to excuse his own behaviour — just about the most serious thing an officer of the law can be accused of.

We find it astonishing that PC X can still say that he does not believe he has done anything wrong. He truly lost his moral compass.

Reform are seeking welfare policy advice from the dangerous autocrat Viktor Orban – a man whose policies actually exacerbate inequality

The Times reports that Reform, rarely a party to thoughtfully come up with their own ideas, have been actively seeking advice from none other that Viktor Orban, the extremely illiberal prime minister Hungary.

On a recent trip to Budapest, Reform officials sought advice from aides to Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, on welfare policy…

Orban’s welfare policies have been described as “a social catastrophe” for Hungary – they do little to actually help the people that most need assistance.

They make poor people poorer.

Severe austerity measures were implemented with respect to both the availability and level of social benefits, which has led to a significant decline in the poverty-reduction effect of cash transfers. Eligibility for disability benefits has been severely restricted and tens of thousands of former beneficiaries have partially or entirely lost this support—frequently in unfair revaluations—and approximately half a million long-term jobless citizens do not receive any social benefits at all. The incomes of those living in deep poverty were further decreased by setting the wages paid in the ever-more-extensive workfare programmes below the statutory minimum wage.

They are anti-worker, favouring fat cat bosses.

Changes in labour law has—by intensifying the insecurity of wage labourers—further increased the power inequality between capital and labour, whereas the curtailment of the right to strike and the abolition of tripartite negotiations will ensure that this predicament persists. Government employees in particular, including teachers, have good reason to fear arbitrary dismissal as retaliation for expressing their political discontent.

Their policies to help parents are aimed at those that are already reasonably wealthy:

The government’s family policy favours the more well-to-do through generous tax benefits which are inaccessible to poorer families, while the real value of universal family assistance has been continuously decreasing

Overall, increasing inequality:

Hungary’s family policies have been designed to only benefit certain kinds of Hungarians….access seems to only be limited to citizens who are already well off in Hungarian society. One of Hungary’s own demographers has stated that that “scheme targets the most affluent people and increases inequality, which is probably a world first among such programs” and has created a “perverse redistribution.”[

And are only in any case accessible to people who fit Orban’s ideal of the perfect family.

Hungary’s family policies explicitly bar certain Hungarians from participating. Unmarried and divorced mothers cannot access many of the subsidies. Further, LGBT Hungarians are also barred from receiving benefits, leaving out potentially hundreds of thousands of Hungarians.

Being seemingly based on an idiotic conspiracy theory:

Orban has explicitly framed his family policies as a possible solution to the great replacement conspiracy theory – a theory purporting that global elites are seeking to replace white westerners with black and brown immigrants

They promote inequality between the sexes:

The government (which was formed in 2010 exclusively by men) frequently frames family policies with an explicit affirmation of segregated, unequal gender roles, where women are caregivers and men are breadwinners.

And are prejudicial against LGBT people:

In 2020, the country amended its constitution to exclude same sex couples from the definition of “family.”

They help those with higher incomes get housing:

Housing policy in Hungary has long been biased toward those with higher incomes, with disproportionately low public expenditures in support of low-income housing. However, the government has recently decided to discontinue all state responsibility for the provision of housing assistance.

Perhaps we should not be all that surprised that Reform are enchanted by Hungary’s welfare system given the manifold evidence that Reform, despite all their “man of the people” schtick, actually wants to go out of its way to help the super rich get richer at the expense of the poor; that they promote anti-worker policies, and are run by Nigel Farage – someone who appears to have real admiration for Orban’s anti-democratic, anti-civil rights, nationalist and autocratic regime.

Farage of course appeared at the same sort of conferences that Orban attends and promotes a similarly dangerous, pretty insane, conspiracy theory to his audience. Memorably, Farage said that:

The biggest threat we face is the fifth column in all our countries that is attempting to destroy the family unit, Judeo-Christian Culture

Our children are being indoctrinated. Our universities have become madrassas of Marxism, and it needs to change,”

Already it seems like Reform’s opportunistic but morally correct claim that they’d abandon the two child benefit cap might well come with some serious limitations. From their chats with Orban’s administration, Reform are apparently:

…enthused by one of their suggestions: lifting the two-child benefit cap only for working mothers.

Reform MP Sarah Pochin accused of lying in order to create fear and confusion

Reform MP Sarah Pochin is back, falling out with a wide arrange of leaders in the area she represents based on continuing to make “incorrect and critical” public claims designed only to evoke “fear and confusion” in those people she is supposed to be representing.

In a strongly-worded joint statement, Labour’s Halton Council leader Cllr Mike Wharton, council community safety chief Cllr Andrea Wall, and Cheshire Police and Crime Commissioner Dan Price said Reform MP Sarah Pochin had made a string ‘incorrect and critical’ outbursts about the town, but had not provided evidence for any of them.

Runcorn & Widnes world report on the nature of the claims she made. No surprises here, it’s exactly what you’d expect of her:

Mrs Pochin has made a series of allegations, including that houses of multiple occupation (HMOs) in Runcorn are hotbeds for serious crime, drug dealing, trafficking, prostitution, and grooming. She also claimed local people are ‘frightened to go out of their houses’ because of the number of ‘illegal immigrants’ in the area, and said the town had a ‘real problem with women’s safety’.

Councillor Wharton, leader of the local council, has no idea where she got these opinions from, saying:

…we as a local authority have to date never been approached for information by Mrs Pochin. Our communities deserve factual information,

Her claims to have seen CCTV of crimes taking place near HMOs are entirely unfounded as far as anyone can tell, with the local police commissioner saying that there’s been no reports or evidence provided of that.

On several occasions Mrs Pochin has stated to have seen CCTV providing evidence of criminal activity. To date, no reports or evidence has been provided to Cheshire Police or to my office by Mrs Pochin, despite the MP having had several opportunities to do so.”

Her claims that an increase in the number of people seeking asylum putting pressure on local services and housing is after the closure of a local hotel where they previously were housed is, you guessed it, unsupported by evidence.

Cllr Andrea Wall, executive board member for community safety, said: “The people who previously lived in the hotel have been moved to another region. Government officials have also confirmed that there will be no further increase in asylum seeker numbers in Halton.”

Colleagues call for Reform councillor Joel Tetlow to step down due to his very unpleasant social media posts

Various MPs and councillors are calling for the suspension of Lancashire Reform councillor Joel Tetlow on the basis of some rather irresponsible and unsavoury social media posts.

A man in an entirely unrelated constituency, London, called Apapale Adoum was recently charged with murder. Tetlow has decided, on the basis of his name alone, that he was definitely a refugee and/or illegal immigrant – Tetlow being amongst the surprisingly vast number of people who conflate the two.

He captioned the post: “Refugees welcome. Keep them coming in Liebour [sic] are saying. “When will the penny drop for some people?”

Does his name being a bit unfamiliar to many people really automatically make you a refugee? Tetlow doubles down.

When questioned by a commenter on the post, who asked whether having a foreign name makes you a refugee, Mr Tetlow said that it did, in his opinion…

This isn’t his first unpleasant post:.

This is not the first time Cllr Tetlow has come under fire for his social media activity, having previously come under fire for sharing posts comparing illegal immigrants to Nazi’s and comparing Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and Chancellor Rachel Reeves to the Moors Murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley.

His colleagues are rightfully unimpressed. Sarah Smith, MP said:

Since being selected as a candidate, he has posted about Hitler, shared memes about the Moors murders, and now made an unfounded claim about a murder suspect based on their name.
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Nigel Farage should suspend him, and the local party should withdraw the whip. This isn’t complicated.

Tetlow, for his part, is leaning into the standard trope of people’s upset being entirely based on some unfounded conspiracy by the press, claiming that

The media in this country often exhibits a bias against those with right-wing views, while left-wing perspectives are given more leniency.

He of course provides zero evidence to support this assertion – if anything, the opposite is more likely true – but that never stopped anyone of his ilk trying to divert attention from their own bad behaviour.

Ever the supplicant to Big Fossil Fuel, Farage is a headline speaker at a gathering of anti-climate extremists

Apparently not content with a mere 92% of Reform UK’s funding already coming from “Fossil Fuel Interests, Climate Deniers, and Polluters” Nigel Farage decided to go speak at a gathering of the Heartland Institute.

Desmog shares what looks to be the (extremely off-putting) invite for a panel called “Net Zero: The new Brexit?”.

Invite from the Heartland Institute for a panel where Nigel Farage is speaking

You would think that that would be an anti-net-zero chat given the devastating failure and unpopularity of Brexit, but, from the context of where it is being delivered and who it is being delivered by I’m certain it’s the exact opposite.

The Heartland Institute is a 55 Tufton Street “thinktank” that is considered by some as the UK’s main group of deranged climate science deniers. It is, unsurprisingly, funded by various huge fossil fuels companies – ExxonMobil and Koch Industries for example.

What is the Heartland Insitute? It’s a think tank, very close to Donald Trump’s administration, that is, or acts like it is, extreme climate change sceptics:

The group promotes false claims that climate change is not potentially catastrophic to the world and it could actually be ‘beneficial’.

It has also incorrectly claimed that heatwaves and temperatures in the US are not increasing as a result of climate change.

Also:

The group has previously expressed the view that carbon dioxide has been “mercilessly demonised”, when in fact it is a “benefit to the planet” and should be “two or three times” higher than its current level.

Naomi Klein sees them for what they probably are:

Author Naomi Klein wrote in her book This Changes Everything that staff at the Institute “recognize that climate change is a profound threat to our economic and social systems and therefore deny its scientific reality.”

They do things like mail 8000 textbooks riddled with climate misinformation to schools in the hope that this will brainwash children to reject the truth.

One of their failed stunts was to release absurd billboards that indicated a moral equivalence between the Unabomber, a terrorist, and believe that believe in the truth of global warming.

Heartland began an advertising campaign in 2012 which featured a photo of the Unabomber, a US terrorist who killed three people and injured others. The picture was accompanied by text, which read: “I still believe in global warming, do you?” The group withdrew the billboards a day later.

The institute planned for the campaign to feature murderer Charles Manson, communist leader Fidel Castro and the founder of al-Qaeda Osama bin Laden.

The group justified the billboards at the time, saying: “The most prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen.”

Although the billboard didn’t last long, The Guardian lets us witness the horror of truth and design:

The Heartland Institute doesn’t only take money from those with those whose fossil fuel interests will make them ever richer if they are allowed to continue to destroy the environment around them. Perhaps most famously, in the 1990s they worked with the huge tobacco company, Philip Morris, to try and convince law-makers that smoking is perfectly healthy and hence should not be subject to profit-curtailing regulations.

The institute set out to discredit the vast amount of science that says otherwise which is now almost universally accepted. Their former president Joe Bast claimed that moderate smoking doesn’t add to the risk of lung cancer. It could easily be argued that their climate change denial is equally as factually and morally obscene.

Lancashire’s Reform try to take credit for an app that was released 3 years before they took power

Lancashire’s Reform-led council proudly boasted that they just released an app in a “bold move to cut red tape and empower residents“.

The app comes from a partnership with Love Clean Streets and allows residents to efficiently report environmental issues such as fly-tipping, potholes and broken signs so the council can arrange to deal with them.

What’s not to love? Well, conceptually it’s all good. The only issue with Reform’s proud boast is that the app was already being used by the people of Lancashire since 2022. It was brought in by the previous council, which was Conservative led. Reform had nothing to do with its introduction, despite now trying to take all the credit for it.

Councillor Barnes highlights their falsehood:

They have really shot themselves in the foot, and it is their first big announcement, and it is a big lie.
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It is completely disingenuous.

She also claimed that even if they had released it it wasn’t necessarily something to be quite so proud of, alleging that the app is pretty mediocre.

They are really shouting out and promoting a tool that really isn’t that good, and if you speak to any councillors who used it for the last few years, and it is not that great.

You can report all sorts of stuff, and often they will close it before the work has been done. It is an okay tool, but it is not this all-singing, all-dancing thing that they are saying it is

The Mayor of Lincolnshire is a climate change denying lover of fracking

Lincolnshire mayor Andrea Jenkyns, of Reform UK, joins Richard Tice in being ignorant, wilfully or otherwise, of the basic facts of climate change that almost every expert agrees on.

Until recently she sat on the board of the anti-climate-change-initiative Net Zero Watch – which is a rebrand of a think-tank that has been described as “the UK’s most prominent source of climate-change denial”.

She herself has stated the incredible belief that carbon dioxide “is not pollution” and the misleading lie that “many leading scientists…cast informed doubt on the concept of a ‘climate crisis”.

In reality, 90%-100% of climate scientists agree that humans have caused global warming, the number being highest in those with greater expertise. And the IPCC have stated that “Carbon dioxide is responsible for most of global warming”.

She’s been a huge fan of fracking. recently claiming to have “always been pro-fracking”.

Now she’s putting her fandom into practice by holding talks with a fracking company, Egdon Resources, who would like to frack under Gainsborough, one of the towns that fall under her mayoral remit.

A large part of her mayoral campaign material was about how she would save the area from the apparent curse of having solar panels. But she never mentioned that she would like instead to frack it.

The residents of her area are unlikely to be happy about this. Fracking is very unpopular with Britons.

A Yougov poll showed that, counter to what is offer from Mayor Jenkyns, the British public would far rather see a solar farm in their locality than for fracking to take place.

The poll reveals that the British public are seven times more likely to welcome a local solar farm than a gas fracking field. The survey asked respondents to rate which one local energy development they would prefer to be sited nearby; 40% chose a solar farm, 25% chose a wind farm, 10% a nuclear power station and 6% shale gas fracking and boreholes.

The British public in general support solar power:

More than half of the public said they strongly supported solar power specifically, with a third supporting it less strongly. In all, it is endorsed by 87%, with only 1% saying that they were opposed.

Another Yougov survey showed that solar is the method of electricity generation that the most people have a favourable view of – whereas they absolutely hate fracking, it scoring even lower than oil and coal.

Chart showing shale gas is even less popular in Britain than coal

Even people who are big fans of oil and gas tend to be dislike fracking.

Chart showing that renewable energy is popular even amongst people with favorable opinions of fossil fuels

It is also not allowed to take place at present due to a moratorium on fracking from central government on the basis that it can cause unpredictable earthquakes – but why let a law or a potential environmental disaster ruin your culture war point?

It’s hardly surprising that fracking unpopular. Earthquakes are not the only known downsides of fracking. The process has also been associated with water contamination, air pollution, environmental habitat disruption and an increase in traffic. The set up is also not overly pretty to look at, especially for someone who doesn’t want to see solar panels when they look out of the window.

Image of Fracking site

Image by Joshua Doubek – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link