If it were down to me, the starting rate would still be the 10p, then have stages of 20p, 30p, 40p, 50p, with a top rate of 60p for the highest paid people.
In return I would scrap inheritance tax (IHT) and not tax savings.
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Roughly it would mean, what you have left in your pay packet is yours to spend. This way, the government would still be collecting VAT which I would set at 15 per cent, while ensuring that the whole of the EU were using the same rate.
Assuming we will eventually have local assemblies, I think people would not object to some kind of local income tax if they can see that their money is being spent within their region on schools, health care, police, fire and ambulance services, safe roads and so on.
But any form of banding is unfair because property values have gone up – as has the cost of almost everything else – but incomes may not have.
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For security of this country, we must join the euro. To rely so much upon the income produced by financial services as a source of taxation is very worrying. If, or more likely when, pound sterling collapses, we will be in one hell of a mess and we won’t have the euro zone countries to rally around and bail us out.
Richard Grant
Via e-mail
