tiintax

It fascinates me that there are people and organisations that don’t take twitter seriously.  Although often it’s just a bit of fun (and occasionally a screaming pit of insanity), it’s also the place where you can see the first draft of politics – which is itself the first draft of history – being hashed out.

For example are you on the #spendingreview or #SR15 hashtag?  The BBC and most of the people I follow on twitter seem to be using #spendingreview which is comprehensible but longer and takes a chunk out of your 140 characters, whereas the Treasury and the George Osborne twitter feeds are using #SR15 which is short but muggle-exclusionary.  If that’s a thing.  (Well it is now).  More follows.  Probably.

(By the way I’m live blogging this, and it’s the first time I’ve done so.  If you’ve subscribed to the feed and find it’s sending you multiple emails, you might want to unsubscribe for a bit or at least ignore anything that comes to you from tiintax before the end of the spending review speech)

12.30  Here we go.

All I’m getting from the first few minutes is security, security, security – sounds a bit…. no, Godwin’s law.  And a notable lack of verbs.  I wish governments would start employing speech writers who would write actual speeches and not bullet point lists.

12.46 a giant sneer at Labour over borrowing £8bn less than forecast so “mending the roof while the sun shines”.  Where did this idiotic roof metaphor come from?  What metaphorical sun is shining on the country at present?

Next the tax credits.  I can’t pretend to understand the detail from the speech alone, but what I think I heard was, we’re not going ahead with the changes to tax credits because they’ll all be washed out by the introduction of the universal credit.

“HMRC is making efficiencies of 18% of its own budget”  Good grief, are we taking the putative savings from closing down the network offices *before* the putative improvements in digital service that will allow the savings to be made???

Fighting tax evasion… seems to mean some kind of action on disguised employment.  Which will be interesting. And there was some kind of commitment to make CGT payable within 30 days of the disposal of residential property.  The detail of that will be interesting – main residence relief means most residential property doesn’t incur CGT surely?  And if we’re talking about property development, why only residential and not offices etc?

13.00 Social care: two billion more, but it comes from Local Authorities sticking a hypothecated 2% onto council tax.  So the government won’t be unpopular about it, just the local authorities, so that’s all right, yes??

13.05ish Osborne sneers at Scotland, or more specifically at what a Scottish spending review would have looked like (given the fall in oil prices) if there had been a different result in the referendum.  Have weird deja vu, till I realise he’s saying exactly what Cameron said towards the end of PMQs.  they’re plagiarising each other’s speeches now?  Or do they learn the insults and sneers in the same bullet-pointed list they take their talking points from?

All right, why is hypothecating the tampon tax a problem?  Because tampons are not “luxury items” and the EU needs to get its act together to recategorise them into the nil rate band for VAT.  But Osborne crowing that he’s going to donate the VAT raised to women’s charities is – as I said on twitter – patronising bollocks (and, yes, I use the gendered language deliberately).  Because why do women have to pay the bill for violence against women?  Why is violence against women only a cause of concern for women?  He’s conflating different issues and trying to make himself look good.  Must check later to see if the Macho Fund (for guide dogs for servicemen and something to do with Winston Churchill?  My womb was wandering too much to take in the detail) is bigger than the Gurlydosh.

Extra stamp duty on buy to lets.  Interesting.  “We will consult on the details” is code for “we haven’t worked out how to do it yet” you understand.

Now some infantile gamesmanship on the police.  Suggest you’ll be making huge cuts to the police.  When Labour suggest cuts should be no more than 10%, recast it as “we have had representations” from the other side to cut the police by 10% – we’re cutting to zero.  Childish and insulting.  And followed by hideous baying sounds from the government benches.  Sometimes I’m ashamed we let these people represent us.

I’m going to take a walk and cool off a bit.  See you soon.