With Non-Doms now facing a 30k tax bill for living in the UK, Spear’s looks at reasons for splitting London, and also for staying.
Foreign residents in London face crippling bills from New Labour’s neo-communist powers, says an anonymous Swiss hedge fund figure who has had enough of the UK Nanny State.
Thanks a lot, Darling! Alistair Darling that is. And the Cameron-Osborne show. I am a foreigner living on these isles and an unhappy one at that, as I am a so called ‘res non-dom’ of European ilk.
You see I thought we Euros were quite welcome around here, particularly if we brought with us a little spending power. As it happens, I think there may even have been a sense of gratitude for our presence here. After all, we helped you better distinguish food from slosh, as without us you would probably still have no idea about the existence of texture, colour or flavour in food in general.
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Efficient, if not always friendly, service in comfortable, clean restaurants may still be the stuff of fairy tales; warm beer still the only option when wanting to get plastered, rather than reasonably priced nice wine. We helped make you aware that there are clothes beyond a Barbour, even if a Barbour is one of the best outdoor jackets ever made. And mixer water taps, draught-free windows and proper heating in country houses, semi-responsive utility companies have all made in-roads since we got here and started complaining.
Ah yes, complaining and paying not to queue a la ‘speedy boarding’ are also new facets we helped bring to the English way of life. That and higher house prices, which in the first instance benefited all of you as you were the only ones owning anything over here, which in turn enabled you to move yourselves up the property ladder or retain the family pile in the country. What we haven’t really been able to help at all it seems is public transport, trains, education or health…
But now the summer party is over and your socialist government is short on money and the Tories are short on ideas. Nothing new there then. So why am I upset, you ask? Because when I met David Cameron a few years back, he did seem a very nice chap, with a wonderful wife, and a loving, caring parent. I never thought he would instigate the ideas that will probably result in my small children having to abandon everything they know and move countries.
Little did I know that one day he would be the reason I would have to leave England. And all because his party got conned by Labour into revealing what few ideas they did have on the pretence of a snap election, so that they could nick any of the good ones, which everybody will have forgotten by the time the election actually arrives.
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And so the Tories obliged, told them of all their plans, most of which were clearly back-of-the-envelope stuff, including how to finance a rise in the inheritance tax threshold by imposing a fixed levy of £25,000 on each person like me who is res non-dom. I guess they thought once in power they could then really have the time to think about it and ‘refine’ the concept shall we say.
But instead, the neo-communists, sorry you call them Labour, took the idea and ran with it. But they upped the ante to £30,000 instead, greedy as they always are, but will undoubtedly make sure they spend it on another red-tape black hole that nobody can ever account for. And by the time the Government releases ‘details’, one will have less than three months to decide to either change lives or be caught in the new mouse-trap as it comes into effect on 6 April 2008. Classic behaviour for quasi-dictatorships, not democracies.
So because I have lived here for more than seven years, it is now going to cost my family £60,000 extra a year for the pleasure of staying here. How can you seriously expect someone to come to a new country, start a new career, make friends, meet girls, finally settle on one, get married and have children and then have to leave by the time they are five or six (if you are fast on the trigger)?
It doesn’t make for a conducive environment for settled family life. I do plan to go home one day, once my children are grown up and flown the coop. But not now, it is the worst possible time to unsettle them. But then again what do communists care about family life and its value for society as a whole?
So, instead I will also likely have to accept a strip search in term of my worldwide assets, however meagre they may be. I am then fully exposed to future reviews that are in all likelihood to result in steeper levies or renewed taxes on assets beyond income. And no, I will not believe a word to the contrary from this Government or any other for that matter. When has a democratic government in any country ever done what it said it would do if winning an election means doing the opposite?
And because I live in central London, already the most expensive city in the world as it is, and I have worked hard and I want to buy myself a nice car, I will now also have to spend an extra £8,000 a year to actually drive it in London. Supposedly to save the planet. Because eleven per cent of London pollution is from cars, of which three per cent is from ‘luxury’ cars, ie cars that can fit more than two adults and a dwarf Schnauzer.
So that will save the planet, or get us on the way there. Just those cars, just in London. But the Chinese can build another 30 coal-fired power stations over the next few years and flood millions of acres of land and habitats to build a dam and that’s fine for the planet because we don’t want to upset them, too much business going on there you see. And if only I saw any of that money spent on improving public transport in London, I might even feel a little better.
Instead, all we get are more strikes and system failures, and more visits to or from Livingstone’s cronies, usually best represented by South American dictators, but acceptable ones, as they are socialist in their self-enriching leanings.
How about concentrating on British passport holders that claim to be non-doms. Now that would be a good place to start as it does seem quite unnatural to hold a British passport but then claiming to not be domiciled here. But doing so would seriously affect Labour funding as a number of them are generous contributors to the party coffers, although not in exchange for peerages of course.
Or how about a sensible idea like setting a minimum total tax bill for non-doms at say £60,000, but to include all taxes paid in the UK by each individual. In this way you would avoid free-loaders which seems a good idea and more to the point, whilst being fairer on people already paying a substantial amount of tax on their UK earnings.
So this is what it looks like from where I uncomfortably sit. A group of Scottish neo-communists, having failed to get themselves elected in Scotland, turned their attentions to the UK as a whole and have taken over in bloodless coup and rule as unelected leaders. They have decided, possibly due to personal issues of self-denial and insecurity, that most Euros should be squeezed for all they’re worth or made to leave, whilst at the same time happily opening the borders to illegal immigrants and asylum seekers that can then freely spend the money raised from the remaining res non-doms through the ‘Social Benefits’ system that pays them better to stay home than to actually work. But they will at least be grateful to their Scottish ‘liberators’, agree to eat haggis on Sundays and, once given a passport, happily vote for them until it is their turn to be squeezed.
Before you decide to go ahead with the plan as is, you may want to look way back at the history of this island or read up on A History of the English Speaking Peoples by a Mr Churchill. You will find that the last time you assisted in the departure of unwelcome visitors, they were called Romans, they also had brought with them a sense of comfort, wealth, organisation, structure, work ethic, and general appreciation of the finer things; if admittedly imposed in a rather ruthless and barbaric fashion to begin with. But also remember that following their withdrawal, the British Isles plunged in centuries of turmoil, anarchy, warfare, famine, disease and misery…
