The Angela Rayner tax proposals - how much sense do they make?

Angela Rayner’s leaked tax memo to Rachel Reeves outlines a raft of new revenue raisers. I’ve written a short piece looking at each proposal, asking whether it makes sense, and whether it would raise the claimed amount.

My take is that about half the proposals make sense from a policy perspective (if we want to raise additional funding) and could raise £1.5bn.

The article is here.

In other news, tax barrister Setu Kamal is threatening to sue me for libel. He doesn’t much like our report on the terrible Arka Wealth tax avoidance scheme (which he advises on and promotes). So it’s not a surprise he wants that taken down.

The surprise is that Mr Kamal is also demanding that I "clear and public confirmation of [my] sincere belief that [he is] the leading barrister in the field of taxation in the country”. That is hard to believe, so I’ve uploaded his threat here.

Back in 2014, Jolyon Maugham wrote an influential article about the small number of tax barristers who greenlight tax avoidance schemes that realistically have no prospect of prevailing in court. The shame is that nothing has changed, and those barristers are still signing off on doomed and abusive schemes. But this makes the Good Law Project the ideal firm to act for me and Tax Policy Associates if Mr Kamal is daft enough to take the matter to court.

I’ll be writing more about Mr Kamal tomorrow - for now, the Good Law Project has a short article which includes all the correspondence.

Thanks for reading this unusually long update - and if you have any comments, questions, criticisms or suggestions, please do drop me a line. All replies to this email go straight to my inbox.

Dan