Thursday 30 October 2008

Darling's VAT Double Bubble

Trixy again:

Well, blow me down with a feather if Alastair Darling hasn't gone and done just that for the X Factor Royal British Legion and Help for Heroes single.
Chancellor Alistair Darling announced today that the Government will waive VAT on the sale of the X Factor finalists' charity single Hero.

Except that he hasn't, has he.
An exceptional one-off charitable donation will be made, equivalent to the sum of the VAT receipts collected on its sales.

You see what he did there? He said he'd do something, then in the next line he said he'd do something else on the same topic but not the same and hope that people wouldn't notice.


And indeed, most people are so woefully uninformed that they would not be able to tell the difference. But what is happening is that Darling is screwing us twice, at a time of great financial crisis in an empty gesture: since he can't withold the VAT from the EUSSR, he is stealing skoolzanhospitalz money from some other pot. That means that the EU gets all their money, we get even fewer / worse skoolzanhospitalz and ZaNu Labour gets a bit of much-needed good PR.

Fuck the taxpayers (twice!), who cares about them?

2 comments:

Mark Wadsworth said...

Looky here, I hate the EU as much as the next man, and I hate VAT even more than the EU, but is wildly incorrect to imply that the EU collects all the VAT.

Total VAT revenues in the UK about £80 billion per annum (twice as much as corporation tax - that's how evil VAT is), gross EU contributions about £15 billion.

Dr Evil said...

As a sales tax VAT is just evil. 5 or 6 % is fine, but 17.5% is taking the piss big time.