A Budget To Create Jobs in an Unexpected Way?
One of the provisions in the budget is that if you start a business outside of the South East, you will get a discount of up to £5,000 on NIC for each of the first ten employees.
This is very generous compared to other parts of Europe, such as France and The Netherlands, where social costs are a big cost of starting a business. Remember that over the last twenty years, the French have been one of the larger groups to move to the UK.
So will it mean that entrepreneurs will look favourably on the UK, as a plsce to start a new business, especially as UK income tax is lower than many places in Europe. For instance we have a tax allowance of £7,400 before we pay tax.
The more I look at this measure, it sticks out as a very good idea. It will be interested to see what the rules are and how they are interpreted.
But just imagine, you are something like an Australian or American software company, who needs a European support office. Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle or Manchester, all of which possess good air links to the rest of Europe, must have moved several steps up the list of where to site that office.
Lady Macbeth
You may think that has nothing to do with my predicament, but they quoted her in an article in The Times today about cricket.
“If we could fail?” “We fail? But screw your courage to the sticking-place and we’ll not fail.”
Shakespeare got it so right!
Why We All Hate Couriers – 2
I’ve just seen on the courier’s web site that my phone won’t arrive until between 16:55 and 17:55 today. So after waiting in all day yesterday for a non-delivery, I now have to wait in all today, for one at an inconvenient time. I do have other things to do, you know!
At least though, I have been able to charge up an old Nokia 6310i, so I have a phone. But I think, I’m on a tariff far more expensive than the one I need for such a device.
Spam in French
Over the last couple of days, I’ve started to receive the usual search engine optimisation spam in French. It’s funny but it seemed to start after France’s real troubles started in the World Cup. I wonder why?
Value Added Tax
There is talk of value-added tax being raised in the budget today. I feel that a rise to bring us more in line with the higher rates in Europe would not be something that caused too much pain, as most VAT consumers pay is on things like electronic goods, that are imported anyway. Perhaps we need a higher rate on things like that and perhaps a 15% rate on services, such as building work!
VAT to me is a good tax, as the system it replaced, purchase tax, ruined my father’s printing business. In the 1950s, printing work had two rates. On something like an invoice form or a letterhead, that had been printed and you could write on, my Dunlop handbills for their tennis tournaments all over the UK, the tax rate was zero, because it was not designed to be written on. Incidentally, the tax on plain paper was zero. This anomally lives on in that we don’t charge VAT on newspapers and magazines. Why not? A tax on OK, Hello et al would probably mean people read something more intelligent.
The outcome of this crazy tax regime was that more and more large businesses set up their own printing departments, buying plain paper and then using the new offset-litho techniques to create perfect copies of the originals created by craft letterpress printers like my father.
When my father had started up again after the Second World War, there were upwards of forty small printers in the old London borough of Wood Green. When he sold up in the mid-1960s there were just two.
So not having a fair tax system cost hundreds of jobs.
Tennis On The Radio
Yesterday, I lay in the sun in the garden and listened to the tennis from Wimbledon.
It’s funny, but tennis is rather a good sport to listen to, rather than watch.
But then, we have a very proud heritage of listening to tennis on the radio, as many times, I’ve heard the superb commentary from the great Max Robertson, perhaps in a car or whilst working in the garden or on my car. Read the Wikipedia entry about Robertson, as he was a truly great all-round broadcaster.
Tennis on Radio 5, is a bit like Test Match Special, in that it is about sport and chat, with some interesting guests during rain and between action. I remember one memorable interview by John Inverdale of Julian Golding. Inverdale was initially surprised that Golding, a black Olympic sprinter was at Wimbledon. Golding said that he had been invited by the LTA, as he was encouraging youngsters in London to take part in sport. Golding disclosed that he had been a promising tennis player, but had found the life very lonely, when travelling to overseas tournaments. So he had turned to his other sporting asset, athletics, mainly because of the cameraderie of his fwllow athletes. When we moan about the lack of decent tennis players in the UK, I hope we take advice from Golding.
But why is it that some sports, like boxing, cricket, horse racing, tennis and football work on the radio and others like rugby don’t?
I suspect that a sport which allows time for chat works. After all, some of the best BBC sports broadcasts are the racing ones from the Cheltenham Festival. Radio allows the characters to shine through.
But then as that late great broadcaster; Brian Redhead once said, if radio had been been invented after television, radio would be the dominant medium.
Vote Early, Vote Often
Various web sites in the United States publish polls on the application or use of the death penalty. There’s one here.
The Anonymous Widower 