Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
“Goodbye, Vietnam! That’s right, I’m history, I’m outta here, I got the lucky ticket home, baby.”
– Good Morning Vietnam
“So, old friends, now it’s time to start growing up, taking charge, seeing things as they are, facing facts, not escaping them, still with dreams, just reshaping them, growing up.”
– Stephen Sondheim
“May the road rise up to meet you, may the wind be ever at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face and the rain fall softly on your fields. And until we meet again, may God hold you in the hollow of his hand.”
– Irish Blessing
“They must often change, who would be constant in happiness or wisdom.”
– Confucius
“It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest thing in the world.”
– John Green
“If you’re brave enough to say goodbye, life will reward you with a new hello.”
– Paulo Coelho
“It’s sad, but sometimes moving on with the rest of your life, starts with goodbye.”
LOUIS XIV’S FINANCE minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, famously declared that “the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing.” When it comes to taxing companies, a modern finance minister might rephrase this as “the largest possible amount of revenue with the smallest possible amount of economic and political damage.”
There were 43 types of tax in the UK in 1993 and now there are 90. The case for simplification is clear
Dan Neidle
The Sunday Times
Britain has 90 taxes. That is more than at any point since the 1830s, when the country was still clearing up after the Napoleonic Wars.
I know, because we counted them all: from the Danegeld paid to buy off the Vikings, to the vaping duty arriving this October. The result is a chart that tells a story of a modern state and tax system created out of desperation, rationalised by the Victorians, mobilised to fund the huge wars and social projects of the 20th century, then slipping back into chaos.
The number of taxes spiked once before, around 1800. A government fighting France and building a modern state grabbed money wherever it could find it. There was one large measure, which, it was promised, would be strictly temporary: income tax. And then a riot of tiny, specific levies on dogs, wigs, hair powder, eggs, clocks and servants, even coats of arms. It was chaos, but understandable chaos, a desperate Treasury throwing everything at the wall.
After the war ended, the hated income tax was swiftly abolished but the nation was still left with all the tiny taxes.
A generation earlier, Adam Smith had set out the principle that taxation should be certain, economical and convenient rather than arbitrary and fragmented. That call was now taken up by a small band of reformers, most of whom have been forgotten. Perhaps the most influential of them, William Huskisson, president of the Board of Trade, is now relegated to a pub quiz question (he was the first man to be killed by a passenger train, aged 60).
So while there were more than 100 different taxes in 1800, by 1900 there were 50.
Then there were small temporary surges in the number of taxes, brought in to fund the First and Second World Wars, but the tax mayhem and bankruptcy of the 1970s did not lead to an explosion of new taxes. EU membership in 1973 meant that all the older sales taxes were swept up into VAT (a simplification, not a tax increase). Nigel Lawson, as chancellor from 1983 to 1989, famously abolished a tax every year. And so, while there was a vast increase in the size of the state in the 20th century, and the economy became spectacularly more complex and diversified, by 1993 the number of taxes had fallen to 43.
In his time as chancellor, Nigel Lawson, pictured his wife Thérèse, set out to abolish unnecessary taxesALAMY
This was not inevitable. Bureaucratic self-interest and inertia could have meant very few taxes were abolished, and permitted many more to be created. We know this because the French have kindly been conducting a 100-year controlled experiment into what happens if you don’t prune your tax system. The result is that they have 348 taxes.
After 1993, the number of British taxes started to climb. Some of the newcomers were defensible: environmental taxes did not exist before the 1990s; devolution created new Scottish and Welsh taxes; levies on plastic bags and sugary drinks do a job. But a lot of it is just political habit. A new tax sounds painless and makes a good headline: multiple overlapping bank taxes, a blizzard of special taxes on the energy sector, an array of different taxes on gambling. Each one came with a speech. None has had a repeal date. The result is that we have 90 taxes.
This was, also, not inevitable. Care and discipline could have been employed so that the tax system did not become increasingly complicated. We know this because the Germans have kindly been conducting a 100-year controlled experiment into what happens if you regularly reform your tax system. The result is that, while the overall level of tax in Germany is much higher than in the UK, they achieve this with only 60 taxes.
By contrast, we doubled the number of taxes in a single generation — without a comparable increase in the overall tax burden. The result looks less like a designed system, and more like a giant game of Jenga, in which every chancellor adds another block to the top and nobody dares touch the relics rotting at the bottom. My favourite relic is “bearer instrument duty”, a tax on a type of shares that no longer exist, which raises no money, and which the government tried and failed to abolish only last year. If we can’t fix that, we can’t fix anything.
Does the clutter matter if the small taxes raise so little? Yes, because every tax is a cost even when it raises nothing. Each one means another set of rules, another HM Revenue & Customs IT system, another adviser, another form, another thing a business must check before it invests or hires. The Tax Foundation, a think tank based in Washington DC, ranks France — with its 348 separate taxes — last in the developed world for tax competitiveness. We are not far above. There are many countries with a far higher tax take than the UK but which are ranked as more competitive: Germany, Sweden, Norway, even Greece. Complexity frightens businesses more than the headline rate.
Of course, complexity is not measured solely by the number of taxes. A single badly designed tax can be more burdensome than ten simple ones. But a proliferating number of taxes is usually a symptom of a system losing discipline.
And here is the good news, which is rare in tax. Clearing out the junk would cost next to nothing. The small taxes raise so little that abolishing them would have little effect on the Exchequer.
Rachel Reeves could take a leaf out of Lawson’s book, abolish a tax a year and barely lose a penny of revenue. It would take courage, because every silly little tax has a defender somewhere. It would also take some work. She would need to look at the complexity within taxes, as well as the individually pointless taxes. But radical simplification is one of the few moves available that is genuinely cheap, pro-growth and popular. We did it after Waterloo. We can do it again. Dan Neidle is a tax lawyer and the founder of Tax Policy Associates, a think tank
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
Dune (1965)
Frank Herbert
Norman Mailer: “We tell ourselves stories in order to make sense of life. There are days when life is so absurd, it’s crippling, but stories bring order to the absurdity. Relief is provided by the narrative’s beginning, middle, and end."
Nationalism and opposition to immigration remain potent forces on both sides of the Atlantic. But interventions in Europe by Donald Trump’s henchmen don’t appear to be helping his political bedfellows.
London| With friends like US President Donald Trump and his attack dogs, who needs enemies?
Both Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth have gone back to the well in the past 36 hours to issue fresh denunciations of the dangers of “mass immigration” in Europe.
President Donald Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth. Does their schtick still work in a Europe that has heard it all before? AP
Vance blamed the murder of British teenager Henry Nowak on civilisational decline under lackadaisical European elites; Hegseth gave a speech commemorating the D-Day landings in Normandy to complain about foreigners storming continental beaches armed with “dangerous ideologies”.
But does their schtick still work in a Europe that has heard it all before?
First, any browbeating from Americans on the issue of policing and race is like being given lessons in fire prevention from a pyromaniac. Vance’s moral high ground is risible, given US law enforcement’s record, be it the shoot-to-kill policies of ICE agents, the lack of due process in Trump’s deportation surge or the country’s long and sorry history of police brutality and discrimination against minorities, most notably black man George Floyd in 2020.
Nowak’s murder has drawn parallels to that of Floyd, given that both victims’ final words included “I can’t breathe” as desperate pleas for help.
Floyd’s death at the hands of a white police officer, who pinned him down with a knee on the neck, sparked the global Black Lives Matter protest movement.
Nowak, in turn, was stabbed by a Sikh man, but treated as a suspect by police, who did not believe he was bleeding to death after his killer lied that the young white Briton had racially abused him.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage leapt on the death of Henry Nowak. Getty
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage leapt on the death as proof of two-tier policing, and the case has quite rightly sparked a debate about whether anti-racism training has swung the pendulum too far in how police go about their jobs.
But Vance has framed the debate in more existential terms.
“Henry Nowak died the same way a civilisation dies: abandoned, handcuffed by authorities who neither trusted nor cared for him, and accused of hate crimes he did not commit,” he posted on X.
“He should still be alive today, and he would be if the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the West and the people who love it.”
Relations between the US and UK are at a low point amid Trump’s frequent hectoring of Prime Minister Keir Starmer for his caution over the folly that is the war on Iran. Against this backdrop, Vance’s comments are particularly provocative as they come just days before a crucial byelection in which Labour and Reform UK are waging war.
While not naming Vance, Downing Street hit back.
“We have seen people trying to interfere in our democracy and seeking to stir up division on our streets,” the prime minister’s office said in a statement.
Hegseth’s speech was also provocative, delivered as it was at an event most associated with the beginning of the end of Nazism.
“Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different, dangerous ideologies — beaches in Spain, in Italy, in Greece and Bulgaria; boats and men arrive,” he said.
“When will European capitals do something about that invasion? Or is it too late? I pray not, and I believe not.”
The question is, do such interventions still have the desired effect? Vance’s last-minute dash to help out authoritarian Viktor Orban in this year’s Hungarian election may have proved counterproductive.
JD Vance’s attempts to help Hungary’s Viktor Orbán did not pay off. Getty
Trump and his administration are unpopular in the UK and across much of Europe. While the far right may be surging in places like Germany and France, their leaders have carefully distanced themselves from Trump.
The European Policy Centre, in a new paper, has described this distancing as “recalibrating”.
“The reasons for this distancing are strategic, not ideological,” the report said. “European far-right parties are built on national sovereignty as a core organising principle, which made Trump’s more aggressive foreign policy moves – his threats to seize Greenland, his administration’s kidnapping of [former Venezuelan president Nicolas] Maduro, his trade tariffs and strikes on Iran – difficult to defend domestically.
“Aligning too closely with an administration that disregards the sovereignty of allied and third states, and whose ‘America First’ policy places European producers at a competitive disadvantage, risks undermining the very ideological foundations these parties stand on.”
It seems the White House hasn’t got the memo.
There is plenty of fertile ground over immigration and integration for the far-right to exploit in Europe and the UK. But while nationalism and opposition to immigration remain potent unifying forces on both sides of the Atlantic, the attacks being delivered in an American accent don’t appear to be helping political bedfellows in Europe.
