I've been thinking about Michael Ashcroft's tax status (yes, I'm afraid that's what we do!). The Tories have been somewhat evasive about it for sometime, simply insisting that he was complying with the law and the undertakings he gave when he became a peer.
Tory spokesman George Young played this straight bat with me on yesterday's show.
But last night Emily Matlis got further on Newsnight with the same George, when he said that the Tory donor and fund-raiser paid tax in Britain -- but would not say "full tax".
This suggests that his tax status is non-dom, as I've always suspected. He's not a tax exile, which would subject him to the 90-day rule -- and he seems to spend a lot more than 90 days on these shores. He's probably non-domiciled for tax purposes in the UK, which means he pays tax on any income generated in Britain but not on his world-wide income, a status those of us who pay our full whack of tax might not like or even resent -- but a status which is perfectly legal, been in existence for many years and which Labour has not touched (despite promising to do so in its 1997 manifesto).
It is widely thought that you have to be a foreigner to be a non-dom but you don't. Tory candidate Zac Goldsmith was one until recently, "inheriting" the status from his father. If you live abroad for long enough out of the UK tax system you can also qualify -- and I suspect that is how Michael Ashcroft became a non-dom.
Labour, the LibDems and TV interviewers (including myself) have given the Tories a hard time over his tax status and we've been encouraged to pursue the matter by their less-than-open replies. But if it turns out he is a non-dom then there is nothing illegal or dodgy about it and it will have been much ado about nothing.
Labour, after all, has also benefited from the largesse of non-doms, such as Lord Paul. I'm still mystified as to why, if he really is a non-dom, they haven't just said so.
Of course there is a widespread view that if you sit in the Lords and Commons then you should pay full British tax, like the people you rule over -- and that, indeed, is about to become the law.
Which means Michael Ashcroft and others like him will have to ditch their non-dom status -- or their peerages.
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Andrew Neil and Sir George Young on Monday's Daily Politics
The global warming consensus has been having a bad time of it recently (see previous blogs) but not everything is going against it. Dr Roy Spencer has been studying the latest average global temperatures for January from the satellite readings compiled by the University of Alabama at Huntsville (to which I've referred in the past, see previous blogs) and they show a substantial spike in temperatures for the month just gone.
This will obviously surprise all of us which just lived through the snow and ice of December/January but these are GLOBAL averages and other parts of the planet have been warm while we've been cold. Also Dr Spencer is a leading and well-qualified climate change sceptic, so his findings cannot be easily dismissed by the sceptic camp. This is what he says:
"The global-average lower tropospheric temperature anomaly soared to +0.72 deg. C in January, 2010. This is the warmest January in the 32-year satellite-based data record.
The tropics and Northern and Southern Hemispheres were all well above normal, especially the tropics where El Nino conditions persist. Note the global-average warmth is approaching the warmth reached during the 1997-98 El Nino, which peaked in February of 1998."
So January was hot -- indeed almost as hot as 1998, which until recently was regarded as the hottest year on record -- until 1934 regained its crown (at least for America). What's going on here?
Too early to say. Of course one month does not deserve too much importance. The data needs to be double-checked. We don't yet know if surface temperature readings confirm the satellite findings. It could be down largely to El Nino, which was also behind the 1998 peak. It could also be that the cold air masses which gave us the ice and snow got locked into the Northern Hemisphere and didn't get the chance to flow elsewhere and cool the ocean surface as it normally would. It might also be the case that global averages are just not a very useful measure.
But many from the global warming consensus have predicted that 2010 will be a very warm year overall -- and January could be the start of it.
I'll keep you posed as the temperature figures pan out.
Click for Daily Politics climate change videos.
When it comes to cutting Britain's massive budget deficit (almost £180 billion this financial year and next) the Tories have always insisted they would go faster and further than Labour. Now it's not so clear.
First, Labour's plans: they would not touch the deficit in 2010/11 but thereafter cut the deficit in half over the three years ending April 2014. It's a big cut in a short time and we don't yet know much about how it would be done.
The Tories say they would start cutting the deficit in the new financial year beginning this April (2010/11). It's never been clear just how much they'd cut in their first year but the implication has always been that the axe would cut deep.
Not now: the talk is about a "limited" first year cut and "we're not talking about swingeing cuts" (D Cameron Jan 31). When I interviewed Phillip Hammond (Shadow Chief Secretary) this week he refused to define "limited" but revealed that so far they'd only defined around £1 billion in cuts for 2010/11. No doubt they would do more than that but the difference between Labour and the Tories on immediate public spending cuts is no longer very pronounced.
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Andrew Neil and Phillip Hammond on Monday's Daily Politics
What about the longer-term? Yesterday's speech by Shadow Chancellor George Osborne merits close textual scrutiny. The Tory plan is now to "eliminate in large part" the structural current budget deficit over a Parliament. This is technical so let's unravel.
The structural deficit is that part which remains even after economic growth. It is, naturally, smaller than the overall deficit and economists differ on how it should be defined. But the Tories are saying they'd eliminate only the structural current deficit, which excludes capital spending, so they are referring only to a part of the structural deficit and promising to cut that part by an unspecified amount. They would also take a Parliament to do it, which means five years rather than Labour's three (to cut the overall deficit in half).
Still with us? Let me see if I can summarise.
As Allister Heath writes in City AM today, the Tories are now saying they'd take "five years to eliminate an ill-defined chunk of the structural (not cyclical) component of a sub-set of the deficit which excludes capital spending. That is even weaker than Labour's plan."
In fact, because the Tories have yet to put figures on their ambitions it's quite hard to see if it's weaker than Labour's deficit-cutting plans. But it's getting harder to see how they are "faster and further".
I've been thinking about Michael Ashcroft's tax status (yes, I'm afraid that's what we do!). The Tories have been somewhat evasive about it for sometime, simply insisting that he was complying with the law and the undertakings he gave when he became a peer.
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