The only certainties in life are death and that higher taxes raise less money

According to Winston Churchill, “There is no such thing as a good tax”. He could very well have been referring to the draconian changes to Non-Doms and Stamp Duty, which are now costing the Treasury £3billion per year. One could play a game of ‘Fantasy Infrastructure’ and ponder how many hospitals and schools could be bought for this humungous amount of money.

The omnipresent, politics of envy, represents the pinnacle of socialist utopian thinking, managing to be both expensive and inefficient at the same time. Like all caring, sharing lefties, Labour governments can’t wait to get their greedy hands on other peoples’ stuff so that they can whittle it away. The hapless, former Chancellor Osborne succumbed to this practice in 2014, when he caved into the usual Labour clamour about ‘soshul justis ishoos’. Continue reading

The NHS is a national treasure

The NHS is a national treasure and anyone who thinks otherwise should be in a psychiatric ward

I genuinely adore and respect this country; we are the luckiest people in the world to live in this liberal, tolerant society which to most discerning people, is the most desirable place to live.

Usually, we can take for granted great civility and decency and, in the main, people do for each other without necessarily counting the cost. Continue reading

As Brexit bubbles away, where does that leave the Residential Property Market in the next quarter?

One doesn’t have to be a carnival fortune-teller or political expert (the former being more accurate) to realise that Boris will be a shoo-in candidate for Prime Minister. Top of the job list will be to trudge through a legislative obstacle course to propel a deal through Europe in three months. This is akin to squaring the proverbial circle and this herculean task will be compounded by the fact that the new – unelected – EU commissioners would hardly have had time to raid the Brussels wine cellar, nor file their bogus expenses claims.

Wisely or not, Boris has committed himself to the deadline of 31st October and there is no going back for the ‘blond bruiser’. After three years of May’s failure, he will confront a restive nation that will delight in nailing him to the masthead. While it’s possible that he’ll just do a cut and paste job of May’s withdrawal deal, kicking some of the more contentious elements down the road (i.e. the backstop), given the past obdurate record of the EU negotiators, this seems like an improbable scenario. We don’t need any more choruses of ‘Mais Non’ from them do we? Continue reading