I spent yesterday writing about the technicalities of domicile as they might impact Rishi Sunak's wife. But that's because her tax decisions cast doubt on his suitability for office. Another thread, this time in the man himself ….
Sunak shot to prominence in 2020 when appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer. Although not quite unknown before then, few had paid him much attention.
Even his appointment as Chancellor looked as much like luck as anything else. He'd managed to be promoted through the ranks of obscure ministers to hold the number 2 position at the Treasury when Sajid Javid resigned. Appointing him saved a reshuffle, so he got the job.
Then Covid happened and Sunak spent like almost no Chancellor in history. Having discovered there really was a magic money tree, which quantitative easing turned on, he had the Bank of England create all the money he needed to cover the cost of Covid.
It could be argued that anyone who spends £400 billion without asking for anything back in tax and without increasing borrowing (which he didn't, because QE cancels government debt) is going to be popular. Sunak was.
Then came the reckoning. £37 billion on track and trace was very obviously wasted. It turned out Covid loans to businesses were handed out without any basic checks and billions will be lost. And then there was PPE corruption. Sunak must have known. The crown slipped.
But what we did not see until Covid was declared ‘over' (when it very clearly was not) was just what the real Rishi Sunak was like. And the reality was shocking. The man who had turned the money on declared that this was an aberration. Sunak decided to play the hard man instead.
Not only did Sunak now deny there was a magic money tree, when he'd so obviously been using it, but he declared the policies he'd pursued were reckless and now he must shrink the state to pay for them. Rishi Scrooge appeared out of nowhere.
Although Covid put massive pressure on public services, and increased the cost of supplying them, Sunak refused the money to deliver the services required. From health to education, care, the legal system and so much more all Sunak offered was austerity and pressure on employees.
Pensioners lost out on the inflation pay rise they were due under existing rules.
Universal credit was cut even though it was known the cost of living was rising.
Tax increases were announced that hit those in work and on lower pay hardest, but which did not go near those with wealth at all.
And as fuel costs escalated because Sunak's Treasury had failed to understand that reopening after Covid was always going to impose supply chain, cash flow and other disruptions, his rebate offer was too small, and based in the idea of a loan, not a subsidy.
In the meantime the Bank of England chose to put up interest rates to increase the cost of living, deliberately, as if people were not being punished enough. Sunak must have approved this as he has the right to veto it.
Come the latest announcements, the failure to take further measures to help those millions now facing unplayable bills revealed a complete ignorance of the despair people face when their costs go up by maybe £3,000 a year and they have no way to find that money.
At the same time he revealed he did not know how to pay for a can of coke using a contactless payment card.
And we learned that Brexit, of which he was a strong supporter, really has trashed UK exports when those of every other country were recovering.
To cap which, he's also opposing spending on green measures as we are being told we are in the last chance saloon on climate change.
Then we discovered his wife has likely saved tens of millions in tax, quite legally, by paying £30,000 a year to use a scheme that let her do so. In other words, she consciously chose not to pay her taxes here.
So what to think of Rishi Sunak? Is he a man suitable to be Chancellor, let alone Prime Minister, as he'd clearly love to be? There are four criteria here. They're politics, economics, empathy and ethics.
Sunak's politics are to the right of the Tory party. He's into small government, low tax, and leaving people to get on and sort out their own problems without state help. But that's not what we need now.
Sick people desperately need a better, bigger NHS. We need more spent on education, the judicial system, care, the environment, green transport, climate change and social housing and benefits. Sunak is not recognising this. Politically he doesn't recognise the need of the moment.
Worse politically, his choice to make people worse off now - which has been his pattern since it was claimed Covid was over - has within it the suggestion that people must now be punished for Covid, and that was not their fault. That's bad political judgement.
Worse still is his economic judgement. He does not realise that by crushing expenditure by the government and by at the same time forcing households into poverty he is most likely pushing us into deep recession.
All Sunak thinks important is balancing his books, he has not noticed that by doing so he's reducing the income of most people in the country - and recession has to follow. That's the action of a man who does not understand economics, or his job.
But maybe that's not surprising because what's become very clear is that Sunak has not got the empathy required of a senior politician. It's either that, or he's just so rich that the idea that you just cannot pay your bills or opt for private medicine is beyond his comprehension.
To describe Sunak as a man without the common touch is to be generous: he does not even realise that there is such a thing and that he needs to have it.
And so I come to his ethics. As his family's decisions on tax reveal, these prioritise his wealth above the public interest. Faced with a moral choice, what is legal but not ethical is the choice made so long as there is personal gain to be had. For a politician that is staggering.
Is Rishi Sunak in that case a man fit to be Chancellor when his political, economic, empathic and ethical decisions are all wrong? The obvious answer is that he is not. Nor should he ever be a candidate for prime minister unless we want to create a wasteland.
Sunak's wife's domicile claim is based on the suggestion that she does not wish to live here in the long term. I'd suggest now is the time for Boris Johnson to help her fulfil that dream. Sunak needs to be sacked, and be free to leave.
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Sunak was unsackable under the “to lose one Chancellor is unfortunate, to lose two would be careless” rule – but has sufficient time now elapsed to allow Boris to nobble a potential rival?
While we are on the non-dom issue – Viscount Rothmere??
Personally I don’t disagree with any of this that you put forward.
But more worrying to me at least is what is going on in HM Treasury.
My concern is that the Treasury is now hard wired not to be courageous and actually holds back the Chancellor or just acts as a mirror to his limited understanding or dogmatic thinking.
I’d love to know more about the characters behind the scenes at the Treasury – the Neo-liberal sleeper agents.
Treasury sleeper agents — so would I, PSR. I have been wondering what is going on there for some time.
And the sooner the better!
Well thank you – it is unclear to me anymore which is the more corrosive presence – the Treasury or the Chancellor or both.
What would the Treasury being saying to a courageous chancellor I wonder? Would they do what the U.S. Fed did to Clinton – convince him that his progressive programmes were unaffordable?
“Sunak needs to be sacked, and be free to leave.”
Presumably by this you mean “free to leave the country”. There is more than a whiff of xenophobia about this statement, Richard, and it ill behoves you to make a remark like this.
Sunak is very clearly British
In the context of his family’s declared intention to leave the country however there is not a shred of xenophobia in.
His wife is confirming this is her intention to day
Your claim is ridiculous and obviously fabricated in that case
You are mistaken, Tom. Both Sunak and his wife have indicated an interest in no longer living in the UK. The sooner he leaves, the better, as far as I am concerned. Let him resign and leave immediately. This view of his and that of his wife makes his political position a tad unusual, to say the least, does it not.
Right. And both him *and* the Mrs holding US Green Cards – up to and during his Chancellorship – demonstrate his commitment to GB,don’t they?!
Unfortunately too many Tory voters believe the “how are we going to pay for it” debt narrative. Until that view changes the country is stuck with the small government low “debt” policies. This is despite the incidence of crippling inflation events over the last 200 years being few and far between and those that we have had have been related to other issues not necessarily wholly monetary.
Sunak’s defence against the sudden political storm around him (even he doesn’t know whether he has had more to fear from the machinations of the Opposition, or of 10 Downing Street); essentially is that his wife is legitimately entitled to her privacy, wholly independent from him and his purely incidental political participation in the Conservative Government. This has a certain, narrow element of plausibility. The problem Sunak must recognise, however is that this is not a matter of law or technical nicety, the comfortable certainties of the apparatchik following rules, where he feels safest; it is a pure matter of politics.
What makes Sunak’s position more difficult, and legitimately open to close scrutiny is that he is the Chancellor; he has powerful influence over the financial well-being of everyone, and indeed has exercised this power lethally in the Spring Statement to bring penalties and rising costs to everyone in Britain no matter their predicament, in the middle of a world cost of living crisis. He has raised take higher probably than any Chancellor, virtually since the late 1940s; after a World War.
As a politician, astonishingly Sunak wants exclusively to promote his beliefs – fundamentally in his case I propose, what CB Macpherson termed ‘possessive individualism’ – that provides for him the hard-line individualist defence he seeks. He and his wife are separate atoms in the political void; totally unrelated to each other. The problem is he represents a Conservative Party that wishes, relentlessly to promote special privileges for ‘family life’; it wouldn’t long survive as a Party in Britain, if it didn’t. Most Conservative politicians promote the values of ‘family life’ as an unbreakable unity. Ministers like to wheel out the family for convenient ‘photo ops’ whenever they may prove politically advantageous; in elections, or when the individual is ambitiously looking for personal public recognition to climb the greasy pole. The family is the central, binding commitment to other people representing personal values in British life; for the Conservative Party.
Sunak is thus easily seen to be merely ‘playing the system’: presenting himself as pure individualist Chancellor, yet simultaneously committed family man; he is arguing he can have his cake and eat it, and do both while living in Downing Street and taxing you more than any Chancellor in decades. He is Chancellor, managing your financial well-being, and politically supported by his reassuring image as a family-man; while simultaneously insisting that his wife is a completely separate entity, entitled to have exclusive ‘possessive individualism’ (through an optional buy-out from HMRC of paying very big taxes, for a mere £30k per annum payment – clearly cheap at the price for her). Her tax-free wealth has nothing to do with him, the Chancellor whether or not anyone thinks the untaxed wealth may benefit his family or family life or not; it is nothing to do with him, as Chancellor – or you for that matter; it just doesn’t count. At the same time his wife is entitled to squeeze out the tax advantages that come her way, to the very last drop (it is alleged his wife may have been ‘non-dom’ here for around thirteen years); but apparently there is a maximum ‘non-dom’ tax entitlement after fifteen or twenty years of ‘non-dom’ tax status in Britain; and Sunak’s wife has been able to indulge this, even while using Downing Street as her home address.
You figure out what Mr Sunak is actually telling you about him, his Government, his Party; and about politics in Britain today.
Scathing and dripping with anger, Richard, and those sentiments and every word you’ve written are more than warranted and absolutely deserved.
Sunak is a loathsome politician and person in a field of loathsome Tory politicians, of which there are simply too many to name. You’re right to call him out. We need more commentators across the media to start doing the same.
Don’t forget his cringey, polished turd of a media campaign: literally signing his name to the ‘Eat Out To Help Out’ scheme, which was akin to performing CPR on a corpse for the hospitality industry.
How many deaths in a pre-vaccine era can we attribute to this pointless and dangerous gesture?
I’ve seen suggestions that the non-dom trick only works if you leave the relevant income in the country where it is “earned”. Is this the case?
No
It just must not come here
… although even here, I think that “income” can be turned into “capital” and that can be brought in tax free (or at least it used to be).
Only is capital gains free…..
Wow (as they say) – the BBC’s Simon Jack (on Twitter) –
“Interesting fact. Non-Dom status “wears off” after 15 years APART from inheritance tax treatment if you are Indian citizen thanks to obscure Uk-India treaty in 1956. India abolished IHT so potential saving of £280 million IHT on £700 million in shares.”
This is true
There is nothing quite so disappointing as seeing journalists try to report on something you know just a little better than them. It makes me reconsider how reliable they might be about everything else, that you expect them to know better than you. Perhaps that is just as faulty.
A few morsels from https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-61041926 :
* “a loophole created by a treaty between the UK and India dating from the 1950s” – Article III(3) of the 1956 UK-India estate duty treaty cannot realistically be called a “loophole” (but the UK keeping that treaty in place for decades after India has abolished its own inheritance tax might be described as unusual. Perhaps we should just apply UK domestic law?)
* “she does not have to pay UK tax on income earned abroad” – she does have to pay UK income tax if she remits that income to the UK
* “Ms Murty would have paid tax at 39.5% as a UK citizen” – the additional rate of tax on dividends in the current tax year – the one that began on 6 April 2022 – is 39.35%. Last tax year it was 38.1%. So where does “39.5%” come from?
* “As an Indian citizen, the Indian government would tax dividends at 20% (a withholding tax).” – but not if she is a UK tax resident who can claim the benefit of Article 11 of the UK-India income tax treaty from 1993, which would reduce the rate of withholding to 10%
They just keep digging the hole….
Considering whether I would rather have Boris Johnson or Rishi Sunak as prime minister is a little like considering whether I would rather be stabbed or shot.
Who else in the Cabinet might take the top seat? Dominic Raab, Priti Patel, Liz Truss? Michael Gove, Sajid Javid, Kwasi Kwarteng? Nadhim Zahawi, Grant Shapps, Nadine Dorries? Oh god. Jacob Rees-Mogg?
I can understand why Johnson might feel safe.
🙂
Ben Wallace will be our next Prime Minister!
Heaven help us
Yes, I admit, Clive, much to their dismay, I left out some of the lesser Cabinet ministers who are perhaps less likely to replace their boss: Steve Barclay, Alok Sharma, Anne-Marie Trevelyan, Thérèse Coffey, George Eustice, Brandon Lewis, Alister Jack, Simon Hart, Oliver Dowden.
Or Baroness Natalie Evans, who would be the first Prime Minister to sit in the House of Lords since Marquess of Salisbury in 1902 (or Alec Douglas-Home for four days in 1956).
Such a constellation of talent should make any other country or generation jealous of our good fortune.
🙂
But surely, 1963?
You are right. Brain fade. Before my time 🙂
I can’t remeber 63
Churchill’s funeral is my first political memory
1956: Suez. How easily the Conservative Party allows itself to forget forever the blunders they commit, repeatedly to lead Britain into the darkness; they have been doing it since Bolingbroke. In 1957 they refused to participate in the Treaty of Rome, 1957 when they might – in spite of the Suez geolpolitical farce – still have been able to shape, or even lead the formation of the European Community that was being created; whatever they wanted. They have been trying to undermine it, ever since. The Conservatives are apparently endemically, corrosively, constitutionally incapable of taking the wise geopolitical decision for Britain.
Agreed
Very good piece, thanks. Does the revelation of them having US Green Cards while he was CHancellor have any impact on her non-dom status?
Also, is it possible to find out whether someone has non-dom status, or is that considered private? I was surprised to find out that Lords Spiritual are allowed to be non-doms, and wondered whether any of them actually are.
The status is usually private
The green card confuses the issue, is the best that can be said
Individuals with a US Green Card are taxable on worldwide income by the USA, regardless of where they live.
Holding a US Green Card would almost certainly negate any benefit you could derive from being a non-domiciled individual claiming the remittance basis of taxation in the UK. Due to the interplay of US and UK rules you would probably be more heavily taxed than any US or UK resident if you were subject to tax in both countries on a worldwide basis.
Quite amusing really
It would be a delicious irony if holding a green card meant that Mrs Sunak was liable to tax in the US on her worldwide income, including income which is not taxed in the UK. I suspect some planning was done in advance of taking that up.
A number of senior CofE clergy have origins in Europe or the Commonwealth or elsewhere, but few that I can see in the current Lords Spiritual, except perhaps the Bishop of Chelmsford Guli Francis-Dehqani, who might be able to make a credible claim to have had a domicile of origin in Iran, but I suspect she has never claimed it, and having left when a child at the time of the revolution, probably has a domicile of choice in the UK now.
And I bet she doesn’t have a spare £30k a year….
As Michael says, holding green card is more of a liability from a tax perspective – the UK / US interaction can be complex, and the IRS have even less of a sense of humour than HMRC.
Just by way of reminder, our current prime minister was a citizen of the United States until the quarter ending December 21 2016. See https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2017/02/09/2017-02699/quarterly-publication-of-individuals-who-have-chosen-to-expatriate-as-required-by-section-6039g
He became Foreign Secretary on 13 July 2016, so served as the UK’s Foreign Secretary for several months as a dual national of another state – and indeed as an MP for two seats, for 7 years plus the best part of 2 years, and as Mayor of London, all the time as an “accidental” US citizen.
I wonder how many MPs are formally citizens of – and perhaps bear allegiance to – another state. And did he travel to the US between July and December 2016? The US requires its citizens to use a US passport when arriving or leaving – so did Johnson hold a US passport?
The BBC’s article on his achievements as foreign secretary when he resigned in 2018 is sobering, and you could draw up a similar list of achievements as prime minister. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-44767848 “Boris Johnson’s job as foreign secretary was to convince the world that Brexit did not mean Britain’s withdrawal from global affairs. It is a task that few historians will conclude Mr Johnson achieved. … the question remains: what is British foreign policy? And it is a question that Boris Johnson’s successor will have to answer.”
It could be argued Johnson’s was accident
Sunak’s was choice and required a statement of commitment to the US which is what is quite extraordinary and which I, for example, as an Irish citizen do not have to make
That is what is inexplicable here, unless of course he had another agenda
I don’t think dual citizenship became an actual thing until a few years after Johnson was born. I think the Supreme Court decided it in either ’67 or ’69. The case involved a man who was originally east European, took US citizenship after WWII, then moved to Israel and took up citizenship there. He then voted in a US election (back in the ’50s?), which was how the case began, when that right to vote was contested by the US.
What i don’t know is when we, the UK, adopted a right of dual citizenship, allowing (presumably) Johnson Sr to register no1 son as British without the loss of the US citizenship he was born with.
I think the UK formally recognised dual citizenship after the 1948 British Nationality Act, although in this context Wikipedia mentions the 1867 Fenian Uprising, after which several Irish people who had moved to the US and taken up US citizenship, where nonetheless charged with treason back in the UK, on the basis that they were still UK subjects (under a doctrine known as “perpetual allegiance”). Following that, both countries started to permit renunciation of nationality.
And the US Supreme Court case you mentioned may be this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afroyim_v._Rusk
There has been movement back and forth between the general proposition that a person should be a citizen of just one country at any time, so becoming naturalised in one country revokes a previous nationality, to a more permissive recognition that someone could be a citizen of two or more countries simultaneously.
Domicile is a related but slightly different question to nationality. It is a general concept of private international law which has been co-opted by the UK tax regime. A person can only be domiciled in one legal jurisdiction at a time, and that can include political subdivisions of a country where they have different legal rules – for example, different states of the US. A person can be domiciled in Scotland, for example, which can be important in determining if their will is valid as the legal rules are somewhat different to England (one witness rather than two, for example).
If you want to dramatically change the political discourse one has a choice between a dead cat or a fluffy kitten. This I think is a dead cat.
What else would we be discussing? The complete tripe of the energy “strategy”? Apalling destitution facing some elements of the population? The vicious treatment of Ukrainian refugees by the Home Office? Brexit chaos at airports and ports? P&O getting away with instant sacking of 800 employees? The potential of 2 million losing their voting rights in the electoral reform bill? Lord Pickles, the relevant minister at the time, not knowing the correct death toll figure at the Grenfell enquiry?
I could go on… As a diversion wonderful.
This cuts through more though
I knew nothing about Baroness Natalie Evans so I looked at her Wiki entry.
She has a degree in social and political sciences.
We have a ‘now or never’ climate crisis.
It would be good to know if there is some understanding of science among our senior politicians (and civil servants for that matter).
Are any of the people in the lists scientists?
How many passed O level physics even?
Do any of them even realise that, during the lifetime of our children, a combination of sea-level rise and more severe storms will ruin coastal communities all round the world … and that central London is a coastal community?
Good questions
But I only have O levels in science
Mind you good ones, and it infuriated my chemistry teacher that I would not do it as an A level
I used to teach physics and maths.
I have great respect for those who passed their O levels in those subjects.
I continued with maths – including (stats) in my degree
Baroness Evans was born in 1975, so will have taken GCSEs. She has an interesting career so far. SPS at Cambridge (now HSPS, with Archaeology & Anthropology rolled in – then similar to PPE at Oxford: sociology, psychology, politics, international relations) – then a researcher at the House of Commons, the Social Market Foundation, and the Conservative Research Department; a policy position at the Investor Relations Society; then roles at the Association of British Insurers, the British Chambers of Commerce, Policy Exchange, and then the New Schools Network. Typical of our ruling political class.
She became a peer in 2015 (aged 38, nearly 39), quickly a government whip, and then Leader of the House of Lords since July 2016, the longest since the 1950s, and if she remains in post for until 2024 she might end up with the longest continuous period as Leader of the Lords for a century. It probably helps that her husband was a Special Adviser since 2012, and was himself elected as an MP in 2019 (James Wild, BA in politics at Queen Mary, then PR, then adviser to Michael Fallon, then in the Cabinet Office).
As I understand it, Alok Sharma studied physics before becoming an accountant, Nadhim Zahawi studied chemical engineering and later co-founded YouGov, Anne-Marie Trevelyan studied mathematics and also became an accountant, and if you can believe it (echoes of Thatcher) Thérèse Coffey has a PhD in chemistry, on complexes of molybdenum, but then moved into finance. But most of the others studied law, economics, PPE, history, and the like.
Lack of scientists . Never mind ‘senior’ politicians – according to Dr Philippa Whitford (SNP – breast cancer surgeon, still keeping qualifications live ) there is a dismal lack of scientists in the whole House of Commons. She was interviewed fairly recently and can find both on YouTube (TNT Show ep 85) , and Lesley Riddoch Podcast. Regret cannot give exact time of that subject coming up, but she does do an interesting insight if you can bear it! even if you aren’t interested in indy Scotland …
I was educated in the dark ages ( 1960s ) and the school I attended required at least one science to be taken at O level by all. Not having children/grandchildren I am ignorant of how much science is valued in education of the young ones. Doesn’t take very long for common knowledge to be lost ( washing hands, cough into a hankie etc )
I feel that Sunak doesn’t get it. Any of it. Ever. He has totally failed to read the room time and time again. The poor chap was, I fear, lulled by all the ‘dishy Rishi’ coverage of the handout days and started to believe his own press.
He has seemed surprised that his wife finances should interest anyone. Had he married say a Doctor, Lawyer, Banker or some other professional potentially earning the kind of wage that puts one just in the 1% I might agree. But no he married into the 0.000001%.
If we are rightly worried about the malign effects of Russian donations to the Conservative party (I go a step farther and worry about the malign effects of all money in politics, whatever its source.) How are we not to worry about the effects of Rishi being married into a family of billionaires. My understanding of real wealth is that it has a powerful survival instinct and it must grow. I have not seen anything in Sunak’s behaviour to suggest he is capable, or would even think he would need to be capable, of putting the countries or even governments interests, or his political ambition before his families wider financial interests. The information coming out about green cards and who knows what else over the coming days further muddies the water and I wonder too if Boris might not do him a favour and kick him out of government. It would probably bruise his ego but would make it easier to enjoy his life with his wife, most likely in the US amongst the kind of people who might appreciate members of the transnational elite. He’ll not go hungry and if he needs something to make himself feel useful I’m sure he’ll be able to continue his good work of the last few years by consulting to whatever US Healthcare giants want a bit of the NHS.
Lastly I just want to say don’t worry, it’s not all bad news, even if we loose Sunak our government has all sorts of talent to fall back on and I am confident that they will find someone capable of keeping much of the population cold and hungry without the walking conflict of interest that is Ms Murthy.
Your cynicism is justified
Doesn’t Sunak also have links with US health insurance companies that want to buy our NHS? In California, believe it or not.
Well, well…
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-61045825
Whenever I hear the words ‘it’s all legal’ I know that something nasty, corrupt and fetid has found it’s way into the light via the S bend.
There is absolutely no push from any political party to sweep away the morass that is tax law in the UK. The same can be said of all the Crown Colony tax havens. That so many who actually pay taxes don’t bother to vote is their obvious rational response and who can blame them when they know full well that it’s all a charade and has nothing to do with democracy. I still have a poster from 1971 – it shows a policeman with his arm around the neck of a demonstrator and beneath – ‘whoever you vote for, the government will get in’ even in those days it was a bit too deep for some to understand.
Ukraine might well turn out to be another Sarajevo moment in terms of a military conflagration as well as the actual economic war that has already started. I live in a country France that can easily feed itself but the UK?
The Conservative party is 95% corrupt, totally incompetent and for the most part contemptuous of ordinary people. Richard is Irish and will know full well that at the height of the Great Famine the elite were still exporting food for profit – their mentality hasn’t changed. The UK imports 65% of it’s food, what underpins Sterling – nothing, the same can be said for all fiat currencies, hence the continued interest in Bitcoin et al.
The famous battle of Isandlwana should be a stark reminder of what the Tories/elite will do if it all comes on top – led by by arrogant stupid public schoolboys with the best modern weapons against superbly disciplined Zulu warriors armed only with spears and clubs, they were utterly defeated, most of the officers fled on their horses (only the officers were mounted) when they saw the endgame and left the ordinary soldiers to die.
If the Fed keeps raising % rates then other currencies will have to follow. This will trigger the biggest housing collapse the UK has ever seen which will take the banks with it and Sterling will crash. No one will want paying in Sterling, our foreign currency reserves (do we actually have any?) will be gone. The Tories/elite will have seen this coming and will flee in time, leaving a nightmare behind.
History teaches us that there have always been ‘resets and that is what it feels like right now. Perhaps I’m being too cynical but this time maybe the whole international Ponzi scheme will collapse unlike 2008/9 – let’s see. Do you notice that Sunak is always grinning, he and his wife have a few very nice homes dotted around the world among them a very nice beachfront home in California.
“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.” F Scott Fitzgerald goes on to say that “They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are.”
This describes Rishi Sunak’s problem. In his world, his wife can pay taxes wherever she likes. In ours, if you claim a benefit you are a household, where even those who have no legal responsibility for you, must, for your sake, tell the state their private information. A “smear” in Mrs Sunak’s case, a “household” in a benefit claimants case.
These benefit claimants, who are not given the privacy Sunak thinks he and his are entitled to, include those claiming Universal Credit – the Benefit for the employer that the worker has to claim. The Benefit Sunak cut back for the “households” who do not consider themselves “entitled” to a scintilla of the different treatment he considers his by right.
Would Mrs Sunak have had to declare an intention to eventually become a permanent US resident in order to get a green card? Did she claim an intention to eventually become a permanent resident of India in order to claim non-dom status? If the answer to both these statements is ‘yes’ then how can they be reconciled? Would an offence have been committed?
We cannot know enough to answer this
But if I was in HMRC and the IRS I would be asking
if rishi sunak’s wife is suddenly prepared to hand over several million to keep her husband in a £150k job we do need to wonder about why this might be…