The hospitality industry wants their VAT cut to 10%. It will cost £12bn

Who benefits?

❌ The smallest most vulnerable businesses? Nope. 45% get nothing.
❌ Consumers? Nope - prices won't fall.
✅ Nearly half the cash goes straight to large chains. McDonald's gets £400m.

🧵: There is a much longer version of this thread on our website with the complete methodology and links to all data and sources. We've open-sourced the code that generates the charts.

taxpolicy.org.uk/2026/06/12/hos…

UK tax has gone up significantly over the last 25 years

But the tax paid by the average UK worker has not

This apparent miracle was achieved by taxing “other people”: higher earners, capital, property, banks, etc

The strategy has run out of road

A 🧵 on what happens next. There is a much longer version of this thread on our website with full citations, links to sources, and all the charts are interactive and much clearer.

This is a quick summary...taxpolicy.org.uk/2026/06/05/tax…

The UK now has 90 taxes (more than any time since 1843).

Germany raises more tax than the UK, but with only 60 taxes.

France raises a bit more than that, but has 348.

What's going on? And what can we learn? The final article in our series on "number of taxes" as a measure of tax complexity:

(Summary in this thread, but the charts are interactive and much easier to read on our website.)taxpolicy.org.uk/2026/05/30/fra…

I promised our analysis of the £5m gift to Nigel Farage would annoy everybody.

The verdict? He probably doesn't owe any tax.

Why? Because "campaigning for Brexit" isn't a taxable trade, and genuine gifts aren't income.

But there are risks for him.

Thread: All the details are in our report:

Reflects analysis from seven highly experienced tax advisers, and review by many more. Not just my views.

This thread is a v high level summary which necessarily simplifies and skips detail.taxpolicy.org.uk/2026/05/20/far…

I accidentally stopped a $600m US tax fraud. The British fugitive behind it now says he’ll sue me for $120m.

It sounds like a joke - but there are 3,000 victims.

Thread: The man in this video claims that everybody – in the UK and across the world – is owed huge tax refunds from the United States tax authority, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS):

A company called Liberty Rock claims you can pay your tax with a magic cheque.

They'll make all your tax go away, for the small, small fee of 30% of the amount.

The only problem: it's a fraud.

We’ve obtained the documents and are naming the names.

Thread: The idea is simple:

1. The client pays Liberty Rock a fee equal to 25% of its tax bill (plus VAT). Thirty per cent of the fee is payable up-front.

The Guardian is reporting Angela Rayner has now paid £40,000 of extra stamp duty, but HMRC accepted she wasn't "careless" and so she didn't pay a penalty.

On the public facts, that’s hard to understand.

Here’s why: The background, in short:

1. Ms Rayner sold her remaining interest in her Ashton-under-Lyne family home to a trust set up for her disabled son, and bought a flat in Hove.

2. She paid stamp duty at the standard rate of around £30,000.

Zack Polanski and his partner called their narrowboat their “amazing home” for three years. He registered to vote there.

If it was his main residence, council tax was due. None was paid.

His team says he stayed there only “occasionally” - if true, there's a very big problem. The Times reported last week that the Green Party leader and his partner “appear in recent years to have stayed on a narrowboat at a marina”.

UK tax is going to be the highest since 1945. But public spending won't increase; in fact most of us will experience a decline in public services.

Here's why - in a thread that I'd love to be completely wrong. This chart shows government tax/revenue as a % of GDP, through the forecast period to 2030.

A really significant increase over the next four years, equivalent to 3.6% of GDP (c£100bn/year). That's huge - ≈10p on income tax.

Our new report: Richard Tice signed accounts wrongly claiming £98,000 of tax exemptions

A 🧵 with the evidence: Normal companies pay corporation tax. So, when they pay dividends, their corporate shareholders don't pay tax again. The dividends are exempt.

REITs are different. They don't pay corporation tax. So dividends received by Tisun One, Two, Three, Four were not exempt.

I hope @Nigel_Farage retracts this false statement.

I did not say Mr Tice paid the full amount. I said we don’t know what tax Mr Tice and his offshore trust paid.

And the “little bit more” is an invention. I’ve gone out of my way in the past to defend Mr Farage from unsubstantiated accusations of tax avoidance. (And got slated for it from certain quarters.)

I’d expect to be treated fairly in return.

The deputy leader of Reform UK, Richard Tice, owns a property company - Quidnet REIT.

From 2020 to 2022 it paid Tice and his trust £600k in dividends. Quidnet should have paid £120k of tax on those dividends. It didn't.

A 🧵 with evidence from the company's own filings: From 10 August 2018 to 9 August 2021. Quidnet was a REIT: an investment fund that invests in real estate.

Just as an employer is required to withhold PAYE tax from wages, a REIT is required to withhold 20% income tax (20%) from its dividends, and pay it to HMRC.

More tax nonsense from "influencer" Samuel Leeds.

"I just sold my castle. On paper, I lost about £3.5m. But here is the part most people will not understand. It is also a tax write-off... the loss can be set-off against profits"

No it isn't, and no you can't.

Oh dear.
One of the great stupidities of the UK tax system is that capital losses can only be used against capital gains.

If Mr Leeds made a £3.5m trading profit in the same year as his £3.5m capital loss, he is still taxed on the £3.5m trading loss.

No "offset".

Companies House has now alerted all five million UK companies of the vulnerability that let anyone, anywhere in the world, access the private dashboard of any company.

Meaning: view confidential personal information, modify company/director details, even file accounts.


I am a little concerned that this is minimising what happened:

- Saying the vulnerability "could only have been exploited by a logged-in user performing a specific set of actions" downplays the ease of bad actors gaining a Companies House login.

Companies House has put out a statement confirming that, for five months, every company in the UK was vulnerable to the simple exploit we identified on Friday. It enabled anyone in the world to view and change their company details.

If you haven't seen the exploit yet, this video is pretty shocking.

John Hewitt, of Ghost Mail Ltd, who found it, gives me a demonstration.

He "hacks" the system by ⚠️ ⚠️ pressing the back key four times ⚠️ ⚠️

I basically just splutter incoherently.

I see some weird things but this takes the biscuit. A vulnerability in the Companies House website, that let anyone view the private dashboard of any one of the five million registered companies, see directors' personal details.

And modify them. The vulnerability was discovered yesterday by John Hewitt at Ghost Mail, a corporate services provider. He got in touch with us immediately. We verified the issue and alerted Companies House.

What’s worse than running a scheme that defrauds the IRS and sends fake £39m demands to public officials?

Accidentally publishing the names of all your clients on the internet. We wrote last week about "Empower the People", a weird UK group that claims to get the US tax authorities to refund all your UK credit card spending.

Incredibly the IRS sometimes sends the cheques. That doesn't stop it being - obviously - fraud.

A scammer - slammed by the High Court for filing "incoherent" claims, sentenced to 12 months in jail for contempt of court, and currently a fugitive from justice, has just ordered me to delete everything I’ve written about him - or he’ll sue me in *Wyoming*. The scammer is Iain Clifford Stamp, who has monetised the "sovereign citizen" conspiracy theory. He makes millions of £ every year promising people he can create free money for them:

(Spoiler: he can't)

Mandelson's firm, General Counsel, covered-up Mandelson's relationship with Epstein.

Here's Global Counsel's CEO and co-founder, preparing to tell the press that Mandelson barely knew Jeffrey Epstein.

Who did he check that line with?

Jeffrey Epstein. They're responding to this Telegraph story, the previous day, revealing that Epstein planned to meet a British Government Minister in New York on the weekend of 12/13 December 2009.

Peter Mandelson is telling the truth on one thing: the idea he was bought for a $4k “bursary” or a $75k gift is ridiculous

The real incentive was a post-government payday - one so big he *rejected* a $3–5m-a-year offer

And Epstein enabled that payday

Here’s the evidence. 🧵 The timeline is damning.

While still in office, Mandelson was warned by JPM’s Jes Staley (via Epstein) that sticking with Gordon Brown would be "bad form commercially".

Translation: It would hurt his future earning potential.

He got the message.

Epstein made $10k+ payments to Mandelson's partner around the time of the email leaks.

Mandelson says he thought the payments were bursaries from an educational foundation.

We're not allowed to say famous people are lying. But is Mandelson lying?

A 🧵 on the evidence: The offer to help came from Epstein alone. No mention of a foundation/bursary.