Five things I have learned this week #4
1 — The Biden Administration has temporarily removed the import tariff on Single Malt Scotch Whisky. This is unalloyed good news — any tariff is terrible for an industry as dependent on exports as Scotch Whisky is. These tariffs were brought in by the previous administration in a wonderfully petty tit-for-tat tariff escalation stemming from the neverending Airbus/Boeing state support dispute between Europe and the US.
Stories of exporters literally flying Single Malt over to the US to beat the imposition deadline abounded when the tariffs were first brought in back in 2019. Considering there are a lot empty planes at the moment, perhaps we’ll see four months of madcap air freight exporting just in case the UK Government fluffs the negotiations and the tariff is reimposed in July.
2 — Whichever bright spark first decided Limited companies are a good holding vehicle for freehold property titles should be given a statue by the legal profession, which the rest of us can pelt with rotten fruit on a regular basis. If the Government were to legislate with one mantra, it should be to target any area of domestic life where you need to hire a lawyer, and remove the lawyer. Private citizens are not cut out to deal with complex legal positions, leave that to companies who can afford it and have more power over their legal advisors. We’re not even cut out to deal with simple legal positions.
3 — Whenever people do or don’t do things because of tax, the Government has failed. And the taxes involved with transacting property are failing our increasingly mobile workforce as they seek to relocate around the country. My suggestion would be to axe SDLT, a particularly irritating transaction tax. To pay for this, we could also get rid of the Principle Private Residence relief. The SDLT / PPR double play has always confused me. New buyers are taxed on their purchase, while the seller, who has made money on the increase in value of their house mostly due to market forces over which they have no control, gets off tax free. Tax the gain and house prices will dip a little — but if you’ve gained on your house, it’s almost certainly got nothing to do with you.
4 — One of the reasons why the logistics markets are so gummed up at the moment is due to movement guarantees. Whenever you ship duty-suspended goods (such as spirits), tax authorities worry they’ll go missing and therefore demand there is insurance to cover the duty payable should the lorry accidentally get robbed at a motorway service station in broad daylight. Prior to Brexit, the movement guarantees used by the haulage industry could cover the whole journey, but now the industry is scrambling to arrange two sets — one for the UK and another one for any European leg. Having spent 9 months attempting to arrange a movement guarantee, I can attest that it takes simply ages.
5 — The real world still exists! I managed to achieve a real world task this week and pay in a cheque to the bank using my bank’s app. The bank then sent me a letter the following day confirming my deposit. Of £2.73. Some aspects of banking I will never understand.
