I’m presenting and co-writing a new short Radio 4 series, Untaxing.
It’s about how tax affects our lives: from the Laffer Curve, to the Beatles, to Jaffa Cakes, and modern day avoidance. 1.45pm on Radio 4, every day next week, from Monday 31 March. On BBC Sounds as each episode airs.
I’ll update this page with background material for each episode.
Episode 1 – The napkin that changed the world
You can listen to the episode on BBC Sounds here, and I’ve an article to accompany this episode here.
Episode 2 – the Beatles clause
You can listen to the episode here.
The best source on the history of the Beatles and Northern Songs, and how their tax wheeze worked, is Northern Songs: The True Story of the “Beatles” Publishing Empire by Brian Southall. It’s out of print, and second hand copies are expensive, but it’s widely available as an ebook. There’s also a wikipedia article, which is pretty good but doesn’t go into details of the tax scheme.
This is the Beatles Clause – still law today:
The tax tribunal decision in Rupert Grint v HMRC can be found here. And note that the Beatles avoided tax by actually selling their music rights to real investors. Mr Grint (in practice his father and their advisers) created an elaborate scheme whereby he sold his rights to his “residuals” from the Harry Potter movies to a company that Mr Grint owned. It was an attempt at a fiscal magic trick – a good/bad old fashioned tax avoidance scheme. It was always going to go down in flames once HMRC challenged it; the surprise was that they chose to attack it with the Beatles clause.
For details of the hair-raising tax rates prevailing in the 60s, see this Hansard report. An excellent history of income tax is here, from the Association of Tax Technicians.
And the Beatles were much better musicians than they were tax avoiders:
Episode 3 – Jaffa Cake – or Biscuit?
The episode is on BBC Sounds here.
I just wrote a long piece about VAT, and why it isn’t a tariff – and the answer is surprisingly linked to Jaffa Cakes.
As for the actual 1990 Jaffa Cakes decision, it’s not easy to read the judgment for yourself. This and many older tax cases aren’t freely available online (it’s United Biscuits v HM Customs & Excise LON/91/0160). There is a decent short summary of the case in the HMRC internal manual on VAT and food, but if that’s all you read then you’re missing the most of the flavour of the dispute.
You can, however, get some of that flavour if you’re at the Edinburgh Fringe this July – the Jaffa Cake musical will be returning. It’s excellent, and not to be confused with the fusion jazz band of the same name (who are neither a musical, a cake or a biscuit).
Episode 4 – The Porn Star Tax Lawyer
The episode is on BBC Sounds, here.
We wrote about Paul Baxendale-Walker last year, and HMRC’s inept attempt to hit him with a £14m penalty. That report is here.
At about the same time, HMRC issued a “stop notice” to prevent Minerva, an entity associated with Baxendale-Walker, from promoting one of his schemes. Unfortunately by the time the stop notice was issued, the entity no longer existed. The stop notice was a bust.
And we wrote about some of Baxendale-Walker’s recent schemes here – they’re of embarrassingly poor quality.
Episode 5 – the £10bn fridge
The episode is here, on BBC Sounds.
We’ve a full report on ZLX here.
Untaxing is all thanks to Craig Templeton-Smith at Tempo+Talker who came up with the idea and got it commissioned by the BBC.
We couldn’t have made it without producer and co-writer Tom Pooley and audio producer Rob Speight. Will Fitzpatrick produced the video.
I received a small fee for my involvement in the series which I donated to charity.