LIGHT RELIEF AT THE WEEKEND

 

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LIGHT RELIEF AT THE WEEKEND

 

At least in lockdown Saturday’s “Times” is still there to amuse me.  I was struck the weekend before last by the headline, “The NHS could vaccinate everybody in five days if it were better motivated”.  After all, hadn’t we been told that the obstacle to rolling out vaccination was the shortage of vaccine.  Er, actually the NHS cannot vaccinate everybody in five days.  Reading on, the article tells us that Professor Bell had actually told the authors that, “Astrazenica is doing a good job.  They will get to two million in the next fortnight and I think they can do more than two million a week.  The NHS has the theoretical capacity to immunise everyone in five days”.

Then there was “When the smoke clears, can America heal itself?” whose thesis is that Donald Trump has divided America and it will take a lot to put the genie back in the bottle.  That is of course a popular left-wing perception, but my recollection is that President Obama actually divided America.  Pre-Obama, America seemed to unite behind its president but that did not happen with Obama.  But then Obama was a liberal and he divided the country by introducing liberal measures, so dividing it was OK then.  Perhaps the reality is that America does not like extremes and Joe Biden could reunite America by returning to pre-Obama middle-of-the-road policies.  Whether he will, is a different question.  So far, he seems to have pledged to revoke most of President Trump’s measures, which is clearly not conciliatory to those who voted for him in 2016.

Then there was “Covid is a clear and present danger to the Bank of England’s independence”.  We are told that the Bank holds the bulk of the government debt issued under quantitive easing so it has become dependent on the Treasury for finance.  But the Bank of England Act 1998 actually requires the Bank to consult the Treasury on its financial stability strategy and its Financial Policy Committee is required to consult the Treasury before it makes most of its recommendations to the Treasury.  It is only in relation to monetary policy that the Treasury has no power to direct the Bank what to do - and even then the Treasury can tell it what to do if the Treasury are satisfied that it is in the public interest to do so.  Accordingly, it is hard to see that the Bank has ever really been independent of the Treasury.

But on to tax.  “Brexit UK stumbles over fine print”.  Whilst admitting that “the nightmare scenario of huge traffic jams around Britain’s ports has so far failed to materialise” it gleefully says that about 6% of lorries attempting border crossings were turned back.  Some of these were because they did not have the right paperwork in place – a teething problem that is unlikely to continue for long – but most were turned back at the French border for not having a negative Covid-19 test, which is of course wholly unrelated to Brexit.  Marks & Spencer apparently told The Times that it is facing difficulties in selling German-made sweets to the Irish Republic and would have to stop doing so.  I am a M&S shareholder so am not unconcerned about M&S’s problems, but I think it a delightful irony if the main impact of the border controls that the EU has insisted on introducing has been to make it difficult to move goods from one part of the EU to another.  I believe that most EU governments of goods to the Republic have traditionally moved through the UK.

Actually, I cannot understand why M&S have a problem with the rules of origin regulations, as the withdrawal agreement with the EU provides that EU goods are deemed to have a UK origin and vice versa.

And finally, “I am one of the workers who fell through the cracks”.  Poor Sarah is a director of a company and employs herself so is not considered to be a freelance worker.  She cannot be furloughed by her company because “she had briefly taken herself off her company’s payroll while she took a part-time job.  She was reinstated on March 30 but to be eligible for furlough, an employee had to be on a company’s books by March 19”.

I don’t know who told Sarah that.  The requirement was for the company to have had a PAYE scheme on 19 March 2020 and for it to have employed the individual on or before that date.  Provided that it met those conditions, the company was free to claim job retention payments for Sarah from March 30 based on her last salary period ending before 19 March (the day before the Job Retention Scheme was announced).  After all, one of the things the government urged people to do was to re-employ and furlough staff that they had already made redundant.

Even if Sarah was her company’s only employee, HMRC will surely not have removed the company’s PAYE registration during her “brief” removal from the payroll as they would have needed to receive the end-of-year return in April 2020.  If in Times-speak “brief” means two or three years, they might have done so, but most people would regard brief as meaning a few weeks only.  It’s a shame that The Times was apparently unable to look up the April 2020 Treasury Direction (as I have done) before misinforming its readers.  But I suppose that while checking one’s facts used to be a requisite of journalism, such behaviour nowadays relates to a bygone world.

 

ROBERT MAAS