Let’s be honest: this vastly simplified tax regime is almost certainly never, ever going to be introduced. But is that because it’s a bad set of ideas? Or because the rich and powerful would simply never stand for it – while the rest of us are too used to the way things are? One of the hardest hits in the book stems from our rebel’s experience of a tax fixer in Australia who used transfer pricing for Papua New Guinean timber. He writes:

On the Profile tab, add information collaborators may find helpful, like your expertise, interests, or experience. If you sign into Viva Engage via Microsoft 365, select View and update your profile in Office Delve to change your profile. Outright tax evasion, when someone knowingly breaks the rules, is the most serious. It’s criminal – but court cases are relatively rare. Only 336 individuals were charged in the most recent annual figures. Though he insists that he has never “personally done anything illegal, or even perhaps unethical”, he knows of many others who have. He wanted to remain anonymous so he could freely reveal the “cheats and scandals, sex and violence, conflict and lies” involved in dodging tax, he writes in his book. Finally we get an analysis of Universal Credit, lambasting the fact that someone on UC who gets a job loses 55% of his benefit, so is effectively paying a 55% tax rate, while a millionaire accountancy partner is paying a 51% rate. The Taxtopia SolutionSo much for the new money – the old money is at it too! The entire value of agricultural land is exempt from inheritance tax, as is “business” property, which potentially exempts our richest landowners from the tax ordinary

But discussion of an important tax conundrum for the humble self-employed at home – whether to be a sole trader or a company – was a tad brief. I wanted him to note that tax and dividend rate changes can affect the equation, and that companies are more useful to traders with spouses. If you have ever paid an accountant, they have charged you what they think they can get away with, not what the work is worth. Always complain about your fee.” Big-name and big-money disputes like this have provoked schadenfreude-fuelled headlines for years, often involving far more complicated disputes over alleged “dodges”. Often it’s HMRC that wins. When Jimmy Carr was revealed in 2012 to be using the K2 scheme – whereby his income was paid directly into a Jersey-based trust, which then loaned him money he never had to repay – he apologised but explained: “I met with a financial adviser and he said to me: ‘Do you want to pay less tax? It’s totally legal.’ I said: ‘Yes’.”When it comes to the accountants and lawyers who help evaders, the number of them facing justice is even lower – with just eight cases being prosecuted in the past two years, it was disclosed this month. His day job, he tells me, “can be as simple as saying: don’t sell that thing this year, sell it next year, because you’ll pay less tax. Or it can involve convoluted international structures for large corporations.” But he is a rebel with a cause: he would like the UK to have a tax system so fair and simple that jobs like his didn’t exist, because there would be no loopholes to exploit. But this comes to the crux of the problem he’s highlighting: they don’t need to. There are enough legal ways for wealthy people to avoid tax anyway without resorting to breaking the law, even if plenty of them skirt pretty close or are downright unethical. Obviously she’s gone for the second option. Fair enough. That’s what a tax adviser would recommend. We’d all love to pay a 0.3 per cent tax rate, I would too, but it shows the non-dom law is dodgy – and it’s absurd there’s only one person in the country who could change that law, and she’s married to him.