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Since Chatbot does not recognise the existence of Burnley FC, I can add Brian Miller (1937-2007) to the list of managers no longer with us. A true one club man, he signed for Burnley in 1954 and finished after his second spell as manager in 1989. (With a brief spell as a newsagent in between...

UK property is now taxed under UK tax law wherever the owner may be based. As for ownership of shares, the practical result of banning UK companies from having indeterminate foreign owners would be that any company that wanted to go public, would do it on someone else's stock exchange. Quite...

This is normal in war. There were loads of civilians killed in WW2 because they happened to be in the wrong place when the bomb dropped, but that didn't mean the UK was a Nazi country. The best way to stop Israel fighting back against Lebanon/Hezbollah is for Lebanon/Hezbollah to stop making...

1. If any player holds up play for injury, either because he needs treatment or because the ref stops play, then he has to leave the pitch until the next break in play. 2. If any player is injured but doesn't need treatment, then there is no waiting around for him to struggle to his feet. He...

Because in rugby they only play on as long as there is no chance the ball will go near the injured player. In football the attack v defence element is far more fluid and the ball can go anywhere at no notice. I was at a rugby game yesterday when the play carried on for a minute or so while the...

They have changed the offside rule, in practice, to make it impossible for the linesman to judge offside. After all, if a team of three men with multiple cameras and computers and state-of-the-art graphics take 5 and a half minutes to judge it, there is no way a linesman can do it with one...

Few of us would disagree in first principles with tax avoidance. That's legal, and starts when you take out an ISA. What this bloke was doing was tax evasion, which is illegal, and changing the law to tax beneficiaries rather than testators on death would not make any difference to this...

Homes aren't subject to CGT so there is no need to use a joke value.

Very few people sell property and don't report the sale, because that would have be done for cash without involvement of a solicitor for either the buyer or the seller. Bearing in mind that the sale of a recently-inherited property will have few or no tax implications, why would they bother...

The payment for medical insurance for yourself, your wife, and your children, is part of the remuneration package for you personally. The wife and children payment is payment for your efforts, not theirs. If the employer were to stop paying their health insurance, you would feel (correctly)...

Your private medical cover is paid for by your employer, and the reason he pays it is that it's part of your remuneration. In exchange, your employer gets the benefit of your labour. It's a different matter when it's a private individual doing the paying. If someone not related to your work...

Levelling up.

I'm not convinced that there is no merit at all, in comparing the jobs of an advisor to the government on a permanent contract and an advisor to the government on a shorter contract, both paid from the same source. I think there are points of comparison.

Do petrol storage tanks have spigots all the way down the sides, so that better paying customers get the best fuel? I would have expected, like with beer barrels, that the tap would be at the bottom.

If I leave my (fictional) £10m to an overseas trust, then the money can't be taxed until a UK beneficiary receives the cash. IHT is collected all at once, not at the convenience of the recipients.

The bigger problem with most public sector pensions (obviously not the Local Government one) is that they aren't funded at all. There is no pension fund for the NHS, for example. They pay this year's pensioners out of the current staff's contributions, and the annual deficit is because the...

Perhaps they have charged him with the easy bits so they can hold him in jail while deciding which of a range of more serious charges to go for.

The abortion laws are a matter for each state to decide, not the federal government. Roe v Wade was about making abortion a federal decision covering the whole of the US, which was always a dubious interpretation of the constitution; all that the overturning of Roe v Wade has done is return...

Are there any official statistics about how many of these cross-Channel immigrants are genuine asylum seekers desperate to get away from France, and how many are would-be economic migrants who can't get in legally? If there aren't, it's inevitable that the two will be conflated. However, let...

I don't see how there is a lack of legal asylum routes, with about 700,000 legal immigrants in each of the last two years. The reason these asylum seekers are coming indirectly from long distances but more directly from France, is because as individuals they believe they would not be allowed...