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Presumably Lammy is suggesting that Starmer wears his wife's clothes?

You only get child benefit removed if you want it removed. If you have too much income to be entitled to child benefit, you can still receive it anyway and pay it back on the end of year tax return. It shouldn't be forcibly taken off you. If you want to means test, then the "easy" way is to...

If you're 50, in a steady job that you know backwards, and have a house with a spare room as a study - working from home may very well be wonderful, and profitable for both employer and employee. If you're 18 and in your first job and have half a bedroom which you share with a school age...

Mind you, last year there was a £300 bonus for all so the amount they will lose this year is £500 - £600 per household. The quick and easy way to save a bit of money without the furore would have been to pay it as they do now but make it taxable. Pensioners at basic rate would pay 20%, higher...

The beauty of any wedding speech is that the audience is so completely on your side, If you keep it clean and under 5 minutes, you'll wow them.

Number 4 stinks. That's the one about abolishing business relief on inheritance tax. Yes, I can see the attraction of making sure that a family inheriting a £10m business employing 1,000 people should not benefit from that money and should be forced to sell up and split the profits with the...

He wrote the TV series "Striker" in the md-seventies, though he didn't appear as an actor. I've often tried to chase up a copy of those series, but it doesn't seem to exist in the public domain, at least.

It would have made no difference if it was her child, his child, or someone else's child. The point was that after a long hold waiting for the phone to be answered, the tax inspector I was talking to was not concentrating on her job of talking to me.

I dare say it works better for companies with an interest in making profit than it does for public bodies. There are no doubt other reasons why HMRC is so appalling at present, but listening to a tax inspector talking to her child when she ought to be talking to me, is not good. I'm sure that...

There used to be a system called Advance Corporation Tax (ACT) whereby companies deducted tax at dividend income tax rates from their dividend payouts. The tax paid could be deducted from Corporation Tax, and pension companies would reclaim the tax from HMRC as a pension credit. When ACT was...

Hamas is absolutely certainly committing war crimes, and yet we still supply arms to their paymasters in Qatar. Presumably stopping sales to Qatar will be next.

Read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Robert Heinlein. You can use gravity to chuck large rocks at Earth and (with the help of a sentient computer) land them anywhere you choose.

Actually it's not standard stuff to ask for proof of parental income for children to be given a place at a state school. Free education is an absolute right. They should never be asked to prove income. If you'd read the story yet further you would have seen that the council apologised for...

Not good for wing play. It's entertaining watching a winger who takes it to the goal line and pulls it back for the forward to put it into the net; but that would be an automatic offside under your rule.

I'm not that much aware of prostitution in general, let alone the not-for-profit variety that you (presumably) know so well. Most charities provide non-essential services. The National Trust, for example. The defining characteristics of a charity are that it provides a public benefit and it...

The whole point of women's football is that it DOES discriminate on the basis of gender identity. If they reject all forms of discrimination, they reject the whole principle of having a women's team. The only question here is how to define a woman for the purposes of sport.

How much profit is healthy and how much is excessive? Sainsbury's, for example, made sales of over £32 billion last year and had profits of £516 million. That's 1.6% profit on turnover. Even if they made no profit at all they couldn't reduce food prices very much...

Tricky one, isn't it. Don't borrow money, it's called austerity; do borrow money, it's storing up debt for us to live better and our descendants to pay for it.

The distinction being that businesses are run for profit, charities aren't. There is argument that educating children should not be seen as a charitable purpose, but their legal status is that of non-profit making entities. Changes in VAT do affect businesses. You said yourself that this...

Most private schools are charities, not businesses. It's generally stated that VAT is a tax on the individual, not the company. Changing the VAT rate is like changing the income tax rate for PAYE - it doesn't affect the company's profits in itself, it affects the amount the individual pays.