[SA Chris]

You have absolutely no idea what anyone on here is doing to help.

Tell us then....  link to others doing great stuff.... this is not the time for 'traditional british modesty'.

Yes it is. This is not a fun charity event. I'm sure everyone is doing something without expecting a round of applause from the neighbourhood.

[tomtom]

Neil Ferguson from Imperial (the key group informing UK policy) is having his optimism broadcast in the US now... what do others think about this? Will the NHS be stressed but not break??

 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/coronavirus-nhs-london-hospitals-lockdown-boris-johnson-neil-ferguson-a9426756.html

I think (and this is just my conjecture) that we'll be somewhere between Italy and Switzerland when this washes up. Both with high ocurrences in the population - but I think we may just get enough extra health measures in place to avoid Italy scale shit hitting fan scenes.

Though there will be big regional variations. London of course (and Brum?) being worse afflicted.

[Oldmanmatt]

Some interesting points regarding the self employed. I know there is a significant amount of piss taking that goes on but on the other hand (I know I would say this!) the caricature you have presented of tax dodging one man bands does not match what my parents do! I would have no objection to closing loopholes but its a bit rich to prioritise this one when big corporations get away with blue murder at the other end of the scale isn't it? More generally, personally this seems a poor time to explicitly exclude people from state support; even if you disagree with their company structure (which incidentally is recommended by accountants everywhere as you know) they are skint just like everyone else and have mortgages to pay. Some of the comments smack of schadenfreude a little.

Not that we’ve ever drawn one, however a Dividend is taxable. At a lower rate than income tax, but that’s meant to reflect the risk. Most company directors draw a salary, on which they pay NI and IT as required.
I understand your “one man band” image, however, the type you describe is not what a LTD company was supposed to be and is, surely, illegal? If you are aware of such, shouldn’t you be reporting it? You seem to believe it’s wrong, after all.

When I ran Avalon G, I was a sole director. My insurance company wouldn’t have covered a sole trader to carry out that kind of work.
(I was not the sole shareholder, though), all the surveyors on the team were subcontractors.
Actually, we all subcontracted to each other, each of us having a different specialty. The arrangement allowed us to cover a lot of ground without keeping a large staff on payroll.
Not every investigation I carried out required a physical security consultant, for instance. On the other hand, sometimes you needed a finishings and coating surveyor on the same tasking as an Anti-piracy/terrorism consultant.

My point being, you tarred a lot of people with a very broad brush.

I understand the reason you describe but at the same time did you choose to pay a realistic salary or, as in most cases, the tax free allowance level then dividend. If it’s the later it’s only done to avoid paying tax. Therefore you should not expect money back from the tax pot you avoided paying into when things are hard.

Ha!
Typed a long response, then lost it all.
Can’t be arsed starting again.

You responded while I was typing, to your original, I hit send and went off with kids to doPE with Joe.
Your response actually changed my impression of your/Petes original post.

Your points:
No, I took a large salary.
I had been an expat for almost two decades, no NI since early 90s and needed a credit rating and mortgage asap. That was the accountants advice. Never drew a dividend.
Not an angel, just took advice and followed it. Not sure what I would have done in different circumstances.
Current business is totally different. We draw no salary and take no dividend. We take a loan repayment on our original investment of ~£100/week. Not at the moment, of course. We have other income and any profit the business makes gets re-invested.


I do believe, if you have paid tax on your dividend and paid your required NI, and hence done all that is required of you by law, on a fully declared income, you should not be excluded from protection in the current climate.
The level of that support? No clue.
I guess it depends how much tax you, or your company paid.
You, for instance, probably paid Corporation tax? VAT? Etc etc. You and your company contributed to the economy. Hw many peopledid you employ? Big Employers contribution from you?
I see your point, with the one man band. But where LTD company status is inappropriate, I still think you should not be supporting it and/or reporting it.
I know that sounds sanctimonious. I don’t know howI would respond myself, in that situation, but I know what is “supposed” to happen.

[Offwidth]

A peach of bad reporting Spectator ness for those interested https://twitter.com/frasernelson/status/1243266492063461376?s=21

The academic source turns out to be a retired (Imperial) Prof of micro-engineering....

It's worth opening the full thread and reading the comments to see the range of views of the Spectator readership who post comments, some very scary, others sensible but caustically funny. On the numbers from the Prof of microengineering  he stated his assumptions (mainly following the trend seen in China) and he isn't advising government... also at Imperial... Ferguson's group yesterday predicted deaths down to 20,000 and he is advising government (the same group who were saying 2 weeks ago that we were 4 weeks behind Italy). Frankly, I think any models for the UK currently need to be taken with a massive pinch of salt given the sensitivity to assumptions, input data and the lack of good test data. We need to look at Italy and Spain and try to do better than them: in particular lock-down harder and take better social precautions.

Both these Imperial models predict numbers in the range of annual deaths for flu seasons but as one wit in the Spectator commented comparing flu to covid 19 is like comparing normal road traffic deaths to terror events using vehicles.

[Will Hunt]

Otherwise for those who prefer arguments to civilised discourse on important topics I can bill  for five minutes at standard rate or at a discount for 10.

There's no need for sanctimonious bellendery. I asked for a fact check on something I'd seen copied and pasted to Facebook. Your response was to link to an article which did not answer the question, the implication being that you didn't understand either the question or how viral load is different to infectious dose. You also made a political point which was not relevant to the initial question and wasn't being contested (NHS staff should, of course, have access to the appropriate PPE).
When it was pointed out that your link did not provide anything useful for the discussion, you said that we had misread it (we hadn't).
I recognised that the infectious dose was probably significant in disease severity, because this is seen in other similar diseases, but in tripping over yourself in your hurry to make a political point, you ignored that it might be useful to people to understand the phenomena in more detail.

 

[Offwidth]

Yes it is. This is not a fun charity event. I'm sure everyone is doing something without expecting a round of applause from the neighbourhood.

In a time of crisis how do people judge.... what or who it's best to support, things that worked and things that didn't, important practical considerations, etc... if everyone keeps quiet about it. It's fuck all to do with expecting applause.

[northern yob]

Some interesting points regarding the self employed. I know there is a significant amount of piss taking that goes on but on the other hand (I know I would say this!) the caricature you have presented of tax dodging one man bands does not match what my parents do! I would have no objection to closing loopholes but its a bit rich to prioritise this one when big corporations get away with blue murder at the other end of the scale isn't it? More generally, personally this seems a poor time to explicitly exclude people from state support; even if you disagree with their company structure (which incidentally is recommended by accountants everywhere as you know) they are skint just like everyone else and have mortgages to pay. Some of the comments smack of schadenfreude a little.

Not that we’ve ever drawn one, however a Dividend is taxable. At a lower rate than income tax, but that’s meant to reflect the risk. Most company directors draw a salary, on which they pay NI and IT as required.
I understand your “one man band” image, however, the type you describe is not what a LTD company was supposed to be and is, surely, illegal? If you are aware of such, shouldn’t you be reporting it? You seem to believe it’s wrong, after all.

When I ran Avalon G, I was a sole director. My insurance company wouldn’t have covered a sole trader to carry out that kind of work.
(I was not the sole shareholder, though), all the surveyors on the team were subcontractors.
Actually, we all subcontracted to each other, each of us having a different specialty. The arrangement allowed us to cover a lot of ground without keeping a large staff on payroll.
Not every investigation I carried out required a physical security consultant, for instance. On the other hand, sometimes you needed a finishings and coating surveyor on the same tasking as an Anti-piracy/terrorism consultant.

My point being, you tarred a lot of people with a very broad brush.

I understand the reason you describe but at the same time did you choose to pay a realistic salary or, as in most cases, the tax free allowance level then dividend. If it’s the later it’s only done to avoid paying tax. Therefore you should not expect money back from the tax pot you avoided paying into when things are hard.

The whole dividend thing isn’t exactly a loophole, it exists to encourage entrepreneurs to start small businesses, and to create jobs for people, yes it’s used by one man bands to milk the system, but it’s definitely not that simple. And a lot of people who more than pay their way in society will be worse off because of this! It’s far from simple and the government are trying. I just hope they can find a way to not penalise hard working small business owners.

[Offwidth]

I asked for a fact check on something I'd seen copied and pasted to Facebook. Your response was to link to an article which did not answer the question

You assumed I was using it as proof for one thing when I explained I was using it as evidence for something else. On load versus dose you are strictly speaking correct but they are used interchangeably when looking at things the other way round, it's semantics that most people should be able to see past. I'll quote from (the Wikipedia page) what the doctor said who treated the whistleblower,  Li Wenliang:  "Doctor Yu Chengbo, a Zhejiang medical expert sent to Wuhan, told media that although most young patients do not tend to develop severe conditions, the glaucoma patient whom Li saw on 8 January was a storekeeper at Huanan Seafood Market with a high viral load, which could have exacerbated Li's infection.[24]"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang

[petejh]

Yes it is. This is not a fun charity event. I'm sure everyone is doing something without expecting a round of applause from the neighbourhood.

In a time of crisis how do people judge.... what or who it's best to support, things that worked and things that didn't, important practical considerations, etc... if everyone keeps quiet about it. It's fuck all to do with expecting applause.

It really isn't hard to work this stuff out; a crisis often makes it simpler, not more difficult, to see the right course of action. For sure in times of crisis a bit of guidance on what might be useful actions to take is a good thing. People will take some of the possible actions - such as volunteering, or helping neighbours, or donating food, or xyz - provided they're made of the right stuff (or yes, if people who are made of the right stuff encourage others, who aren't).
I don't think anyone could argue there's any lack of guidance right now - virtually the whole population is sat around listening to radio, on the internet or watching the tv abut COVID-19 and possible ways to help.

[Offwidth]

If you want to constantly reinvent the wheel and be inefficient. My engineering side and experience with people who work in charities and other NGOs, tells me 'coal face'  communication is very important. Fatneck's post is a perfect illustration to me.

Anyow on a different subject (thanks to girlymonkey on the other channel) here is a scientific link on viral load:

https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-questions-about-covid-19-and-viral-load/

[Offwidth]

The whole dividend thing isn’t exactly a loophole, it exists to encourage entrepreneurs to start small businesses, and to create jobs for people, yes it’s used by one man bands to milk the system, but it’s definitely not that simple.

We need new words to split the two types of tax avoidance.  Commentators on the right are often saying things like "stop moaning you hypocrites, all tax breaks are avoidance".. it's a ''squirrel distraction defence' to detract from their own dishonesty.  Tax incentive schemes, set up for good reasons, get exploited by dishonest accountants and clients to do something else: that is an avoidance loophole that needs closing in law. I think most people paying tax, most of the time avoid tax legally for fair reasons.

[fatneck]

Bo Jo's got CV-19!!! 

[petejh]

The whole dividend thing isn’t exactly a loophole, it exists to encourage entrepreneurs to start small businesses, and to create jobs for people, yes it’s used by one man bands to milk the system, but it’s definitely not that simple.

We need new words to split the two types of tax avoidance.  Commentators on the right are often saying things like "stop moaning you hypocrites, all tax breaks are avoidance".. it's a ''squirrel distraction defence' to detract from their own dishonesty.  Tax incentive schemes, set up for good reasons, get exploited by dishonest accountants and clients to do something else: that is an avoidance loophole that needs closing in law. I think most people paying tax, most of the time avoid tax legally for fair reasons.

You're right in the main, that is what happens at a population level.

But you're wrong and naïve about some small subsets of the population, probably because you have no experience of dealing with these people. Gme and I do. Some of these people avoid paying tax by ruses that border on legality. As Bradders says, the system is set up to encourage highly creative entrepreneurs and risk-takers to create wealth for the benefit of many. Unfortunately, the system is then leached upon by these one-man band parasitical twats who aren't, like OMM or GME, setting up business's that benefit anyone - they're simply screwing a system that wasn't supposed to be for them. They do it to simply to expand their bank balance by avoiding all possible contribution back to the society from which they still live in and still benefit from. They can't even claim to be benefitting society in the way that media entertainers or sportspeople do who also use this system. The ones I'm talking about are just parasitical twats. They can sell their jet-skis and Beemer M3s (fuel costs deducted from revenue) to get them through.

[petejh]

If you want to constantly reinvent the wheel and be inefficient. My engineering side and experience with people who work in charities and other NGOs, tells me 'coal face'  communication is very important. Fatneck's post is a perfect illustration to me.

  Patronising twat. My 'being a human being' side gives me inside knowledge too.

[Offwidth]

Where are all these M3s?  Even the local drug middle mangement on my main road (the infamous St Anns Wells Road)  seem to have the sense to drive stuff that doesnt attract unknown attention to their illegal business. I know quite a few people running single person Ltd companies from high tech down to trade and most seem honest to me.

[SA Chris]

If you want to constantly reinvent the wheel and be inefficient. My engineering side and experience with people who work in charities and other NGOs, tells me 'coal face'  communication is very important. Fatneck's post is a perfect illustration to me.

  Patronising twat. My 'being a human being' side gives me inside knowledge too.

Exactly, also your common sense.

Most of what good people are doing is not rocket science and doesn't need engineering knowledge, just basic grass roots sensible networking and speaking to people.

[Oldmanmatt]

Not normally me saying this, but times are strange.

This is now all a bit testy and recursive.

Points made, wadded and puntered as the audience sees fit.

Can we move it on?

Given that the PM is into his first 24 hours of symptoms, I’m actually concerned about where that might lead, since he’s hardly been in isolation on the run up to this point.

I actually, genuinely, wish the man I would have happily called a wanker to his face, a couple of weeks ago, all the best.

Poor fucker actually thought he was going to grab a shit load of glory, for very little effort, on the back of a few trite sound bites.

Copped a roundhouse to the temple and snap kick to the nuts instead. Has had to flip his entire ideology and world view and actually hasn’t been the insufferable twat he normally is.


Anyway, Royal Navy joke to ease springs:

If Charles is positive, does this prove Queen Elizabeth and The Prince of Wales, are both Carriers....?

[tomtom]

Boom tish OMM

I agree. Move the conversation on in the thread please? It’s not the time to be getting snarky.

[Will Hunt]

Before we all get carried away (i.e. people thinking that the Tories have suddenly move rapidly leftwards and we're about to get permanently nationalised industries and a significant increase in the size of the state; also Jeremy Corbyn crowing that he was proved right etc etc etc), it might be worth bearing in mind that the government's financial measures are a temporary response to an unprecedented threat.
I think that a lot of the government's action has been highly commendable, but I can't see it continuing once we're back to business as usual.

[Offwidth]

The NCP view on charity work during the pandemic:

https://www.thinknpc.org/resource-hub/coronavirus-guide/

[mrjonathanr]

The health secretary -who else? - will be joining the PM in isolation it appears.

[Oldmanmatt]

Before we all get carried away (i.e. people thinking that the Tories have suddenly move rapidly leftwards and we're about to get permanently nationalised industries and a significant increase in the size of the state; also Jeremy Corbyn crowing that he was proved right etc etc etc), it might be worth bearing in mind that the government's financial measures are a temporary response to an unprecedented threat.
I think that a lot of the government's action has been highly commendable, but I can't see it continuing once we're back to business as usual.

I would not be surprised to find a few voters waking up to certain possibilities, though.

It’s quite likely to have a profound effect, isn’t it.

A German friend shared a natty little tidbit on FB that I liked:

“In Germany, we don’t do charity; we pay tax.
Charity shows the government’s failure to fill it’s responsibility.”

[rich d]

Where are all these M3s?  Even the local drug middle mangement on my main road (the infamous St Anns Wells Road)  seem to have the sense to drive stuff that doesnt attract unknown attention to their illegal business. I know quite a few people running single person Ltd companies from high tech down to trade and most seem honest to me.

Hi from Notts!! there was a bloke on the Trent Bridge bouldering last night when I went for my daily outdoor exercise not seen that for a while.
I think it's a mixed bag with tax and self employed, although 3 out of 4 use it purely to reduce to a minimum their tax. 2 are single person businesses who pay themselves through dividends and write everything else off, the other is a tradesman who declares a fifth of his earnings and makes no profit official - he's now livid that the government aren't giving him more - that does feel like karma in that situation - although still working at least for this week.

[Andy F]

Just a heads up, if you get an email for the department of health telling you not to eat tinned pork because it contains covid-19 ignore it, it’s spam.

[gme]

I should have probably started the topic re tax and self employed in the coronavirus economics page so sorry about that.

More in line with this page, are people aware of what is going on in Holland. I have a business there as well and speak pretty much daily to them. The dutch attitude is very much full steam ahead, we have no restrictions in place on our working other than stay 1.5m apart. Still allowed to have meetings and events upto 100 people and travel not limited. They shut schools, bars and resturants before us but thats pretty much it.

Ploughing along openly supporting the herd immunity route. 761 ICU beds full out of 1100, dertemined not to let it effect the economy. There infection/deaths curve is pretty much the same as ours but a day or two behind us.

Will be an interesting experiment if they hold fast on this route.