A form of tax relief?

It's in the Mail!

Tony Blair could claim tax relief of almost £1.75million as a result of his plan to donate the proceeds of his memoirs to a charity helping injured British soldiers.... and ... ... the multi-millionaire could lessen the blow to his wallet thanks to 'Gift Aid' rules brought in by his government ten years ago.

Maybe all those new rules were a good idea useful after all.

... under current tax rules, he faces a tax bill of £2.3million on the sum, as he pays income tax in the 50 per cent bracket.

This would mean the entire cost of the donation for Mr Blair would be the £4.6million advance plus the £2.3million paid to the taxman, adding up to £6.9million.

Wow! That's a lot of cash to give away. Seems remarkably generous.

But once he makes the donation, the former PM is perfectly entitled to claim back a large proportion of this original tax bill in the form of tax relief. Under Gift Aid rules, the Royal British Legion can first reclaim the basic rate portion of the tax already paid on the £4.6million by Mr Blair at 20 per cent. This amounts to an extra £1.15million and will swell the actual donation to £5.75million.

But under rules governing charitable donations, Mr Blair is also then entitled to receive tax relief equivalent to 30 per cent on the total donation of £5.75million. This would equate to a potential clawback of up to £1.72million.

So, if you give away a load of money you don't really need the uber-generous tax office will give you a third back - cash in hand - for being so benevolent. And, naturally ... Mr Blair's spokesman last night insisted that the former Premier would 'not benefit' in any way from the donation.

All this might, though, be idle speculation, because the Telegraph tells us that

It is not clear whether the offer to the charity includes the advance or whether the donation will simply be “proceeds” accumulated on top of the advance, which is usually repaid to the publisher.

So, if the book doesn't sell as many copies as anticipated the publishers might want some of their advance paid back - and, of course, they'll look churlish for taking cash destined to a well-deserving charity.

What a mare's nest - and quite clever too.

All this might mean that nobody really knows how much might end up being given to RBL - and the whole thing will prove to have been yet another empty gesture, nothing more than spin and free publicity for a book that's, pre-release - being offered at half price on Amazon. The Guardian tells us that this free advertising (some via the country's publicly funded state broadcaster, the BBC) seems to have worked too. Who'd a thought it!

The Metro refers to the possible donation as Blood Money, and Adnan Sarwar in the Guardian reminds us that when ...

... Sir John Chilcot [Iraq War Inquiry] asked Blair if he had any regrets. After initially dodging the question, Blair answered with a confident "No". In the audience were families who had lost their children in the wars. I was astounded by Blair's arrogance. Given the most public platform since he left office and a perfect opportunity to show some respect, he decided not to. ...

... I have heard people say if Blair was being genuine he could have donated anonymously and out of the public eye. I don't care if this is genuine or more spin – what I do care about is helping soldiers. ... I won't be buying Blair's book though.

And nor will Mrs Rigby be buying the book. If she wants to donate to the Royal British Legion she will do so directly, either via their website or by putting some money in one of their collecting boxes. She sees no need whatsoever to channel any donation through a third party.

Mrs R also wonders if, maybe, in the long run it's best to take the mickey as does The Daily Mash, and we should accept that

... the RBL should keep the money, it will do far more good with them than it will in Blairs pocket ...

We are all mortal, no matter how clever, how clean-living or how rich we are, it's the one certainty of being human - and there are no pockets in a shroud. A few months ago Mr Blair was looking quite frail which is why, thanks to ARRSE, Mrs R will share a verse from Bob Dylan's Masters of War

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul.

....

Mr Blair - Was it worth it?

Anthony Charles Lynton "Tony" Blair was born 6 May 1953.

He attended Chorister School, Durham, and Fettes College. Both fee paying, and both very selective. From there he went to St John's, Oxford.

Mr Blair's grandparents, on his mother's side, were Irish. His grandfather George Corscadden was an Orangeman, (a Protestant). Mr Blair has used this ancestry to enable his children to have Irish passports - fair enough, many would like to be able to do that.

Mr Blair was first elected as a member of parliament for Sedgefield in 1983, when he was 30. He, apparently, told Michael Foot he was a Marxist and when he stood for his first election he said he wanted Britain to leave the EEC, wanted unilateral disarmament and so on, and so on - there are so many things Mr Blair has said, and later changed his mind - it's something we all do.

On 11th May 2007 - the day after announcing that he would formally resign from his job of Prime Minister on June 27th - the Mail carried an article about how people age. It had the title Don't worry Tony...None of us is getting younger. These are the pictures that were at the head of the story.

On the left is Mr Blair in 1997 - aged 44. On the right, ten years later, he is 54.

Since then Mr Blair has done a lot of things. The very first thing he did on leaving office was to declare himself a convert to Roman Catholicism. He had, Mrs R thought, some odd reasons - but his choice, his conscience - nothing to do with anybody else.

He used some of his money (and perhaps donations) to set up his Faith Foundation in America. Odd sort of thing for an ex-politician but - his choice, nothing to do with we Rigbys.

TonyBlairOffice shows that he does more than that, there's the "Africa Governance Initiative", the "Tony Blair Sports Foundation" (for NE England), "Breaking the Climate Deadlock" and also "Office of the Quartet Representative".

And here's a picture of Mr Blair in his role as the latter. (The picture is linked from a Google search, but the image link appears to be to Mr Blair's own site.)

Mrs R thinks it's a surprising picture and wonders if anybody else can see why. He seems to look ill at ease, unsure of himself. It isn't a picture of a 'statesman', somebody with power and authority. Maybe not getting that Europe job he so coveted hurt more than we know.

And that brings us to the latest pictures, taken in April 2010 - just a few days ago, and just a few days short of Mr Blair's 58th birthday.

This one was published in the Times on May 1st. There may, perhaps, be a little lens distortion - but neither a competent photographer with decent camera gear, nor a careful editor, would allow poor quality images to be published in a national newspaper. (It was taken by Ben Gurr who presumably works for the Times.) So, the picture has to be real.

This last one was published a couple of days earlier alongside stories mentioning how Mr Blair had come to lend his support to the Labour election campaign. It's from the Telegraph (follow the link to article plus comments).

When Mrs R first saw the picture of Mr Blair with his arms outstretched she as shocked by the way he looks. You see there are people in the Rigby family who are almost exactly his age and some who are many years older - he, unfortunately, resembles the very much older Rigbys who have been retired for quite some years.

Now, we all have our ups and downs, we all have our disagreements and Mrs Rigby actually thinks Mr Blair did a lot of harm to Britain and to Britain's interests, but she's never actually wished anybody ill, or dead. Never.

Mrs Rigby agrees with Andrew M Brown in the Telegraph. She thinks Mr Blair looks old and, frankly, he also looks quite frail. She seriously recommends he slows down and very quickly realises money isn't the be-all and end-all. She thinks he needs to realise he's made enough to live a very comfortable retirement, and he'd probably be wise to spend his time in Ireland, where he might not need to pay as much in tax, and where his humongous property empire might eventually generate less IHT.

Whatever has gone wrong, it's time, Mrs Rigby thinks, for him to take himself out of both the media and the political spotlights, otherwise we might soon be reading his obituary.

....

The electoral equivalent of the norovirus.

"the electoral equivalent of the norovirus"

A description of Mr and Mrs Blair's contribution to the Labour Party's election campaign, by Paul Scott in the Mail.

Other gems odds and ends from the same article are :

[Mrs Blair] is free to lend support to the Labour Party in the election campaign, she has found her offers of help have been met with a deafening - and distinctly embarrassing - silence

Unfortunately - no, no, don't laugh.

Mrs Blair's diary is so blank that she has committed to attending a book signing to plug her memoirs at a literary festival in Swindon just three days before the election on May 6.

Given that the book in question has already been on the shelves for two years and sold the paltry total of 354 copies in the three months to the end of last year, it hardly seems a pressing engagement.

Champagne Socialists? The Blairs? No, no, it can't be true that ...

... the couple's eldest son, Euan, has just received a six-figure bonus from investment bank Morgan Stanley, where he has worked for the past three years.

Hmm, what was that about planned legislation concerning bankers and their bonuses?

Tony and Cherie already have a £3.7million London home in Connaught Square, a £5.75 million country home in Buckinghamshire and a £1.13million central London mews house that Cherie bought for their 23-year-old son, Nicky, last October.

and

[Mrs Blair] is [planning to spend] in the region on £1.5million on a London house for 26-year-old Euan because he is said by family friends to have 'outgrown' [his] £550,000 Islington flat

That'll be the Euan who just earned himself the six figure bonus, and can't afford to buy his own place. Goes to show he's really just the same as all the other young graduates who are struggling to pay off their student loans - to pay fees imposed by the government during his father's term as Prime Minister.

Mr Blair is estimated to have made in excess of £25million since quitting Number 10 in June 2007.

It's perhaps no wonder he doesn't visit Britain very often, Brown's tax policies would make a nasty dent in all that money. Odd though, that Mr Blair only donated, what was it, £14,000 or £40,000 to Labour's election campaign? That much will have been just a bit of loose change, cash down the back of the settee sort of thing.

Don't you just love it when you can see true Socialism in practice. Practised by all those rich people who are making absolutely sure they share their money around, who are helping out those who are poorer, who are pulling children out of poverty and such like, who are being true philanthropists ...

Ah, but that doesn't seem to be going so well either, because Mrs Blair has just 'donated',

... £250,000 to the Cherie Blair Foundation For Women, whose offices are located above a burger bar in London's Oxford Street, to help pay staff wages

It would also seem that

Mrs Blair ... has been riled by stories claiming her supporters are attempting to have her made a baroness with a seat in the House of Lords.

She's riled because she thinks it's all a smokescreen, devised by ...

... [Mr Brown who] wants to deflect attention from what are said to be his own private plans to make his wife Sarah a dame when he eventually leaves office.

Oh, but all this is just gossipy, over the garden fence sort of stuff. It's all in the Mail so can't possible be true. It can't be true that

Cherie's relationship with ... Gordon Brown remains as bitter as ever.

Surely they were the best of friends, so it can't be true.

Can it?

....

Spilling secret beans.

The Times reports conversations between the now Lord Irvine of Lairg and Tony Blair relating to the decision to abolish the position of Lord Chancellor :-

[Lord Irvine] first discovered that the office of Lord Chancellor was to be abolished and the job transferred to a Secretary of State in the Commons in early June 2003, just days before it happened. “I had no intimation of this but when The Times and the Telegraph carried the rumour I determined to see the Prime Minister.”

That was at No 10 on June 5. Mr Blair hesitated and then said that it was being considered but nothing had been decided. Lord Irvine asked “how a decision of this magnitude” could be made without consultation with himself, the permanent secretary within government, the judiciary, House of Lords authorities and the Palace.

“The Prime Minister appeared mystified and said that these machinery of government changes always had to be carried into effect in a way that precluded such discussion because of the risk of leaks.”

What makes Mrs Rigby more than a little bemused is what might have happened had these plans been "leaked" - presumably to the opposition and the media - and if these matters had been discussed, debated and voted on in Parliament, which is where we ordinary folk expect such wide reaching decisions to be made. With a massive majority it would have been surprising if things hadn't gone according to plan.

The end result is that Jack Straw, MP for Blackburn, is "Lord Chancellor" and "Secretary of State for Justice", in charge of the brand new Supreme Court which the "Justice Department" says :

... provides greater clarity in our constitutional arrangements by further separating the judiciary from the legislature.

This is the same Jack Straw that avoided answering a QT questioner, who asked, "Can the recent success of the British National party be explained by the misguided immigration policy of the government?", by coincidence only a day before other secret discussions were revealed (quoting from Minette Marin's article in today's Times) :-

Andrew Neather — a former adviser to Straw, Blair and David Blunkett — revealed that Labour ministers had a hidden agenda in allowing immigrants to flood into the country.

According to Neather, who was present at secret meetings during the summer of 2000, the government had “a driving political purpose” which was: “mass immigration was the way that the government was going to make the UK truly multicultural”.

What’s more, Neather said he came away “from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended — even if this wasn’t its main purpose — to rub the right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date”.

and

“There was a reluctance ... in government,” he wrote, “to discuss what increased immigration would mean, above all for Labour’s core white working-class vote.” The social outcomes that ministers cared about were those affecting the immigrants. This, Neather explains, shone out in a report published in 2001 after these confidential deliberations. One must question whether this is true. Needless to say, Straw has denied all this and Neather has since tried to back-pedal.

Mrs Rigby can't, from any of the reports she has read, work out what the truth is. She simply hasn't a clue. But, she does know that Britain has changed so much that it no longer even vaguely resembles the Britain of pre-1997 when Labour were first elected.

Since 1997 a whole generation of young people have grown up, they seem to accept that it's normal to be watched by CCTV cameras, that it's normal to be asked for identification by any number of either uniformed or non-uniformed individuals. It's normal for the Police to close roads without saying why, and it's normal for DNA to be taken at the slightest opportunity. It's become normal for summary justice to be served through the post, without the chance of time in a Court of Law to plead innocence.

Since 1997 it's become normal for people's personal and private opinions to result in dismissal from work, and words said in private conversations to be reported to the authorities. It's become normal for ordinary people to be criminalised for trivial 'new' offences, whilst thugs are let off with a warning, or taken to Alton Towers.

It's also become normal for our MPs to be subjects of scorn and derision - unworthy of the trust we, the public, place in them.

Mrs Rigby thinks it will be quite a tangle for the next government to unravel, if they have either the time or energy to do so whilst they are also dealing with the financial mess they will inherit.