Phil Aldrich

And then the efforts to actually try and fix that have proved to be a huge political constraint.

So you end up just in complete stalemate.

And that's the big challenge for Burnham is how he breaks that stalemate where Starmer was unable to.

I mean, a lot of small business owners, they make their money through taking capital gains on the businesses, the profits that they've made and the gains that they've made.

I think people in general would see it as unfair if you had a capital gains tax which was unadjusted for inflation.

Obviously, the people who are defending the idea will point back to Nigel Lawson in the 1980s, and that was when capital gains tax was lost.

the rates were drawn to be equivalent to the income tax rates.

And so, you know, there is a sort of, you know, the Labour can say, oh, well, the Tories did it.

But of course, back then, there was the inflation adjustment.

So and the Liberal Democrats say in the election manifesto, in their election manifesto in 2024, they had something similar where they wanted to, they wanted to harmonize the rates, but with the income tax rates, but they would introduce an inflation adjustment.

So

For years thinking about doing this, you either do it the way he wants to do it and just irritate so many people that it'll backfire inevitably, or you do it in a way the Liberal Democrats were suggesting, which ends up raising, you know, after behavioral adjustments or whatever, it only ends up raising three or four billion, which is nice to have, but it doesn't solve everything.

So it's not a big, you know, it's not a big bazooka.

Yeah.

Well, and actually on the behavioral stuff, as a reminder, the HMRC's own estimates of harmonizing the CGT with income tax rates are for there to be, and you end up losing tax revenue because of this exact thing.

Because everybody just assumes we're going to wait it out.

We're not going to cash in anything.

So there's no tax to be paid.

And then, you know, they hope for a Tory or reform government next time around who will just completely reverse the policy, which, you know, they will inevitably reject.

run on.