Simon Lambert

It's now only £3,000.

And it was Jeremy Hunt who did that, not the Labour government.

The Labour government has also, however, raised the rate of tax on capital gains.

And all of these things are seen as discouraging investing.

To come back to the way of how you do this properly is what you do, as I said, is you bring in an element of indexation so you only tax gains above inflation.

Then you can equalise the rates and it doesn't penalise people anywhere near as much as it sounds like.

And actually, in many cases...

it would actually mean that people paid only the same amount of capital gains tax as they would now, or potentially even less.

In fact, in Jeremy Corbyn's manifesto, there was a thing about equalising capital gains and income tax rates, and they did bring in a level of indexation, but that was done on what they called a risk-free rate of return, which is the return from government bonds, from gilts.

And if you did the numbers on somebody, for example, who had held a buy to let for about 20 or 25 years, there was a scenario where they actually ended up paying less capital gains tax rather than more under that plan.

So as you can see, even under Jeremy Corbyn,

This could have ended up with people paying less tax.

What it would tax, though, is people who make very short-term big gains.

And that did used to be considered to be a thing that we wanted to avoid.

We wanted to encourage long-term investment.

I think it says that we are continuing to head in the wrong direction.

And the problem is we have reached a scenario where the tax burden is very high compared to British historical standards.

It's not that high compared to some other countries, but some other countries have a different way of thinking on these things compared to, you know, the mindset that we are in as a country, the tax burden is at a high.

However, taxes on the average earner have come down.

And that was largely, again, thanks to the Tories.