Tax one to know one

There are two expressions that severely hack me off at the moment. One is ‘we're all in this together'; the other is ‘it's all about ownership of clients'.

Of course, the first one is a favourite line from our new chancellor George Osborne when he talks about tackling the deficit. Thankfully, he hasn’t used it a lot in the last few weeks, although he did recently when talking about extracting extra revenue from offshore accounts in places like Liechtenstein. He made it sound as if there were billions hidden away by UK taxpayers that could be used to reduce the deficit. There might be, there might not, but it is a useful bit of political spin from a government that has found it hard to ‘be in it together’ when the majority of the cabinet ...