The UK's Tax Battles, Part One: How We Got Here

If you’ve been following taxes closely these past few months, you know that the UK is currently undergoing a drastic change.

This episode of The Deduction is part one in our ongoing coverage of the UK’s taxA tax is a mandatory payment or charge collected by local, state, and national governments from individuals or businesses to cover the costs of general government services, goods, and activities. battles. Jesse chats with Tom Clougherty, research director and head of tax at the Centre for Policy Studies in London. Tom talks us through what all went down in the UK this fall: from the leadership elections to the countless U-turns the new prime minister has made to try and reform the country’s tax code.

Shortly after we finished recording this episode, news broke that Chancellor Kwasi Kwatern was being ousted, and Jeremy Hunt would take over the Exchequer, with the promise that, yet again, another U-turn would happen on the country’s budget.

While this episode doesn’t get into that turn of events, it is still an informative start, showing how we got here and where the country should go on taxes.

A quick British glossary for this episode–“Bugbear”: a cause of obsessive fear, irritation, or loathing.