What connects: a doodle on a napkin, a musical about Jaffa Cakes, a Beatles song, the relegation of a beloved football club, and a giant “super-cooling” fridge? If you answered “the UK’s broken tax code, obviously”, well done. But if you’re confused as to what on Earth a fridge has to do with HMRC losing £10bn in tax (enough to build, say, 20 hospitals), Dan Neidle has a new radio series for you.
Neidle’s name might be familiar. He’s a tax lawyer whose exploits as an investigative journalist and non-profit adviser have included uncovering the HMRC row that led to the resignation of the former chancellor Nadhim Zahawi, and the PPE procurement scandal involving the Tory peer Michelle Mone and her husband, Douglas Barrowman. In Untaxing, he argues that Einstein was wrong when he said tax is “the hardest thing in the world to understand”. Tax, Neidle says, is just a set of rules. And we can learn a lot about our society from the way the rules have been designed – and how people play the game.
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