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.
If the topic seems somewhat dry, the execution is anything but. Yes, there are interviews with economists and tax specialists – but also forays into how the Beatles accidentally signed away the rights to their music to avoid tax (Michael Jackson eventually bought them in an attempt, Neidle says, to lower his own tax bill) and a re-enactment of that pivotal moment when Art Laffer sketched his curve on a napkin, changing the debate around revenue rates forever. You might be aware of the 1991 tribunal that found Jaffa Cakes were cakes rather than biscuits for VAT purposes because they go hard instead of soft when stale – but have you ever heard the song lyric “If a Jaffa Cake’s a cake why don’t you eat it with a fork?” (That is, by the way, what HMRC tried – unsuccessfully – to argue.)
The message, though, is a serious one. From fridges to football clubs, our tax system is failing the people it is meant to serve: us. Grab a Jaffa Cake and listen in.
Untaxing
BBC Radio 4
Weekdays from 31 March, 1.35pm
[See also: Dan Neidle interview: the tax-dodger’s worst enemy]
Content from our partners
This article appears in the 26 Mar 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Putin’s Endgame