Jersey likes to suggest that it is a deeply successful finance centre where milk and honey flows for the benefit of all. That's not true. As the Jersey Evening Post reported yesterday:
Last month newly published figures revealed that inflation in Jersey had risen to 4.5 per cent with large price hikes in housing costs, fuel and food all recorded.
There are now concerns that more Islanders will struggle to make ends meet over the winter when food and fuel consumption increases and further inflation is expected owing to factors such as Brexit and global uncertainty.
And it added:
This year there were more so-called ‘pauper funerals' — which are paid for by Social Security as the deceased person's estate cannot cover the costs — between January and May than during the whole of 2017.
According to a freedom of information request, 28 such funerals were held at a cost of £52,779 last year but in the first five months of this year there have already been 30 funerals covered by the States. If the current trend continues, a record number of paupers' funerals will be held in 2018.
Tax havens work for the wealthiest in a society. That is not because they generate more wealth. Tax havens generate no wealth. They just reallocate the wealth that there is. And that reallocation is always upward. And that is being seen even in Jersey.
Jersey is a society made rotten by wealth. But it is those without that wealth who are, inevitably, paying the price for that.
I continue to believe that Jersey's days as a tax haven are numbered. The veneer can only last so long.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
That’s interesting data and we can see that paupers funerals in Jersey cost about twice what they in North West England can. Did Lee who wrote the article think about whether the high cost reflected well on Jersey as even paupers get more spent on them than here, or badly as Jersey taxpayers are being ripped off by their government.
No doubt some neoliberal Jersey resident will be along shortly to tell us about the life-time income hypothesis, how it maximises your happiness if you get it right, and high cost of government for a respectful funeral is a good thing.
Way back when I retired and wondered where to go and what to do around that time Jersey was alleged to be a good place because the tax breaks meant you were much better off, it was just over the water to get the delights of France and there were properties to be had with some apparently good terms for those taking on debt to buy them. Doing my sums carefully and ignoring the hype I concluded that while on the face of it it was tempting there were too many risks and unknowns. The big one, a very big one, was the probability of running out of money the longer you lived. Not so much chickens as Jersey cows coming home to roost.
Did somebody say Jersey?
I was hoping that you might return to your previous suggestion about the UK following the Jersey example as a formula for BREXIT.
Poverty seems to be the hidden thread in many of the “tax havens” around the world so I wonder why anybody would want to recycle a flawed model yet the Jersey formula does seem to have an increasing number of fans in the corridors of “power.”
Especially I want somebody to explain how a place such as the UK might follow the Jersey (or G or IOM model) outside of the EU – whereas the Jersey model depends upon the existing strange relationship with the UK et al.
Who might the UK lean on as Jersey leans on the UK for so much support?
I may be missing something – but Jersey (G and IOM) only survive because they have a strange parasitic relationship with the UK, EU and other international bodies but can the UK be parasitic too and whose blood can it draw upon?
All noted Mike
And most people do not appreciate what you are saying
Simple. Abolish corporation tax. Abolish VAT [entirely possible after Brexit]. Make the income tax system even more progressive than it currently is. Limit top tax rate to 50%. Increase taxes on property ownership. Create a new law: ‘tax fraud’ – which basically means anything other than the government chooses (so, e.g.: ISA OK, anything else = prison). And impose a 30 day limit on entering the UK unless you are paying British taxes. If you go over the 30 days, we need to know about your tax affairs. The left would probably hate much of the above. And the economists will all get into a bit of a flurry over it all. The lawyers will try and kill most of it. But luckily politics trumps the whole lot.
So you want to give up £189bn of revenues and have no way of recovering them
So what will you cut out of government spending to prevent inflation?
The entire NHS and a bit more?
I prefer realistic comments, please
I think you were a resident some time ago Mike, but I’m assuming that because of your disgust at the manner in which the island conducts itself, you left some time ago ?
I used to live in Jersey, some 40 years ago, and the poor had nothing, inequality was obvious, even then.
There is such hypocrisy fron the JEP publishing material with social justice concern. It is the Establishment house journal and its readership is supremely indifferent to inequality. Its primary function is to defeat dissent in the interest of wealth and power. Meanwhile large sections of the working class suffer a peculiar insular cocktail of poverty. 70% voter abstention attests to the dire situation of the labour movenent and progressives.
I am aware you have said this for many years Nick
You have, of course, been right