
The India deal may prove a hard sell for Sir Keir
After three years of negotiations, Britain and India have at last agreed a trade deal. The UK will slash tariffs on imports from India and India will do the same for British exports, including whisky, cars, medical devices and much else.
The deal is good news for British consumers and exporters, a boost for free trade in an increasingly protectionist world, and a triumph for the Brexit vision of reorienting trade away from the stagnating European continent. The Remainer claim that we would be stuck behind Brussels in the queue for future deals has been discredited.
The problem for Sir Keir Starmer is that his woeful record on tax and migration will make it difficult for him to sell this deal to the public. One of the sticking points in negotiations had been the taxation of Indian workers temporarily posted to Britain by their employers. Yesterday's deal granted these workers an exemption from paying National Insurance contributions in the UK so long as they pay the equivalent tax in India.
Such an arrangement could have been sold as a sensible move to avoid workers being taxed twice and, indeed, Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds attempted to portray it as such, noting that we already have 17 similar deals, including with the EU, US and South Korea.
On the heels of last Autumn's National Insurance raid, however, and concern over the volumes of both legal and illegal immigration, it is potentially politically toxic. Indeed, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has wasted no time in accusing Sir Keir of introducing a system of 'two-tier taxes', with his deal being portrayed by Reform and the Tories as granting tax cuts for some migrants, even as British workers face tax hikes.
Concerns are also being raised over the potential impact on migration. The Indian government's own statement announcing the deal claimed that it 'eases mobility' for Indian workers, and secures 'immense opportunities' for Indian youth in the UK. Mr Reynolds, however, asserted it would have 'no impact' on Britain's immigration system, besides a small number of workers accessing a visa capped at 1,800 per year. Given the Government's record, many will wish for more solid assurances that this deal does not amount to liberalisation of visa policy by the backdoor.
The economic benefits of this deal should have seen it welcomed by all quarters. It is a deep shame that Labour's dysfunction has overshadowed what may prove to be a great Brexit victory.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Daily Mail
38 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Fears of tent cities as rough sleeping is decriminalised in end to 200-year-old law
Tent cities could pop up across the UK as rough sleeping is decriminalised, critics of the policy say. Ministers have announced plans to repeal the Vagrancy Act by next spring, meaning it will no longer be an offence to sleep on pavements. But there are fears scrapping the 200-year-old law despite rising numbers of the homeless will mean more people camping on the streets. Announcing the changes, Angela Rayner said she was 'drawing a line under nearly two centuries of injustice towards some of the most vulnerable in society'. The Housing Secretary pledged to increase funding for homelessness services with an extra £233million this financial year to provide alternatives to rough sleeping. She said: 'No one should ever be criminalised simply for sleeping rough and by scrapping this cruel and outdated law, we are making sure that can never happen again.' Introduced in 1824 to tackle a homelessness crisis after the Industrial Revolution, the law was designed to punish 'idle and disorderly persons, and rogues and vagabonds'. Most parts of the act have been repealed but some remain in force in England and Wales to enable police to move on rough sleepers rather than prosecute them. Homeless charities called the move a 'landmark moment' they had long called for. However, there were concerns that the move could lead to more people sleeping on streets and the creation of 'tent cities'. The charity Shelter estimates there are 326,000 people, including 161,500 children, in England who are homeless, a 14 per cent increase on the previous year. This has caused camps to pop up in several cities, including on Park Lane in central London. Figures published in April showed the total number sleeping rough in the capital – those who spend at least one night on the streets – was 4,427 for the three months to March 2025, which was a near 8 per cent increase from 4,118 for the same quarter last year. The numbers classed as living on the streets had risen by 38 per cent year-on-year to 706 from 511. The Government said 'targeted measures will ensure police have the powers they need to keep communities safe – filling the gap left over by removing previous powers'. These will be new offences of facilitating begging for gain and trespassing with the intention of committing a crime and will be brought in through amendments to the Crime and Policing Bill. Ministers said this will ensure organised begging – often by criminal gangs – remains an offence, meaning it is unlawful for anyone to organise others to beg. Ms Rayner's department said spending on homeless services would hit nearly £1billion this financial year. Kevin Hollinrake, Tory communities spokesman, said: 'Labour's approach will result in a pavement free-for-all in our towns and cities. They just don't understand or care how this affects law-abiding local residents and the impact it has on their pride of place.' Chris Philp, the Tory home affairs spokesman, told the Telegraph: 'This move risks turning British cities into a version of San Francisco, which has become overrun by encampments of homeless people.


Spectator
44 minutes ago
- Spectator
How can ‘sanction' mean two opposing things?
Sir Keir Starmer said 'he could 'not imagine' the circumstances in which he would sanction a new referendum' on Scottish independence, the Times reported the other day. The Mirror said Amazon 'has agreed to sanction businesses that boost their star ratings with bogus reviews'. So we find sanction being used with completely opposite meanings: 'give permission' and 'enact a penalty to enforce obedience to a law'. The latter sense was extended after the first world war to cover economic or military action against a state as a coercive measure. That is the use we daily find applied to action, or the lack of it, against Russia. The diverging meanings both go back to the Latin noun sanctio, deriving from the verb sancire 'to render sacred', hence 'inviolable'. Such a sanctio came to mean a decree, as in that obscure beast of history, the pragmatic sanction, which looks neither pragmatic or like a sanction. The phrase had a good run for its money, though, labelling a decree attributed to St Louis of France against the Papacy in 1268 and a decree by Charles III of Spain in 1759, granting the crown of the Two Sicilies to his son. I would describe as an anxiety dream the thought of having to write about either. Here, pragmatic meant 'to do with affairs of state', a development of the ancient Greek word that, via Latin, also gives us practical. In English pragmatic acquired the meaning 'practical' only in the mid 19th century, allowing the Americans C.S. Peirce and William James to harness pragmatism to describe a kind of philosophy. As for sanction, it is now also deployed to label the removal or reduction of social benefits. In February this year, 5.5 per cent of claimants were being sanctioned. There is, too, the architect of Dublin's Heuston station (often misprinted as Euston station): Sancton Wood (often misprinted as Sanction Wood).


Spectator
44 minutes ago
- Spectator
OnlyFans is giving HMRC what it wants
Fenix International occupies the ninth floor of an innocuous office block on London's Cheapside. The street's name comes from the Old English for marketplace, and once upon a time Cheapside was just that: London's biggest meat market with butcher shops lining either side of the road. Today, the street houses financial institutions and corporate HQs. But Fenix still runs a marketplace. Some may even call it a meat market, albeit one that operates on the phones of hundreds of millions of users worldwide. Its name: OnlyFans. OnlyFans is best understood not just as a porn site, but as a social media platform with a paywall. Creators – mostly women – post photos, videos and voice notes behind monthly subscriptions. Users pay extra to tip the women, customise content and have one-to-one chats with their favourite models. Not everything on OnlyFans is X-rated, but that's the content that makes the money. An entire ecosystem has grown around OnlyFans since it was founded nine years ago by two British brothers, Tim and Thomas Stokely. One 'e-pimp' explained that successful models outsource much of their work to offshore call centres to give the illusion of intimacy with customers. Low-paid workers in Venezuela or the Philippines are hired to impersonate creators over text chats, maintaining dozens, even hundreds, of relationships with lonely men. OnlyFans' profits are enormous. In 2023, it generated nearly £5 billion in sales – up more than 2,000 per cent in four years. The company paid £127 million in tax last year, £110 million of that in corporation tax. Because Fenix is based in London, the bulk of that cash is flowing straight into the Treasury. For comparison: Britain's fishing industry – supposedly a red-line issue in Brexit – brings in just £876 million and pays next to nothing in corporation tax, while also receiving £180 million a year in tax concessions. We don't think of OnlyFans as a media company (if we think of it at all) and so we ignore what it is in business terms: a staggering success. With more than four million 'content creators' and 305 million subscribers, it would easily rank in the top three British publishing companies. It is perhaps the most successful creator-based subscription service ever. Traditional platforms can't compete – OnlyFans' revenues are twice that of North America's Aylo, which operates the world's biggest porn websites. Britain's sex industry brings in far more to the economy than politicians are comfortable admitting Britain's sex industry brings in far more to the economy than politicians are comfortable admitting. The Office for National Statistics estimates Britons spend in excess of £6 billion annually on it. It is one of the few British industries which remains a net (digital) exporter. Indeed, OnlyFans is perhaps the strongest unicorn (a privately held start-up worth more than $1 billion) in the country. It's more profitable than any other British tech start-up. And it's doing something our other digital start-ups can't: exporting to America while keeping tax revenues onshore. Two-thirds of its revenue now comes from the US, proving that even in a global tech economy dominated by Silicon Valley, British firms can still compete. OnlyFans' success makes it all the more striking that, according to Reuters, Fenix is in talks to sell. Los Angeles-based Forest Road Company is leading a group of investors in negotiations to buy the business for £6 billion. It's rumoured that other suitors are vying for attention and that shares may be sold on the stock market. Either way, one of Britain's few successful exports could soon be gone. It's awkward to defend pornography, and so politicians don't try. Parliament hosts thousands of lobbying events every year – payday lenders, bookies, vape companies, even arms dealers turn up for drinks and canapés. There is no 'sex tech reception'. Ministers fall over themselves to visit impressive-looking factories that are in fact barely relevant. For example, Glass Futures, a research and production plant for the glass industry based in St Helens, was recently picked by Keir Starmer as the perfect location for his speech decrying 'Farage's fantasy economics'. The plant is a not-for-profit that makes £7 million in annual sales. OnlyFans pays more in tax in a month than Glass Futures earns in a year. But no MP would be caught dead at OnlyFans' Cheapside HQ, despite, I'm told, many invitations to visit. Neither has any politician ever defended the porn industry in a debate on innovation, exports or growth. The most recent House of Lords research note on 'the impact of pornography on society' contains no mention of the words 'economy', 'tax' or 'finance'. Of course, money isn't everything. The harms of porn – to women, to relationships, to the minds of teenage boys – are real and considerable. We might well be better off banning the whole thing. But if we are going to wage a moral war on porn, we should at least be honest about what we're sacrificing. The money is real – and it's already in the bank of HMRC.