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Hindustan Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Trapped between two wars: The art of the Lost Generation
Sometime in the early 1920s, Gertrude Stein took her ancient Ford Model T from her home in Paris's Rue de Fleurus to a local mechanic. The car had been having starting trouble, and the young mechanic assigned to it was making heavy weather of it. Eventually, Stein deemed his efforts unsatisfactory and complained to his boss, who berated the boy, saying: 'You are all a generation perdue.' When Ernest Hemingway, a friend, next visited her home, she applied it to him and others of his generation. 'All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation,' she said. Hemingway, who understood the value of phrases like that, used it as an epigraph for his first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), which follows the lives of a group of American and British expatriates in Paris in the mid-1920s, rootless people wounded physically and emotionally by the Great War, looking for, and not always finding, an anchor. The expatriates in Paris at the time, incidentally, made up a sort of who's who of the cultural icons of the first half of the 20th century. The poet Ezra Pound moved to Paris in 1921. Writer Ford Madox Ford in 1922. Novelist John Dos Passos in 1919. James Joyce came to Paris intending a two-day layover en route to London, and ended up staying until France fell to the Germans in World War 2. Sylvia Beach, the daughter of American missionaries, moved to Paris in 1917, and set up Shakespeare and Company, one of the world's most famous bookshops. F Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda Fitzgerald visited in 1921 and '24. (A year after that second visit, he would release his best-known work, set in this era, but in New York: The Great Gatsby. It is 100 years old this year.) Back to Paris, in the wake of the Great War, this was a city where people caught fish in the Seine for dinner, and toilets with aluminium containers were still emptied into cesspools that were cleared by horse-drawn wagons. But it was also the home of Picasso, Modigliani, Chagall and, on occasion, Salvador Dali. It was the city of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, of Coco Chanel and the singer Josephine Baker. It was a world of people who had been in the war young, were trying to build their own anchors — through art and sculpture and dance, stories and fashion and architecture — and didn't yet know another war was coming. *** The rootlessness was not restricted to Paris. In England, in 1922, TE Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, dissatisfied with life as a civil servant, applied to the Royal Air Force under the name TE Ross and was initially rejected, before people like Winston Churchill recommended he be accepted. The poet Robert Graves suffered so badly from shell shock that even the smell of flowers reminded him of the gas warfare attacks he had suffered as a soldier. Siegfried Sassoon, awarded the Military Cross, one of the war's highest decorations, became a poet and a conscientious objector. Wilfred Owen, generally considered one of the great poets of the war, was killed a week before its end, aged 25. What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? / Only the monstrous anger of the guns. / Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle / Can patter out their hasty orisons. / No mockeries for them; no prayers nor bells, / Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, — / The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells; / And bugles calling for them from sad shires… he wrote, in Anthem for Doomed Youth (1917). *** This was also the beginning of a new world for the Western woman. First, with the men off in the battlefields, they took up jobs in factories. Many lost their menfolk and breadwinners; the lucky among them received war-widow pensions, but others struggled. More women were forced to seek permanent employment. This, directly and indirectly, contributed to the movement for women's suffrage, and the right to vote was finally extended to them. Back to Stein's phrase, 'Lost Generation' soon began to be used beyond its original context of her inner circle of artists, poets and writers who flocked to Paris in the 1920s. It became the tag for anyone born between 1883 and 1900. Franz Kafka (1883-1924) would fit the bill, even though he never fought in the war, having been found medically unfit. The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926), his best-known novels, deal with the sense of despair, alienation and fruitless search for meaning that would come to define the young adults of this age. But what about Hugh Lofting of Doctor Dolittle fame, or PG Wodehouse? Well, there never has been just one kind of art. This is a period that saw the rise, for instance, of the crime novel, with people essentially binge-reading the work of great British pulp-fiction writers such as Sax Rohmer (a former soldier and creator of the Chinese criminal mastermind Fu Manchu); Hermann McNeile aka Sapper of the Bulldog Drummond adventures (who was still serving when he began to write these tales, and would inspire authors such as Ian Fleming and Alistair MacLean); Dornford Yates, who alternated been funny stories of upper-class Englishmen dealing with declining fortunes, and hard-edged spy thrillers, with characters that moved between genres. It wasn't just the men. Three of the four Queens of Crime who dominated the Golden Age of Mystery: Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers in England, and Ngaio Marsh in New Zealand, were from this cohort. (The fourth, Margery Allingham, was born in 1904.) Christie served as a nurse with the Red Cross during World War 1, which left her with a vast knowledge of poisons (and a penchant for murderous nurses). Sayers, credited with popularising the statement 'It pays to advertise', also wrote the original advertising jingle for Guinness. Marsh toured as a stage actress during the war and would use her knowledge of stagecraft to great effect in her Roderick Alleyn books. *** Across the Atlantic, other Lost Generation authors were redefining the crime novel. Dashiell Hammett, an ambulance driver in the war, would define the 'hard-boiled' detective novel; a genre launched by Carroll John Daly's Three Gun Terry (1923). Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) would take up Hammett's mantle with gritty, hard edged crime thrillers such as The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely. The Lost Generation changed children's literature as well. The Australian-British Pamela Lyndon Travers created Mary Poppins in 1934. Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince (1943) remains one of the bestselling books of all time. The Englishwoman Richmal Crompton created that irrepressible schoolboy William Brown in 1922. Air Force pilot WE Johns (also the man who rejected Lawrence's application to the RAF) created Biggles. And there was, of course, Enid Blyton (1897-1968). *** World War 1 made Hollywood what it is today. The destruction of European cinema in the war saw a wave of actors and directors make their way to America. There were so many movies being made in the US after the war — 80% of all movies made worldwide — that the studio system evolved, as did the producers who would dominate the industry's golden age: Louis B Mayer, Irving Thalberg, Harry Cohn, Jack L Warner. All the great silent comedians belonged to this generation: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, and Chico, Harpo and Groucho Marx. So did many of the great directors who would transform cinema: Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang, George Cukor, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Jean Renoir, Rene Clair. And, of course, there were the actors. The South African-born Basil Rathbone crawled to the German side, across no-man's land, disguised as, of all things, a tree, to recover military intelligence that would earn him the Military Cross. He would go on to epitomise sneering British villainy in swashbuckling films, and is still considered one of the best portrayers of Sherlock Holmes. Claude Rains, who made every movie better just by being in it, and whose performance in Casablanca is still remembered, lost almost all the vision in one eye as a result of a gas attack. Within months of the war breaking out, Ronald Colman (A Tale of Two Cities, Prisoner of Zenda) had his leg shattered by a mortar shell, forcing him to crawl back to safety. The experience left him with an air of melancholic reserve that worked well for the characters created by another Lost Generation Englishman: James Hilton. His novels Lost Horizon (1933) and Random Harvest (1941) both featured world-weary protagonists scarred by the war. Colman played both men in the film adaptations. 'It was the war that made an actor out of me,' he would later say. 'I wasn't my own man anymore. We went out. Strangers came back.' (K Narayanan writes on films, videogames, books and occasionally technology)
Telegraph
19-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The sinister truth about The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby has a claim to be the novel of the American century. When it was published in 1925, 'Silent Cal' Coolidge was the 30th president of the United States, the stock market was booming, the Ku Klux Klan was thriving, and a biology teacher from Tennessee called John T Scopes was tried for violating a law prohibiting the teaching of the theory of evolution. A hundred years later, we've hit president 47 and a second round of Donald Trump, his red tie as symbolic as Gatsby's green light. F Scott Fitzgerald's third novel exposed the fracture in my homeland's aspirations. We idolise the fakery, the idea of the 'self-made man', which Jay Gatsby exemplifies: yet the fakery is brutalising, its victims left dead by the side of the road. In the popular memory, Gatsby glitters and seduces, but the deepest truths of the novel offer a blunt demonstration of how shallow is the sheen. Yes, other works of the era endure – Edith Wharton 's The Age of Innocence (1920), Ernest Hemingway 's The Sun Also Rises (1926), Langston Hughes's The Weary Blues (1926) – but none holds the place in our collective consciousness that Gatsby does. Yet the book's sales were initially low, and Fitzgerald died in 1940 believing it – and himself – to have failed. By then, America seemed to agree. 'The promise of his brilliant career,' ran the obituary in The New York Times, 'was never fulfilled.' The opening paragraphs of HL Mencken's 1925 review of Gatsby were, and remain, notorious: This story is obviously unimportant, and, though, as I shall show, it has its place in the Fitzgerald canon, it is certainly not to be put on the same shelf with, say, This Side of Paradise. What ails it, fundamentally, is the plain fact that it is simply a story – that Fitzgerald seems to be far more interested in maintaining its suspense than in getting under the skins of its people. Or, as The New York World put it: 'Fitzgerald's latest a dud'. But the conclusion of Mencken's critique is less likely to be quoted: he sensed that there was something extraordinary here. The tale, he noticed, 'has a fine texture, a careful and brilliant finish. The obvious phrase is simply not in it.' In 1943, amid the Second World War, the US army and navy library services began distributing millions of paperbacks to US servicemen, free of charge, in an initiative that would continue until 1947. Among them were 155,000 copies of The Great Gatsby – a boost that powered Fitzgerald's novel into permanent public consciousness. In this period, too, the critic Lionel Trilling – like Mencken, little read today, but influential then – identified Jay Gatsby with the country that brought him into being. Fitzgerald's doomed creation, Trilling wrote, 'divided between power and dream, comes inevitably to stand for America itself. Ours is the only nation to pride itself upon a dream and gives its name to one, 'the American dream'.' That famous dream was not a catchphrase when Gatsby was published, though it has come to be identified with the text; it has had shifting meanings, from a progressive vision of equality to gold lavatory seats for all. Somehow, the novel allows the reader to dream themselves into the text. Read it, or reread it, and I dare you not to be awed by the brilliance and subtlety of Fitzgerald's writing. Nick Carraway's first sight of his mysterious neighbour at the end of chapter one is one of the finest visions in modern literature: subtle, sure-footed, sinister, suspenseful, as this darkling figure regards 'the silver pepper of the stars... Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet up on the lawn suggested that it was Mr Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens.' Yet Carraway then believes he sees him tremble – believes that Gatsby might be looking out at that single green light, which might or might not be at the end of a dock. And then: 'When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.' Entitled assurance and unquiet darkness: the mechanisms of the novel, in which a veneer of glamour is relentlessly stripped away by lies and violence, are set in motion. The greatness of Gatsby will prove to be a chimera, as insubstantial as the inflated gains in the stock market that would collapse four years after the novel's publication – The Great Gatsby, the Great Depression. Fitzgerald captured the essence of a freewheeling era and the darkness that was about to consume it – the dream and the nightmare folded into nine neat chapters. The scholar Sarah Churchwell has written astutely about both Gatsby and the American Dream: she's the author of Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby – published in 2013, just as Baz Luhrmann's film adaptation, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, was released – as well as Behold America, a 2018 study of the phrases 'American Dream' and 'America First'. She also introduces the new Cambridge Centennial edition of The Great Gatsby, an enticing hardback full of scholarly yet accessible notes and illustrations. If Mencken missed the essence of Fitzgerald's novel upon its initial publication, he wasn't alone. Down the decades, Churchwell says, many have proved little wiser. The Great Gatsby has been 'embalmed in cliché, reduced to a shimmering Jazz Age fantasy of flappers and fun and hackneyed observations about the American Dream that obscure its darker vision of corruption'. If you cast in the title role Robert Redford – who played Gatsby in Jack Clayton's film of 1974 – or DiCaprio, that shimmer will become overpowering. The world to which Gatsby aspires – this self-created man, dazzling in a pink suit, wearing shirts so beautiful that they make his former lover, Daisy Buchanan, weep – is ruthless beyond his imagination. When Daisy's husband, the brutish Tom, breaks his lover Myrtle's nose, the moment retains its power to shock, a century on. 'The novel exposes corruption in all its forms,' Churchwell says. 'Moral, financial, social and spiritual. It's a world where deception is survival, wealth erodes responsibility, and power is protected by brute force – not a world of boundless opportunity, but one where power is preserved by those who already have it. Gatsby's tragedy isn't just that he can't win Daisy back, but that the world of Tom Buchanan will always crush upstarts like him.' Fitzgerald was ahead of his time: in 1925, the joint was jumping, and the possibilities of prosperity seemed limitless. Americans, as Churchwell puts it, 'were mostly deaf to cautionary tales about heedless waste'. And so most adaptations still focus on the glamour and the glitz. Fitzgerald's book was transformed into film as early as 1926 – that silent movie, now lost, was based on a Broadway play, directed by George Cukor, who would later direct the films My Fair Lady and A Star Is Born. A century later, a new musical, with book by Kait Kerrigan and music and lyrics by Jason Howland and Nathan Tysen, is arriving in the West End. On Broadway, it nabbed a Tony Award for best costume design, but purists heading to the London Coliseum may baulk at its near-complete erasure of Gatsby's past, so crucial to the novel's essence. Marc Bruni, its director, has admitted to already having English teachers taking him to task. Yet it offers a further demonstration of just how badly we all want to have a good time: how eager we still are, like the careless people of Fitzgerald's novel, to live in the present and ignore what was, and what is still to come. The Cambridge edition of Gatsby reproduces pages from Fitzgerald's manuscript, and the galley proofs, which he corrected up to the last possible moment, making major revisions to a text that the publisher considered finished. For instance, 'Gatsby turned to me, his voice trembling' becomes 'Gatsby turned to me rigidly'. The galley text has Tom Buchanan say, 'Women get these ideas in their heads –', until Fitzgerald changes 'ideas' to 'notions', the latter word carrying a significant whiff of denigration. An idea has weight, a notion does not. The language of The Great Gatsby is its triumph. 'Even as Fitzgerald's plot forecloses possibility,' Churchwell says, 'his prose expands it. If Gatsby's dream was doomed from the start, the novel suggests that language itself – its ability to conjure meaning beyond the material – might be the only real transcendence we have.' Gatsby's real greatness lies in his enduring belief in something more, even if it's only a tragic illusion. And that is the dream that still enchants us, despite the lies and violence that threaten, in this new century, to completely engulf us. Illusion – or hope? It's up to us to decide.
Associated Press
24-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Associated Press
The Sun Also Rises on Cthulhu: The Next Pride and Prejudice and Zombies—or Something Bigger?
A bold new novel, The Sun Also Rises on Cthulhu, reimagines Hemingway's classic by merging literary mastery with cosmic horror, releasing April 1, 2025. 'Hemingway explored a lost generation's existential crisis. Lovecraft delved into humanity's insignificance in an indifferent universe. This novel blends both, revealing, maybe, it's the same story.' — Jorah Kai ATLANTA, GA, UNITED STATES, March 24, 2025 / / -- As Hollywood continues to mine familiar IPs and franchise fatigue sets in, The Sun Also Rises on Cthulhu offers something truly rare: a high-concept literary mashup that balances artistic prestige with mass appeal. This genre-bending novel merges Ernest Hemingway's seminal classic The Sun Also Rises with the mythic terror of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos—two of the most influential literary voices of the 20th century. Releasing April 1, 2025—a century after the original publication—this chilling reimagining has already caught the attention of a top Hollywood agent, with whispers of major star power and global adaptation buzz surrounding a potential feature film or prestige streaming series. A Story Made for Hollywood In 2009, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith surprised readers and filmgoers alike, blending Austen's timeless romance with a zombie apocalypse. The book sold over 1.5 million copies, and the film grossed $25 million worldwide—ultimately finding long-tail success through streaming and digital rentals. It proved audiences crave fresh, genre-blending takes on the classics. The Sun Also Rises on Cthulhu is poised to follow a similar path. This mashup merges Hemingway's spare, haunting prose with Lovecraft's cosmic dread, reintroducing the Lost Generation—Jack Schitt, Ro'brt Ctholh'en, Brett Ashley, and Creepy Bill—as they drift through postwar Europe, stalked not only by existential malaise but by an ancient terror on the verge of awakening. A Visually and Sonically Immersive Novel Beyond its genre-bending narrative, The Sun Also Rises on Cthulhu features stunning chapter illustrations and a beautifully painted cover that vividly bring the world to life. The book is paired with Sad Songs from an Old Goth in a Tree and three immersive music albums—The Book Soundtrack, Voidwalker, and Sad Songs—created by the author, an existential detective and veteran of global dance music culture, from Burning Man to the Olympics. The result is a multisensory experience steeped in beauty, dread, and catharsis—crafted to captivate fans of art, music, and story alike. Hollywood Eyes the Prize The novel has already piqued the interest of a top Hollywood agent. While details remain confidential, insiders are buzzing over the project's blockbuster potential—as either a prestige streaming series or a $100M feature film. With Cthulhu—one of horror's most iconic and globally beloved characters—at the center, the adaptation carries a built-in fanbase spanning film, games, literature, and comics. The combination of literary prestige and mythic horror could position The Sun Also Rises on Cthulhu as the next Pride and Prejudice and Zombies—a genre-bending breakout with both artistic edge and box office potential. Buzz from Major Outlets The book has already earned coverage from Yahoo News, The Associated Press, and a growing number of prominent outlets, highlighting its ambitious concept and cultural relevance. Early reviews are glowing—praising the seamless fusion of Hemingway and Lovecraft, the striking artwork, and the novel's emotional resonance. Critics and horror fans alike are calling it 'deeply creative,' 'visually arresting,' and 'an unforgettable reading experience.' With momentum growing, The Sun Also Rises on Cthulhu is fast becoming one of the most anticipated releases of 2025. About the Author The Sun Also Rises on Cthulhu is co-authored by Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winner Ernest Hemingway and Jorah Kai, the modern minstrel of the macabre. Kai brings a bold, horror-infused lens to Hemingway's classic. Though still emerging in the Western literary landscape, he has a long history in underground and artistic circles and recent cultural impact in China, where he has appeared on national television and reached millions of viewers in his cultural and solarpunk environmental documentary shows. Kai's Diary, his pandemic nonfiction epistolary tale, was an international bestseller and one of the top books in China for 2020. His novel Amos the Amazing, another bestseller in children's steampunk literature, was recently acquired by CQPG—the powerhouse publisher behind Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem, now a global Netflix sensation. With China's growing fascination with Cthulhu and Kai's cross-cultural reach, this book is poised to captivate readers across continents and languages. The Sun Also Rises on Cthulhu launches April 1, 2025, and is now available for pre-order in eBook, paperback, and hardcover formats. To request a review copy or explore the book, soundtrack, or upcoming events, please contact More Publishing or visit Garrett H. Jones, Jorah Kai 224-858-8521 X YouTube Other Legal Disclaimer:
Yahoo
22-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
We will all pay the price for Labour's war on wealth
There is an oft-repeated, and by now inevitably somewhat clichéd, line from Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, in which he wrote that bankruptcy first happens slowly and then all at once. I hope then that readers will forgive me for using it here, but it seems to me to be an incredibly apt way of describing the trend in wealth creators leaving the UK. The number of millionaires making their way to more favourable tax jurisdictions has been fluctuating since the financial crash, but now the UK is expected to lose the greatest proportion of millionaires in the world by the end of this parliament. Non-doms were already gradually moving, but by all accounts a substantial number of those remaining are now planning to flee. Slowly, and then all at once indeed. I should hardly need to explain why this is calamitous for the economy, but the Government clearly needs a reminder. The disproportionate amount of business activity they create here aside, the taxes they contribute are integral to the Government's ability to fund its spending commitments, whether it's welfare or public services. The top 1 per cent pay almost 30 per cent of income tax. The number of liquid millionaires who left last year was the equivalent of over half a million average taxpayers leaving. Considering that these ordinary taxpayers are already being squeezed to pay for the state's spending, this is clearly a disaster. It's easy to see what this exodus is in response to: the sense that the UK has become increasingly anti-business and anti-wealth. The latest increase in employers' National Insurance and the incoming Employment Rights Bill will only have entrenched this view. And so they're heading to places that actively court high-net-worth individuals, such as Italy, which offers a flat tax, or the UAE, where there is no inheritance tax, capital gains tax or income tax. But of course it's the abolition of the non-dom status that is the final nail in the coffin for our non-doms. The Treasury will now be able to levy significant rates of tax on their assets and businesses abroad. They might as well erect a massive 'Get Lost' sign. This new regime already looked pretty bad. But it appears that the situation is a lot worse than we previously thought. The Adam Smith Institute has consulted with legal experts, financial advisors and accountants, and it has become clear that the Finance Bill as currently drafted has created a punitive and arbitrary set of rules, which will almost certainly drive away the final few remaining non-doms. The way the rules have been designed may result in non-doms being forced to pay genuinely excessive rates of tax, especially if, as planned, the Bill dismantles the safeguard that prevented a UK resident's profits from a foreign company from being treated as personal income. It also seems that there is significant legal uncertainty around the Temporary Repatriation Facility, which is supposed to encourage them to move their assets here. Their full findings will be released next week – and I've been told they make for grim reading. It is not clear why the Government is pressing ahead with these plans. Perhaps, as their most ardent detractors would accuse them of, they want to punish wealth-creators for what they see as their 'unfair' success. Or perhaps they genuinely believe that this will actually raise more money for the Treasury. But either way, it will ultimately be the average taxpayer in this country who will pay the price for Labour's war on wealth-creators. When wealth leaves the country, those who are left behind will inevitably see their taxes increase to pay for state spending. After all, as the great Mrs Thatcher once said, there is no such thing as public money, there is only taxpayers' money. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
22-03-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
We will all pay the price for Labour's war on wealth
There is an oft-repeated, and by now inevitably somewhat clichéd, line from Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, in which he wrote that bankruptcy first happens slowly and then all at once. I hope then that readers will forgive me for using it here, but it seems to me to be an incredibly apt way of describing the trend in wealth creators leaving the UK. The number of millionaires making their way to more favourable tax jurisdictions has been fluctuating since the financial crash, but now the UK is expected to lose the greatest proportion of millionaires in the world by the end of this parliament. Non-doms were already gradually moving, but by all accounts a substantial number of those remaining are now planning to flee. Slowly, and then all at once indeed. I should hardly need to explain why this is calamitous for the economy, but the Government clearly needs a reminder. The disproportionate amount of business activity they create here aside, the taxes they contribute are integral to the Government's ability to fund its spending commitments, whether it's welfare or public services. The top 1 per cent pay almost 30 per cent of income tax. The number of liquid millionaires who left last year was the equivalent of over half a million average taxpayers leaving. Considering that these ordinary taxpayers are already being squeezed to pay for the state's spending, this is clearly a disaster. It's easy to see what this exodus is in response to: the sense that the UK has become increasingly anti-business and anti-wealth. The latest increase in employers' National Insurance and the incoming Employment Rights Bill will only have entrenched this view. And so they're heading to places that actively court high-net-worth individuals, such as Italy, which offers a flat tax, or the UAE, where there is no inheritance tax, capital gains tax or income tax. But of course it's the abolition of the non-dom status that is the final nail in the coffin for our non-doms. The Treasury will now be able to levy significant rates of tax on their assets and businesses abroad. They might as well erect a massive 'Get Lost' sign. This new regime already looked pretty bad. But it appears that the situation is a lot worse than we previously thought. The Adam Smith Institute has consulted with legal experts, financial advisors and accountants, and it has become clear that the Finance Bill as currently drafted has created a punitive and arbitrary set of rules, which will almost certainly drive away the final few remaining non-doms. The way the rules have been designed may result in non-doms being forced to pay genuinely excessive rates of tax, especially if, as planned, the Bill dismantles the safeguard that prevented a UK resident's profits from a foreign company from being treated as personal income. It also seems that there is significant legal uncertainty around the Temporary Repatriation Facility, which is supposed to encourage them to move their assets here. Their full findings will be released next week – and I've been told they make for grim reading. It is not clear why the Government is pressing ahead with these plans. Perhaps, as their most ardent detractors would accuse them of, they want to punish wealth-creators for what they see as their 'unfair' success. Or perhaps they genuinely believe that this will actually raise more money for the Treasury. But either way, it will ultimately be the average taxpayer in this country who will pay the price for Labour's war on wealth-creators. When wealth leaves the country, those who are left behind will inevitably see their taxes increase to pay for state spending. After all, as the great Mrs Thatcher once said, there is no such thing as public money, there is only taxpayers' money.
