My accountants have, quick off the mark as ever, issued a pamphlet setting out the main changes announced by Gordon Brown on Wednesday.

Of particular note, amongst all the "elect-me-I'm-safe-with-your-taxes" obfuscatory dicking about with basic rates and starting rates of tax, was the following seemingly innocent inclusion:

HMRC is to be given the power to designate as a recognised stock exchange for tax purposes any investment exchange recognised by the Financial Services Authority. This measure will have effect from Royal Assent.

Now why would HMRC want to determine this? One possible answer is this:-

This seems to mean that shares listed on AIM could cease to attract business asset taper relief for capital gains tax (except for the company's employees) and business property relief for inheritance tax.

Gordon has spotted some other cavaliers having too much fun in fancy dress - time to impose some Calvinist grey upon those knaves.

I have been a bit dissapointed in his treatment of VCTs which seem to be getting even more unhelpful. This could be another manifestation of that. I do hope that he does not stop BATR on AIM shares.

Unfortunate that AIM is no longer the market it was methinks. If the above rings true, then it is purely down to how successful it has been as opposed to the main market.

Also EIS now limited to 2m a company per annum - what can you do with that, except give people a tax break on their hobbies?

Gordon really is naive. He's spent the last 10 years setting up tax breaks and then removing them because too many people have been taking advantage of them. He has abolutely zero understanding of the concept that private wealth does so much more than make its owners relatively wealthy. Fundamentally they spend an emormous amount of effort trying to invest those funds in profitable enterprise, thereby creating employment, social wealth and more profits for Gordon to tax.

He really is a neanderthal Soviet in his thinking that everyone should be reduced to average wealth and taxes should be spent on adminstrating public services that worked better before the administrators arrived.

As I've got older I've become considerably more left wing than I started - but the old Labour view of hte econmy has never worked and never will.

I thought the older one got, the more conservative one became, stockdog???
Radical left wing views are the domain of the university graduates! :o)

One feels that age is just a way of seeing the other persons point of view without being clouded by your own.

stockdog , I go along with what you have said.

There is a sort of naiviety there. The 04/05 and 05/06 VCT 40% reliefs helped a lot in getting VCTs going as they are not brilliant investments. Now it all seems gone and getting worse. Why do it in the first place ?

Dampening the AIM market would not be good , private investors spend a lot of time and effort in ensuring that profitable ventures are supported. Deincentivise them and we are back to the "tractor factory production mentality".

It makes you wonder what will happen to SIPPs when everyone has them.

I remember the 60s and 70s and the situation was hopeless. I am astonished nowadays that the current government has done as well as it has. Perhaps we should give Tony some credit.

The current govt has appeared to do well almost entirely because they hit the bottom of the interest rate cycle combined with the final decade of low Chinese labour costs keeping inflation down - clothes and lots of goods have never been so cheap relative to earnings, but Gordon has given away a lot of family silver (or should I say gold, our reserves of which he sold most of at the low point of around $200 some years ago!). He has reduced industry to a quivering pulp of blame-the-profit-makers red-tape (who have seen a net loss in employment) whilst nurturing the public sector which has grown out of hand on full final salary pensions paid for out of current account. As for pensions and IHT - penal rates of tax for anyone who tries to leave money behind whether or not out of already fully taxed income - which money could be invested in profitable industry not feather-bedding the latest policy u-turn. The joke is that his policies have helped fuel the passive massive rise in house prices ion which we are to be taxed at every turn, whether buying (stamp duty) or dying (IHT).

But don't get me started . . .

Don`t stop now stockdog I was beginning to get wound up as well.
Pensions, my favourite subject as I happen to have been on the losing end of Equitable Life.
Cost me the pension I would have had.
The with profits pension I was advised to have in 2002 has managed to drop every year since.
Scottish Mutual, need I say more.
Knowing what I know now, there is no way I would invest my money other than making my own investment decisions.
I`ve finished now.

These problems aside (and I too have an Equitable problem) what can we do about it ? I have found that I can reduce my tax burden by VCTs , SIPPs , AIM ... It would be a shame if the BATR on AIM goes.

Does anyone know much about successful spreadbetting or any other way of improving ones tax position ?