I am afraid I am going to have to disagree with you, as soon as he strays into economic policy all he can do is mash together other peoles’s ideas. It was hardly a surprise that he wasn’t on Corbyn’s panel of economic experts – he doesn’t have the heft of Wren-Lewis, Stiglitz, Blanchflower etc.
Now let’s move onto taxation, a milieu I know a bit about, I am reminded of this article. I won’t go through line by line but there are two pretty startling mistatements (I am being kind).
First, there is this statment
“I did a quick Google search,” he says, “and discovered that I could get 500 courses in accountancy, and none in tax. Why is something that is so important so little researched and only taught as an adjunct to accountancy? Why aren’t we researching the sociology of tax, the philosophy?”
Well his Google is broken because when I google it plenty of courses come up. This doesn’t surprise me as two of the best guys I worked with on tax, both partners at one of the major city law firms, studied under John Tiley, the first serious tax academic at Queen’s, Cambridge in the 1970s.
Second, there is this one
Vince Cable nicked some of my ideas in 2009 and put them in to the Liberal Democrats’ manifesto, which meant they got into the coalition agreement, which meant the general anti-abuse law [part of the Revenue’s tax avoidance strategy] in 2013 came from me
Now he has really overreached himself here. I trained as a tax adviser at a rival big accountancy firm at the pretty much the same time as Murphy. The relative merits of a general anti-abuse law were being debated in the technical press then. Tony Blair’s Labour Government issued a consultative document on it in the late 90s, while he was still a jobbing accountant. It is therefore ludicrous for him to claim credit for the idea.
You may say he must be an expert because he appears on TV and in the papers alot and the International Tax Review said he was the 7th most influential person in the tax world. Media exposure leads to influence and there is no doubt he gets alot of media attention. In my view this is as much to do with the fact that very few people in the tax field want to put their heads above the parapet, it is not in their interests. Second there are alot of unflamboyant and introverted people in tax, there is a lot of truth in the quip, “the quality of the tax advice in inversely proportional to the quality of the suit”, when they do get forced into the sunlight, they are dreadful TV.
I am not writing off all his work, but I am always take what he says about anything with a hefty pinch of salt because his level of expertise and achievements are overstated by the media and sadly, it appears by himself.
