Announcements made as jokes in the Budget have cost £2 billion in lost revenue, according to The Times of 3 November 2018.
This year’s rate relief for public lavatories so that “local authorities can at last relieve themselves” cost a few hundred million pounds.
Last year’s relief for driverless vehicles cost £540 million. It was announced as “sorry Jeremy [Clarkson] but this is definitely not the first time you have been snubbed by Hammond and May”.
In 2014, Chancellor George Osborne taunted Ed Miliband, “King John’s humbling defeat centuries ago seems unimaginably distant – a weak leader who had risen to the top after betraying his brother”. That was announcing £1 million for the Magna Carta Trust.
In 2015, Osborne had another go at Miliband with another million to commemorate the Battle of Agincourt when “a strong leader defeated an ill-judged alliance between the champion of a united Europe and a renegade force of Scottish nationalists”.
And so on. [18.11]