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Buses in the time of Covid

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  Covid 19 and the Bus and Coach Industry by Glynne Stewart Pegg  North Riding Classic Bus. £14.99 ISBN 978-183841687-4 This book covers the effect of Covid 19 on the Bus and Coach industry from 2020 to 2023. It is “profusely illustrated” (as they used to say) and this makes it a valuable document of a time which already seems to be vanishing from our collective memory. Photos showing hand sanitizer bottles on buses, signs saying “keep your distance” and warnings not to talk to the masked driver already look like stills from a science fiction movie. Glynne Stewart Pegg was an economist, industry historian and part time bus and coach driver throughout lockdown. Ironically, he had been due to make a work visit to bus manufacturers in Wuhan in January 2020 but was advised to delay his journey as the first news of Covid was acknowledged. The first UK death from Covid was announced in March 2020, and this was quickly followed by full lockdown. Pegg wrote the first edition of the book while
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Best of British to the HMRC Surge Team

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Reading HMRC’s advert for enthusiastic team players to join its Surge and Rapid Response Team, my response is to wish them a sincere Best of British.  When I started this blog, I warned myself that my experience of HMRC was time-limited and would soon become outdated. Even so, I can only hope their enthusiasm is rewarded. When I joined HM Customs and Excise as a Band 1 (50% of an Admin Assistant) my goals and targets were easy: make it to the first week, make it to the first month, follow the rules, do what you were told and get past my probationary period.  In my first month I witnessed a retirement speech in which a bearded old exciseman told everyone that the wheels were coming off the wagon and management didn’t have a clue. I watched it with indifference because (as I said) I was focussed on following the rules and doing what I was told. I never dreamed that one day I’d be taking the same jaundiced view – or even that I’d give a damn. Looking back at the internal structure of Cust
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The Press Takes A View On Customs Matters

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  I’ve said before that I think merging the Inland Revenue with Customs and Excise wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, but shifting the Law Enforcement side over to the Border Force helped to unbalance HM Revenue and Customs moral compass.  Even so, while researching the HM Customs on TV articles, I’ve been struck by the antagonistic attitude of the press. In 1986 the Sunday Mirror trailed The Collectors TV series by asking readers if they’d, “ever tried to smuggle a bottle of booze or packet of ciggies through the customs? And cursed the peaked-cap Customs man for an interfering busybody?” And in the Belfast News Letter, columnist Charles Fitzgerald began his review of The Duty Men by saying, “If you believe that Governments should not interrupt the free circulation of such indispensable items by imposing monstrous taxes on them and pricing them out of reach, then like me you’ll not think beating the Revenue to be much of a crime, “ and boasting, “many’s the bottle of good French brandy I
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Inland Revenue on TV - Tune On The Old Tax Fiddle (1961)

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 In the spirit of the HM Revenue and Customs merger I have been searching for films and TV shows about the Inland Revenue. I haven’t found a whole TV series yet but, I did come across an Armchair Theatre from 17 December 1961.  Raymond Huntley and Henry McGee It’s called Tune On The Old Tax Fiddle by Ronald Hardy and stars Raymond Huntley as F.K. Gaunt, Inspector of Taxes (Huntley was, I hasten to remind you, the second actor to play Dracula in Hamilton Deane’s 1927 stage play). Author Ronald Hardy was an accountant, who based his first novel, The Place of Jackals on his experiences as a liaison officer in Indochina during the war. He continued to write thrillers such as 1973’s The Face Of Jalanath, in which the hero Farran leads a group of hand-picked mountaineers on a suicidal climb across the Kashmiri peak to destroy Red China’s vast nuclear complex of Su Tokai. It’s a surprise, then, that Tune On The Old Tax Fiddle is a sardonic comedy. Hardy had actually sold the story to BBC Radi
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Customs On TV 4 - The Knock

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  Despite the success of the 1987 BBC documentary series, The Duty Men, the failure of the 1986 series The Collectors made it hard for the BBC was unwilling to contemplate another Customs-based drama series. Independent producer Paul Knight was looking for a follow-up to his successful ITV series London’s Burning. He told reporter Annie Leake that, “I realised there were tremendous possibilities there for a fictional series. In many cases HMCE’s powers far outreach those of the police. It’s surprising that the BBC didn’t spot the potential first.” By a strange coincidence, one of the London’s Burning directors was Keith Washington, who had also worked on The Collectors! Writer Anita Bronson based the scripts for The Knock (named after the call-sign for a raid, and consciously echoing The Sweeney) on extensive research. Inevitably, some of the scenes recall The Duty Men. A “classic-bag-switch” in the penultimate episode seems very much like a scene from the BBC series, right down to the
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Customs on TV 3: The Duty Men

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 Fly-on-the-wall tv documentary shows are so commonplace today that it is hard to imagine what a big deal a series like The Duty Men was back in 1987 – made in the days of heavy film cameras and sound equipment in a much less open society.  While the 1986 drama series, The Collectors had proven unsuccessful for the BBC, the Corporation had an ace up its sleeve. During the same time period, documentary maker Paul Hamann was collaborating with HM Customs and Excise on the 1987 BBC2 documentary series: The Duty Men. Hamann had made over 40 documentaries for the BBC (as a producer for the BBC’s Open-Door Unit, he helped residents of Belfast’s Divis Flats in the Falls Road make a documentary about their poor housing conditions). His 1985 ‘Real Lives’ documentary about extremism in Northern Ireland was the subject of a special meeting of the BBC Board of Governors after an article by the Sunday Times resulted in Home Secretary Leon Brittan (who had not seen the film) demanding the BBC pull t
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30 Years of Air Passenger Duty – Surely You Can’t Be Serious?

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1 November 2024 will mark the 30th anniversary of Air Passenger Duty. Hated by passengers, loved by Governments. Air Passenger Duty went live in 1994, but was introduced in 1993 by Kenneth Clarke, Chancellor of the Exchequer, who thought it was unfair that international agreements let air transport fly on fully duty rebated aviation kerosene, as a result being the only form of transport that was not taxed. As a counterbalance, Clarke brought in an excise duty collected by airlines on passengers who start their flights from the UK. It was never positioned as a ‘green’ tax. Clarke said at the time, “I need to raise revenue…in a way which does least damage to the economy.” The Finance Bill that brought in APD and Insurance Premium Tax was the largest to date, and HM Customs and Excise had not introduced taxes of such weight since the creation of VAT. The Assistant Secretary at Revenue Duties A in Manchester put in a bid to take on the new tax as, “it sounded interesting and it would help
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