In Politics, as in Comedy, timing is everything and is seems to be sadly missing at the Treasury.  Not long after Alastair Darling unveiled his much vilified master plan to simplify Capital Gains Tax in an effort to clip the wings of the Private Equity Overlords, it seems that the world has moved on.

Having committed Revenue and Customs and the rest of the country to an expensive and time consuming exercise to change the basis of CGT, the Private Equity outfits are starting to fall upon hard times, if the experience of Blackstone amongst others is anything to go by.  The collapsing credit markets have made it very difficult to make money buying listed companies with borrowed money so the Government will be flogging a dead horse in trying to extract significant revenue.  Any that are making money will probably relocate to somewhere more accommodating.

Once again, policy makers have shown themselves to be ignorant of a couple of truths; that markets will normally move to eliminate excess profits and the law of unforeseen consequences will apply.  For some reason, politicians seem to think it is possible to have free markets and individuals and at the same time stop some people becoming very wealthy indeed.  Still, it does detract from all the muckraking taking place in Westminster now that the spotlight has fallen on that particular gravy train.  Business people are at least honest that they are doing it to become wealthy, our MPs could learn from that candour.