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The Guardian
08-07-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Britain remains trapped in poor economic policy
Randeep Ramesh certainly tackles a worthwhile and complex modern economic policy conundrum (Labour could find the money it wants without raising taxes. This is austerity by amnesia, 29 June). But his opinion that the Bank of England should simply hand over the cash proceeds from quantitative tightening (QT) and that central bank independence is somehow partly responsible for Britain's economic woes, are misguided. Central bank independence was hard-won and has largely proven a resounding success in the developed world for more than 30 years. Allowing a central bank to hand over substantial moneys from QT revenues to the Treasury would be a recipe for disaster, against the spirit if not the letter of the law, as well as a dangerous precedent. More broadly, there is merit in Ramesh's push to coordinate fiscal and monetary policy better. Neither the Treasury nor the Bank are immune to criticism in their failures to act earlier to stave off the inevitable post-Covid inflation spike by raising rates more quickly in late 2021-early 2022, before the Ukraine war. Equally, the Treasury may have acted in a more nuanced fashion in removing the government-led stimulus NewmanLondon A big thank you to Randeep Ramesh for explaining the implications of quantitative easing (QE) and QT. This insane orthodoxy simply gives public money to banks and the City. In 2007-08, the then Bank governor, Mervyn King, pontificated about 'moral hazards' for banks with regard to their risky behaviour, but then it was the public purse that took the hit from the crash and has been picking up the tab ever since. It is a parasitic system geared to the benefit of the City and the oligarchy. Gordon Brown's granting of independence to the Bank was a mistake, driven by his anxiety to reassure the City that Labour was not a threat. Running the economy is profoundly political and ideological, and the notion that only state technocrats can be trusted with monetary policy is nonsense. Rachel Reeves is making the same mistake by trying to fit her spending to Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) predictions. The creation of the OBR was simply a George Osborne wheeze to help justify his disastrous austerity policy, which Reeves is in danger of WoodKidlington, Oxfordshire Have an opinion on anything you've read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
New Statesman
02-07-2025
- Business
- New Statesman
From the archive: Reality: a charter for avoidance
Photo by Maurice Hibberd/Evening Standard/) In 1979 Mervyn King, later governor of the Bank of England from 2003 to 2013, argued that the British state was too dilapidated to deal with a modern economy. Labour had been complaisant, but the Tories resisted reform. 'In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.' It is hard to reconcile Benjamin Franklin's words with the experience of taxation in post-war Britain. Tax rates switch with bewildering frequency, and rarely do more than a few months go by without some kind of tinkering being done upon the system itself. Margaret Thatcher is basing her campaign upon the firm promise – one of the few she has made – that the immediate effect of her victory would be another – downward – shift in the rate of income tax. Indeed, Tory policy for the past few years has concentrated unflinchingly upon disseminating the myth that Britain is a heavily-overtaxed country. But at the same time the Tories have set themselves against any energetic attack on the real evils of our tax system: which are its astonishing complexity and incoherence, its lack of efficacy when dealing with company revenues, and its bias in favour of established, hereditary wealth. Not that it can be said that Labour has made, or credibly promised, any of the reforms that are urgently required. Whichever party policy is examined, uncertainty – even arbitrariness – seems likely to be the future of taxation in Britain. The system that we have is the product of innumerable ad hoc changes, few if any of which were based on any coherent view of the underlying structure they were supposed to improve. The state into which our system has drifted shows that further minor modifications to the status quo will not bring us any nearer to the objective of a reasonably efficient, fair and stable tax system. Yet no government which is concerned with the most efficient way of financing public spending, and which cares about how the tax burden is distributed, can afford to be without a coherent tax policy. Anyone analysing the system for the first time must view it in amazement – with its separate taxes on different kinds of income, each tax having its own rules and methods of administration. In addition to income tax, there are distinct and separately administered surcharges on employment income (in the form of national insurance contributions), on investment income (in the form of investment-income surcharge) and on self-employment income (in the form of special national insurance contributions for the self-employed). The methods of calculating liability differ in each case. At the lower end of the income scale, interaction between the tax system and the maze of different means-tested benefits can give rise to tax rates of well over 100 per cent on each marginal addition to income – the notorious 'poverty trap'. A good example of the unhappy effects of the ad hoc approach occurred last year, in Chancellor Healey's treatment of capital gains tax. Inflation means that real capital gains can be much less than nominal capital gains, but our system taxes nominal gains: the reverse of what a well-designed income tax should do. One remedy proposed was 'tapering relief', under which the tax rate would be lower the longer the asset had been held: another was index-linking, to ensure that tax would fall solely on real gains. Mr Healey rightly rejected 'tapering'' as economically absurd and administratively complicated. And he rejected indexation, on the proper grounds that it would be wrong to index-link capital gains without doing so for other forms of capital income, such as building-society interest. But he rejected the logic of his own argument, which was that if inflation created a problem (clearly it did) then indexation should be introduced across-the-board, And if it did not, there was no case for giving special treatment to capital gains. What the Chancellor actually did (and it scarcely fits with the image of a Chancellor 'making the pips squeak') was merely reduce the rate of capital gains tax: so that the first £1,000 of gain is exempt altogether, and gains up to £5,000 in a year pay a maximum average of only 12 per cent. The marginal rate then jumps to 50 per cent, before falling to 30 per cent on gains above £9,500. This is a curious rate schedule, to say the least. Its design has nothing to do with the incidence of inflation: it appears to be merely a device for buying time until the government can think of something more sensible to do, or until inflation disappears, or until people stop worrying about it. Such pragmatism, lacking any base in underlying principles, leads to complexity, excessive cost, and the loopholes and anomalies on which the tax avoidance industry thrives. It is this allegedly practical, but actually impractical, approach which has produced an accumulation of legislation like a patchwork quilt coming apart at the seams. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Although neither the Conservative manifesto nor the Labour one faces up to the issue, there certainly are reforms which could be instituted – at the cost of upsetting the status quo. But before looking at such proposals, it is necessary to describe the real, as against the imagined effect of taxes in Britain. The redistributive elements in the system rely largely on high tax rates on earned income, although variations in earnings are no longer (if they ever were) the major source of inequality. The main sources of wealth are inheritances and capital gains – including those from building-up and selling a business – and effective tax rates on income from capital are lower than on employment income, because those taxes are easier to avoid. The attempt to impose very high tax rates on earned income gives rise to a proliferation of fringe benefits which are not only a less efficient method of rewarding managers, but serve to increase the visibility of differentials. Employees might find it easier to accept that senior staff should receive larger salaries than that they should get longer holidays, more lavish working conditions, private medical insurance, special dining rooms and use of company cars. According to the Diamond Commission 94 per cent of senior managers in 1975 had personal use of a company car, and a system under which executives are twice as likely to get a free car than receive bonus payments is one which emphasises status rather than performance. The argument against the highest rates of tax on earned income is not that they discourage hard work (they may, though the evidence is limited). But they encourage inefficient forms of reward, and they do not achieve much redistribution. Consequently, they raise little revenue: reducing the top rate of tax on earned income to 60 per cent would cost about £250 million in a full year, much less than cutting the basic rate by one point. At the other end of the scale some five million people, nearly ten per cent of the population, are supported by supplementary benefits – with many others failing to claim the benefits to which they are entitled. Although this is a far cry from Beveridge's idea of national assistance as a final line of help for a handful of families, it can perhaps be said that concentrating help on recipients of supplementary benefit is a cost-effective form of income maintenance. The trouble is that it does not maintain the incomes of the low-paid, because those in work are not eligible for supplementary benefit. If the low-paid try to increase their earnings – by working over-time, or by changing jobs – they are apt to be little better off: this is where the combination of income tax, national insurance contributions and the withdrawal of means-tested benefits can produce marginal tax rates over 100 per cent. Income tax, national insurance contribution and Family Income Supplement alone imply a marginal rate of between 80 and 90 per cent, and at the beginning of last year there were 100,000 families getting Family Income Supplement, and there is a myriad of other means-tested benefits like rent and rates rebates. It is immensely difficult to calculate the implicit marginal tax rates which are produced, and if families could work them out (which is unlikely) many would be very depressed. There are a good many wage-earners who would be better-off if they could arrange to be sick, or unemployed, for a part – but only a part – of the tax year. (This does not apply to the long-term sick and unemployed, who are unjustly given lower rates of assistance than those whose misfortune is temporary.) The strange situation has two causes: first, sickness and unemployment benefits paid in lieu of taxed earnings are not themselves taxed; second, child benefits for those in work are less generous than those for people out of work. It is hardly likely that many people are able to contrive short periods of unemployment so as to maximise net income. But the fact that such anomalies exist – with their true nature being poorly understood – makes it easy to whip up resentment against 'scroungers', as the tabloid press has not hesitated to do, thus making it harder to persuade the average wage-earner to meet the cost of adequate benefits for those in need. Sickness and unemployment benefits could be taxed – thus providing revenue to improve benefits for the longterm unemployed – provided there were administrative reforms. Chiefly, this would require the abolition of 'cumulative withholding' in the PAYE system, so that any one payment could be specifically taxed, with any necessary adjustments being made after the annual tax peter, which all taxpayers would have to make. And rapid changes in mortgage interest over the past two years have meant that cumulative withholding has been effectively scrapped for many owner-occupiers: it should be extended to other taxpayers as soon as computers can make it feasible. If anyone is not convinced of the simplifications this would bring. I suggest a look at the leaflet entitled Autumn 1977 – Income Tax Changes for 1977-78 which was sent out last year with the notices of coding for 1978-79. See if you can understand page two, which is all about mortgage interest relief – a prize for the best solution. Some reforms have been made: from this month, child tax allowances and family allowances are replaced by a single child benefit, amounting to £4 per week for each child, with an additional £2 for the first child in some one-parent families. Further reductions in the gap between child support given to the employed and the unemployed could be given by making an extra payment for the first child, which could be financed by abolishing the married-man's tax allowance. But investment income, and the treatment of savings, produce anomalies more striking than anything in the mythology of 'scrounging'. A top rate of 98 per cent may give an impression of penal taxation, but it is misleading. It is, of course, silly to tax anything at 98 per cent, and in reality the government does not try to. For instance, the Bank of England has designed special government stocks for high-rate taxpayers which cuts their effective tax rate to about 50-60 per cent. Capital gains are taxed lightly in comparison with investment income – particularly after last year's Budget – and this gives scope for tax advisers to dream-up wondrous schemes for converting income into capital. Failure to index the system does increase the tax burden, but the practical outcome is one in which the rate varies enormously, virtually haphazardly, from person to person and from year to year. Three forms of personal saving receive especially favoured treatment: investment in owner-occupied housing; contributions to pension funds; and life-insurance premiums. This is on the whole advantageous to middle-class families, and the three items make up the bulk of personal savings, so that the institutions which hold them dominate the capital market. Pension funds and life-insurance companies own between them nearly half of the equity capital of British companies, and their behaviour is critical to the government's ability to borrow the money that it needs. Discrimination between different types of saving involves different rules for each kind of asset, which produces the complexity on which the investment-columns of the newspapers thrive, and makes the basis of avoidance devices. The consequence of failure to apply consistent treatment to savings and investment income is that much decision-making is dominated by tax considerations, both at the personal and the industrial level – where the financing package associated with a decision is often more critical than the basis profitability of the investment being examined. What is the rationale for a system in which mergers may take place essentially for tax reasonsL in which tax advisers are more Important than engineer and export managers, and there is an incentive for valuable time to be spent on socially pointless activities. The favours given to life-insurance companies, pension funds and owner-occupiers, though taken politically for granted, are very hard to justify. They happen to suit the life-style of middle-class people with predictable career-patterns, who remain largely immobile both geographically and occupationally. The sort of person who comes to mind, in fact, closely resembles the people who construct and control the tax system. He is a civil servant, living in (say) Wimbledon: able to stay without interruption in the same owner-occupied house; travel to work by train (zero-rated for VAT): look forward to a secure and inflation-proofed pension; able to put any spare cash into a life-insurance policy which will mature at the right moment to pay school fees, and thus secure a foothold in the system for a future generation. I have absolutely no wish to discriminate against civil servants living in Wimbledon, but neither can I think of a good reason for discriminating in their favour. Given the deficiencies of our economic performance – central so much campaign rhetoric – it is odd that we should offer incentives to people in the City so that they can think up dis-incentives which work against those who move around after employment (thus wishing to rent, rather than buy a home); who disagree with staid employers (thus placing low value on pension rights) and wish to exploit new business ideas, but cannot do so because any savings they may have are locked-up in life insurance. Here we come to the argument, which will be much rehearsed in the next few weeks, which says that only a big reduction in the tax burden can eliminate the worst distortions, and 'free the spirit of enterprise from the straitjacket of excessive taxation', etc. Although a cut in rates would reduce the magnitude of the problem – depending upon what sacrifice is made in essential services – there are two large difficulties in the argument. First, as the tables show, Britain simply is not highly taxed in comparison with many of those countries which are exhibited as examples of economic success. Despite the problems of comparison, the broad picture is clear. We bear less tax than Scandinavia, rather more than America and Japan, and about the same as the West European neighbours which out perform us. Secondly, many of the problems I have described derive from the weakness of the tax base, rather than the rates which are applied. We are taxing the wrong things, and failing to tax the right things. Only a virtual elimination of direct taxation would deal with this – and the point is important in terms of the present political argument, which often proposes a shift to indirect taxation. A small shift to indirect taxation would make no impact on the inadequacies of the present tax base: to make a large shift would be to abandon any pretence of progressive taxation. I believe the only way to deal with the problem is to have a uniform treatment of income from capital, through a progressive personal expenditure tax of the kind proposed by Nicholas Kaldor in 1955, and again by the Meade Committee last year. This has not been welcomed, or even much discussed by those British politicians who are most vehement about the evils of taxation: and what they perhaps care for as little as anything is the Meade finding that the whole system could be much simpler in operation than that we have at present. It would be based purely on cash flow, eliminating the distinction between income and capital on which most of the present-day opportunities for avoidance depend. An expenditure tax would be levied directly on individuals, and by choice of rate could be made as progressive as the government of the day desired. Taxable expenditure would be receipts of cash from all sources (whether tips, or sales of shares) minus cash deposited in 'registered assets' which would include practically all kinds of saving except current accounts. PAYE would continue to be deducted at source, and the majority of taxpayers would notice little administrative change. It might be argued that such a tax favours the rich, because only the rich can afford to save. But this forgets that the rich also dis-save, and that the system we have makes little impact on spending out of capital gains and inherited wealth. Indeed, capital taxes are largely ineffective at the moment: the high exemption level means that most of the wealth transferred between generations pays a very low average rate. Even since the introduction of Capital Transfer Tax (CTT) it remains easy for a couple who are well advised to pass on more than £100,000 tax-free. For this reason, gifts and bequests made to other people should be treated as part of taxable spending: resulting in an increase of the average fax on capital transfers, without the need for self-defeating marginal rates at the top. A good example of the weakness of CTT, and of the extent to which political debate on taxation is divorced from reality, occurs in the treatment of small businesses. There is a wide range of concessions, but most of them assist the founder of the business only at the end of his or her career. The problem with small business is not that it is crushed under transfer taxes, but rather that policy fails to find ways of encouraging new firms to arise and old ones to die in peace. There is little evidence that the dynasties motive is important to innovators (it is thought important by those who have inherited themselves) and some evidence that firms perform less well when the inheritors take them over. 'Small is beautiful' makes as mindless an axiom as 'big is beautiful', which ruled the sixties. Yet already, under Labour, the 1977 and '78 Budgets have produced inexplicable concessions for small business which the Tories will find it difficult to out-do. In one year these were so enormous that the size of a business liable to CTT increased eight-fold. This change was not announced by Mr Healey, and part of it could only be detected through the omission of certain words in the Finance Bill. The truth is that the decline of small business did not occur overnight, and it cannot be corrected through such huge concessions to the owners of established concerns. Indeed, an expenditure tax is more likely to do something for small-scale industrial innovation: by facilitating personal saving, and by reversing the trend towards 'institutionalisation' of the capital market. A stock item of political debate is the idea that British industry staggers under a vast tax burden. If the personal tax system is rather a shambles, the corporate tax system is chaos enclosed in mythology, with most industrial companies paying little, if any, tax. John Kay and I found that of 20 leading UK industrial concerns, 13 paid no mainstream corporation tax in 1977, and in total only £117 million of tax was paid compared with total reported profits in 1976 of £4,276 million. The 'temporary' stock relief of November 1974 has survived almost five years, with no sign of a permanent solution. Because nothing has been announced, companies are uncertain about their tax liability, and so we have a tax which raises scarcely any revenue but yet generates economic distortions. There appears to be a complete absence of ideas about what to do. In 1974, the corporate sector was threatened with financial bankruptcy because of inflation's effect on stocks: now it is intellectual bankruptcy. The most convincing alternative would be a 'cash flow corporation tax', which would be levied on the difference between receipts from sales and outlays made for current and capital inputs. Stock relief could be abolished, inflation accounting would be for tax purposes, and distinction between different types of finance would occupy less attention. I believe that such a tax, coupled with a progressive personal expenditure tax, would redress many injustices. It would represent the first serious attempt in this country to tax spending out of inherited wealth, and to lessen the transmission of privilege from one generation to the next. The effects on the economy would, I think, be restorative. Of course, there may be other solutions which can be put forward. But if any politician suggests that major reform is less than imperative, or that what is required is to 'lighten the burden', by some ad hoc juggling with the rates, he or she is avoiding one of the central problems of present political economy. [See also: Just raise tax] Related
Times
22-06-2025
- Business
- Times
‘No Carbon' Carney has left us high and dry
A bit like a sort of unreliable boyfriend. This, rather brilliantly, was the description of the record of the governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, by the Labour MP Pat McFadden, then a member of the Treasury select committee. That was in 2014, when the handsome Canadian, hailed as the 'George Clooney of central banking', was just a year into his tenure. McFadden was not talking about Carney's personal life: it was a metaphor for his policy of interest rate 'forward guidance', which was proving no sort of guidance at all. It was all over the place. In one respect, however, there was complete consistency in Carney's record over seven years as this country's most powerful unelected figure. He determinedly used his position to push Britain's banks into defunding the oil and gas industry, on the grounds that man-made climate change was of primary importance, and that financial institutions should base their investment decisions on the proposition that 80 per cent of the planet's hydrocarbon reserves were 'un-burnable'. His wise predecessor, Mervyn King, questioned the decision to make fighting climate change part of the Bank of England's remit, arguing that it made 'absolutely no sense' to add 'net zero' to its responsibilities, and that the Bank should stick to its knitting (interest rates and price stability) and leave environmental policies to the politicians. However, after leaving the Bank in 2020, Carney stuck to his mission. Under the auspices of the UN, he set up the Net Zero Banking Alliance, co-opting a large number of the world's biggest banks, representing $74 trillion in assets, into basing their lending on the mission to achieve 'net zero by 2050'. This, combined with the Labour government's policies under Ed Miliband, has meant that, as one British oil company executive put it to me, 'Not a single UK bank will lend to the North Sea industry'. The Net Zero Banking Alliance, more recently, has suffered an exodus of its American members, which have fallen in line with Donald Trump's agenda (summarised as 'Drill, baby, drill'). But surely, now that Carney has at last achieved his ambition of becoming Canadian prime minister, he is using all the power of that position to fight the good fight. Er, no. One reason Carney actually won the recent election was that he pledged to scrap the 'carbon tax' implemented by Justin Trudeau, for which he had previously proselytised. In office Carney has kept that promise — and in recent weeks gone much further in the opposite direction to everything he did when Bank of England governor. He appointed as energy minister a man who was an executive of an oil exploration and production company in Alberta, the heart of Canada's vast hydrocarbon reserves. These are known as the Alberta oil sands, covering an area the size of England and described some years ago by National Geographic (not a fan) as 'the world's largest industrial project … Especially north of Fort McMurray, where the boreal forest has been razed and bitumen is mined from the ground in immense open pits, the blot on the landscape is incomparable.' Carney has relaxed the emission restrictions that hampered this development (among others) and declared two weeks ago that he wanted Canada to be 'an energy superpower … in both clean and conventional energies. And, yes, that does mean oil and gas. It means using our oil and gas here in Canada to displace imports wherever possible, particularly from the United States. It makes no sense to be sending that money south of the border or across the ocean, so, yes, it also means more oil and gas exports, without question.' • The oil-rich Canadian cowboys who want their own Brexit What accounts for this remarkable transformation? Pure political expediency. Trudeau's policy had been profoundly unpopular, and the Conservative candidate, Pierre Poilievre, constantly referred to 'carbon tax Carney'. So, shamelessly disowning his own previous advocacy, Carney dumped it. Then there were the idiotic threats from Trump to annex Canada. While that will 'never happen' (to quote Carney), the prospect of Albertan secession was less improbable, as that province had been sorely provoked by the ecologically motivated threats to its hydrocarbon industry. Canada as a whole could not afford such a secession, and immediately after Carney's election win, the premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith, introduced a bill to make a referendum on the matter much simpler to implement. She simultaneously called on Carney to make various concessions, which 'must include abandoning the unconstitutional oil and gas production cap'. He got the message. It was no coincidence that, as host of last week's G7 summit, Carney chose to hold it in Alberta. In the final communiqué, the topic of climate change was barely mentioned. To put it mildly, this has confused those who deeply admired Carney, not least in this country, for his previously passionate campaigning against oil and gas investment. But when I asked someone who worked closely with the man at the Bank of England what had happened to his old boss, he laughed and said: 'I must have told you before that Mark is fundamentally a trader, and therefore prepared to adapt principles to circumstances.' This was partly a reference to the fact that Carney's career before becoming a central banker was at Goldman Sachs. But what does this mean for the UK, still thoroughly enmeshed by the net zero policies in which Carney played such a central role? As Brendan Long, a Canadian energy analyst, told The Daily Telegraph last week: 'It means that while Canada's oil and gas industry is ramping up production under Carney, the UK remains aligned with the anti-oil and gas ideology he promoted when he was governor of the Bank of England.' Although Ed Miliband has now indicated a reversal of his opposition to the development of two North Sea fields, known as Rosebank and Jackdaw, the government is keeping its radical policy of banning all new exploration; across the median line, Norway has declared it will be boosting its North Sea exploration and production to the highest level since 2010. The crazy point, which fits in with the government's target but not the national interest, is that if we buy Norwegian gas, it does not come out of our 'carbon budget', as administered by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. Similarly, when we've shut down our entire domestic oil and gas operation and are buying the Canadian hydrocarbons that Carney is now so keen to boost, we will make the (unelected) Climate Change Committee — charged with setting our carbon budgets and invigilating our progress to purity — happy. Not so much the British voters, I fear, come our own general election in a few years' time.
The Sun
18-06-2025
- Sport
- The Sun
Bankrupt former World Darts semi-finalist, 59, stuns Gerwyn Price to earn timely Players Championship prize money boost
MERVYN KING'S form has gone "Boom" - three months after he went bust. The Ipswich ace toppled former Ally Pally champ Gerwyn Price on the way to three impressive wins at Players Championship 18. 2 It could not be more timely for King who feared losing his home after saying he owed 'north of £500,000' to HMRC. The one-time BDO world no. 1 exclusively told SunSport in March he even worried about how he could look after his three dogs. The ex-PDC World Championship semi-finalist said he "hid my head in the sand' as his debts soared over the past two decades. But King was in scintillating nick at Leicester's Mattioli Arena on Wednesday. And top billing went to his opening performance. The current world no.147 dismantled Premier League Darts star Price 6-2. Averaging nearly 100, King bagged six of his nine attempts at double to clinch a 6-2 victory. His Welsh victim Price, 40, is world-ranked 11th and has seven PDC majors to his name, including the ultimate prize at the Ally Pally in 2021. King went onto beat Glastonbury thrower Justin Hood 6-3 before pipping Dutchman Wesley Plaisier 6-5. But resurgent Morecambe hurler Dave Chisnall ended the veteran's surge by inflicting a 6-2 defeat. Darts star Daryl Gurney screams X-rated rant about his 'b------s' on stage at World Cup But for King just being at the oche might be a joy after he was made insolvent at the High Court of Justice in London earlier this year. It left he and wife Tracey anxious about the care of their three large pets — a Pyrenean Mountain Dog, a Pyrenees-Newfoundland cross and a Golden Retriever - should the couple have to move home. King picked up most of his darts' prize money at his peak from the late-90s to early 2000s. However, he mistakenly thought that income was "winnings" rather than "earnings" - and he didn't make it known to the tax authorities. Two decades later - during Covid - King began delivering parcels for Amazon — and realised he could be near to becoming bankrupt. He also started a construction business but 'got rid of it' as he could no longer be a company director.
The Sun
11-06-2025
- Sport
- The Sun
Raymond van Barneveld granted exemption to play in darts tournament as five-time world champion accepts wildcard invite
DARTS legend Raymond van Barneveld has been granted permission to join the World Seniors Tour. The 58-year-old has been named as the final wildcard for the 2025 Champion of Champions. 2 Barney will take on 11 other legends of the sport at the tournament in Portsmouth on June 29. The Dutch icon currently holds a PDC Tour Card. He was given special permission by the PDC to appear in the event later this month. Van Barneveld began his darts pro career way back in 1987. He started in the BDO, winning four world titles before joining the PDC in 2006. Barney added the PDC crown a year later, cementing his place as a legend of the sport. The Dutchman still plays on the Tour, but his last major televised final came in the 2018 Masters. He will go up against stars including Simon Whitlock, Steve Beaton and Mervyn King in Portsmouth. Van Barneveld said: "I am looking forward to playing in this event. "The sport has always loved big characters, and World Seniors Darts have brought them back, with most still playing to a high standard. "They have a loyal crowd, and the popularity for the Seniors seems to grow and grow. "I'm looking forward to catching up with the old faces of the sport, especially from my BDO era. "I'm not coming over to Portsmouth thinking this will be easy. "I will be giving my full respect to all of the players involved, and I will be preparing hard for this tournament". "To have the likes of Simon Whitlock, Steve Beaton and Mervyn King, who have not long come off the Professional Tour, and then Seniors World Champions like John [Henderson], Robert [Thornton], and Ross [Montgomery] also playing, it's going to be a real battle out there to take the title".
