There’s a lot been written recently about flat tax proposals. Too often flat tax options have been deliberately muddled with tax cutting. It would be possible to introduce a flat tax at a sufficiently high rate that the total income tax take remains as it is now, but many of those proposing flat taxes sneak tax cuts in at the same time, muddying the issue.

The Tory Cornerstone Group, though, are fans of tax cutting and make it clear that their flat tax would cut taxes, helping "millions of low-paid workers and pensioners."

They propose a £10,000 personal allowance and a 22% overall rate. That’s the same as the current basic rate, so let’s guess who would benefit most from this. Is it "millions of low-paid workers"? Or is it folk who currently paying top rate tax? Is it possible that those getting the greatest tax savings would be the very richest? Here’s a rough graph to give you a clue.

Can you tell who it is yet?

Today’s Wikipedia featured article is on the Single Transferable Vote.

A particularly good episode of Lost (“Raised by Another”) on E4 last night. Lot’s of spooky an exciting bits.

There was a certain amount of Christ sub-text, I thought: Claire conceives despite being on the pill, and a medium tells her the baby is important/dangerous. Then a man who (we’re to assume) wasn’t on the plane, apparently wants to prevent the birth – some anti-Christ plot here?

Some niggles, though, with the logbook bits. They agree that by removing the names of the dead from the plane’s manifest, they’ll be left with the names of the survivors. But the aeroplane broke into pieces and the survivors (and the deceased they survivors know about) have come from one section only, so many of the people on the manifest will be unaccounted for. Also, we established last two episodes back that Sawyer isn’t using his real name. If Sawyer isn’t the name on his passport (which it could be if he legally changed it), he’ll be the one who doesn’t appear in the logbook.

Still, what with Mira Furlan last week and a crazed madman this, it’s certainly picking up the pace.

I am, for the record, in the camp that doesn’t expect a decent explanation at the very end…

Signal fault brings train chaos

Rail services into and out of Edinburgh have been slowly resuming following an early morning signalling failure which hit rush hour trains.

The fault near Haymarket station in the capital brought trains to a standstill with thousands of commuters affected.

I resorted to a bus journey in the end, which took 1 hour 42 minutes. It took a circuitous route through various towns – I got off less than 40 miles from where I boarded. I arrived at my desk three hours after leaving the house.

To put that in perspective: I could have been in London via aeroplane in the same amount of time.