"The measures, brought forward for consultation after the Revenue lost the £500,000 Arctic Systems case in the Lords, will raise £260m in its first year by clamping down on the way incomes and profits are allocated between husbands and wives within family businesses.". Apart from discrimination against married couples in this way being totally unfair and arbitrary, it is simply not true that £260m will be raised in the first year of any changes. People will find other ways of managing their family businesses, that is all. Supposing a husband and wife got divorced - but still lived together and shared dividends. What then? IR35 showed that stupid tax law does not raise revenue. This Government makes me sick!

Richard, Worcester, England

When I started my family business I knew little of CGT, NI, PAYE, VAT, benefits in kind, or any of the other statutory tools of financial extraction imposed on us. (is IST or 'income shifting tax' the next one?)

16 years later the two of us have personally generated an enterprise that has trained and employed over 40 people, unfailingly paid over hundreds of thousands of pounds in tax revenues every year and provided award winning services to an international clientele.

The well meant taper relief was the closet we got to a pat on the back.

The new proposals do not encourage us to make the extra effort required to convert a small time success in to a big time one, or to repeat the process should we ever sell up.

It seems that if pets look like their owners, then the country is looking like its Governors - unattractive.

Pete, London,

Is Darling so beholden to his trade union cronies that he insists on driving the country into a ruin reminiscent of pre-Thatcher UK once again? Anyone who thinks that highly capable people, with earnings to match, are obliged to stay here, especially in this day and age, is quite simply not fit for office.

James Smythe, London,