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Then one day, a neighbour with whom we are on friendly terms volunteered that he knew a thing or two about computers and that he could probably help us. As he lived in the house next door, we leapt at the idea. He fixed and updated our computers and then refused payment.
True, my wife Rose had baked and offered him cakes and bread and all manner of other food but this was ridiculous: he had been hard at work on our computers for five or six hours. We insisted that we pay him but he was having none of it — and the more we insisted the harder he resisted. So instead we gave him a case of wine. Much embarrassed, he finally accepted it — and our barter economy began. He has been back on numerous occasions and various goods and services have been exchanged for his computer-fixing skills. The arrangement works perfectly; we save ourselves in the region of £1,500 a year, and he in turn gets delicious grub, the odd bit of letter-writing and form-filling, and the occasional case of wine.
At the beginning of December, for another neighbour, we hosted a wedding party in our basement kitchen. Quite apart from the fun of it, we had our back garden swept and tidied by a gang of guests before the party, plates of delicious food donated and bottles of drink left for our consumption — oh, and we have a day’s free labour from a handyman coming up.
Our friend the food photographer Jason Lowe recently bartered a set of pictures for a day’s shooting in the West Country. I am not sure who has come off best, the gamekeeper or Jason, but both are doubly happy because as well as feeling they have secured a bargain and a whopping discount, neither has to pay tax on a transaction that is worth perhaps £500 to each of them.
That scourge of the Left, Professor Roger Scruton, has been bartering goods and services for years. Piano lessons for hay, grazing for grain, and so on. Scruton says, ‘The barter economy becomes a non-accumulating economy, which is a healthy thing from all perspectives because it encourages a mutual dependence and there is no monetary intermediary.’
Scruton, who is the wine critic of the New Statesman, has also hit on a novel way to dispose of wine he receives as review samples but does not want to drink. He has a passion for unpasteurised milk, a commodity that you cannot buy because it is illegal to sell it over the counter, so he swaps his wine for the local farmer’s raw milk. Complete satisfaction on both sides: a perfect economic interaction.
You only have to put ‘barter’ into the Google search engine and up pop all manner of sites. In these straitened times, it seems people want to barter anything from a tanker full of oil to houses, racehorses and all manner of other goods, services and commodities. But beware: HM Revenue & Customs’ rules are opaque. HMRC told me that they ‘have no interest in individuals who are not running a business engaging in barter’. In other words, if you barter as a one-off service, as an individual and not as a business, and you are not trading in order to make a profit, then the trade or barter is entirely free of tax. And that’s the Chancellor speaking, not me.
So back to my computer man. His day job is driving a taxi but he doesn’t barter taxi rides (because if he did it would fall foul of HMRC rules). We have a friend nearby who is in constant need of computer help, however. She too is fed up with paying through the nose for people to fix her computer. She also has a very nice apartment in Marrakech; enter computer man, who wants a holiday in Morocco. As I sit here writing, the pair of them are negotiating how many computer hours for how much holiday. They’re both delighted and the tax man cannot — at the moment — touch them. It leaves you feeling very smug indeed. In these difficult times, I would heartily recommend it to anyone, rich or poor.
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