The IFS is quite right here, stamp duty is largely paid by pensioners

The Institute for Fiscal Studies is quite right here, the people who really pay stamp duty on shares are the pensioners:

Labour’s plans to raise taxes on businesses and financial transactions will hit pension funds, reducing returns for savers and harming living standards into old age, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has warned.

Jeremy Corbyn hopes to raise £5.6bn per year with a levy on bond and derivatives purchases, extending the stamp duty charge that already affects share transactions.

He said it would target banks and help repay the damage wrought by the financial crisis.

It is not, of course, the banks who buy and sell shares, but our pensions that do. And a charge on a transaction inside a pension will be paid by that pension.

This is all known as "tax incidence" of course, the thought that all taxes are paid by hte wallet of some live human being getting lighter - on the simple basis that there's only us folks here to pay taxes - and we need to walk through the effect of a tax on the economy in order to work out whose.

However the IFS said that, ultimately, all taxes are paid for by individuals.

This is not new news either. The IFS has issued a couple of papers on the subject in the past. There is also the EU's own investigation into the incidence of a financial transactions tax. Which shows that, yes, the incidence is largely upon  investors - pensioners that is - plus lower wages for the workers across the economy.

Taking the fat cats this ain't. Which is why the Mirrlees Review so strenuously insists that we just should not be having transactions taxes at all, they're simply a bad form of taxation to begin with.

If you do want to try to tax the financial sector there are other and better ways. An extension of stamp duty is the wrong thing to do entirely, it's a tax which should be abolished in its entirety.