If Alistair Darling cuts VAT back to 15%, I predict a mini-Y2K. Well, actually, since the Y2K bug never really caused any major problems, it might be worse than Y2K. Why? Because VAT hasn’t changed since 1991. A lot of software has been written since then - in particular, all web-commerce software.

There are going to be a lot of hard-coded “17.5%”s in dusty old corners of shitty 1990s Java billing engines. It’s an easy enough bug to fix as far as bugs go, but who is going to be on the ball and get it done?