Around the time of the pre-Budget report, the TS office is flooded with predictions of what to expect in Brown’s speech from various accounting firms and other economic spectators. It’s made all the more interesting by the fact that no-one knows what is going to happen, but pretend they do.

This year, top 25 firm MacIntyre Hudson has taken this a step further by providing odds on what it expects to appear, although it didn’t say whether it would be taking bets.

Alongside some of the more mundane predictions, TS fancies a fiver on, at odds of 1000-1, the introduction of a 90-day ‘detention period’ for anyone accused of tax avoidance.

Obviously this is tongue in cheek, but it did get TS thinking. Where would offenders be detained?

Perhaps an off-shore location would be appropriate. A reopened Alcatraz would surely fit the bill.