Closely fought, some excellent touches, and wonderful entertainment. Wasn't the football good yesterday?

Oh, no, I meant to say the Hecklers debate about non-domiciles on Radio 4. Honestly, I did listen to it, and I haven't just spent the morning trying to get hold of it to write about it here.

Did you listen? Having now heard the full debate, I thought it was a good run-through of a lot of the different issues, and there were some striking points made.

Have you ever heard Mike Warburton say that he thinks Gordon Brown is 'one of our most successful chancellors'? It's a nice try, Mike, but I don't think you'll be getting an invite to Number 10 just yet.

Richard Murphy was proposing dropping the non-dom rule, and heckled by Mike, by Tim Congdon of Lombard Street Research, Julie Meyer of Ariadne Capital and by Michael Cole, the former spokesman for Harrods and well-known non-dom Mohammed Al-Fayed.

There were a couple of arguments that merited airing. Mike said that successive governments have looked at the issue and decided not to drop the rules. He says because they came to the sensible conclusion not to. I think there's an alternative explanation.

Tim Congdon made the point incessantly and impatiently that there was no viable alternative. I think Richard's argument that there are every other tax system in the world has an alternative, bar one (Ireland) dealt effectively with that.

Julie Meyer, Michael Cole and Mike all made the point that we would throw away our competitive advantage over the US and other countries in financial services and other things if we dropped the rule.

Richard's argument that if the government really thinks the UK is such a great place to do business, the people coming would come anyway. I like that argument a lot. Is all that nonsense we get from Gordon just guff, if he thinks we need tax rules to bolster us? Probably.

I also liked Richard's rallying line: 'Fly the flag, pay the tax'.

All in all, I think the hecklers lost, at least in the way it was edited (I'm told some of the controversial stuff was left out). They were too quick to accuse Richard of being envious or xenophobic apart from anything else. I don't particularly think he's either of those things, and accusing your opponents of base motives didn't seem particularly courteous.

They landed some hits, but I thought Emma Chamberlain's contribution at the end (she was in the audience) summed a lot of it up for me. She said the debate was hampered by poor data. If we want to ditch the rules, we need to know what effect it will have.

She added that there were plenty of US people who came to the UK who didn't benefit from the rule, one reason for thinking a lot of people come here because it is a good place to do business. She also outlined some compromise ideas, the Swiss negotiated tax idea and also time limits on the rules.

Personally, I think the rules are indefensible and should be ditched at once. What's your view?

And if you haven't heard it yet, you can listen again here.