June 5, 2009
Tax Gap
Part of the reason I’ve not blogged much recently is that I’ve been doing huge amounts of work on the Finance Bill currently passing through Standing Committee.
In the process, I was made aware of the Government’s plans to repeal a serious anti-avoidance measure. Working with the Tax Justice Network, I have been trying to raise the profile of this issue (first raised, FYI, in Private Eye in the issue before last).
The result is a good article in The Guardian, today. Unfortunately, James Purnell decided to stab Gordon Brown in the front last night, and so the collapse of the Government is dominating everything.
The irony, of course, is that the attention paid to the Government’s overall disarray will lead to its handing of a huge chunk of power to corporate interests at the expense of its own Revenue going un-noticed. And that will happen at the expense of all the little people. Like you and me.
If somebody would kindly wake me up from this Kafkaesque nightmare I appear to permanently reside in, that would be nice.
I was hoping to have an accompaniment piece up on Comment is Free today, but given Labour’s collapse that seems unlikely to happen. Still, there’s always hope. Just ask Gordon Brown.
In the meantime, Richard Murphy has more. (And I expect that the TJN Blog does too, but I’m writing from the limited internet access of the National Archives, which won’t let me see that website for some unexplained reason).
James Arnold said,
June 5, 2009 at 2:30 pm
The expenses scandal is drowning out an awful lot of important stuff, unfortunately. Here is George Monbiot on how the outrageous £6.2billion expansion of the M25 barely gets a mention in the press:
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/05/26/the-real-expenses-scandal/
But then, it isn’t surprising that corporate greed is a much less interesting topic for the corporate-run media than political greed.
Paul S said,
June 5, 2009 at 3:58 pm
James,
I read that Monbiot article when it came out; he’s spot-on.
Want to know something worse? Virtually all the companies that the UK government has PFI contracts with are based in…tax havens!
I’m doing some FOI-ing on it at the moment, collecting the data. Not only do these companies rinse the UK taxpayer first time around by being the beneficiaries of PFI, they don’t even pay (full) tax on the profits they make through the rinsing.
SUPER!!
A New England « Bad Conscience said,
January 19, 2010 at 11:19 am
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