It is remarkable how the BBC manages to avoid rigorously investigating donors to the Labour party and their various tax dodges.
The BBC defends Miliband and his inheritance tax dodge…
Ed Miliband should publish tax documents – Conservative MP
One rule for the rich and one rule for the rest of us under Miliband as Labour condemns ‘sophisticated tax avoidance’ what ever that means….but defends Miliband’s own dodging.
Here the BBC promote Labour as the party that will tackle tax evaders…Ed Balls vows to crack down on tax evasion and the interview is hardly testing for Ed Balls who is fed a question by Marr and allowed to use it, as probably intended, to peddle his own line.
No hard questioning about the hypocrisy in Labour’s claims about dodgy donors to the Tory Party.
However the BBC is keen to highlight every word Miliband utters in relation to this matter….here closely examining the life and times of Tory Lord Fink….
Ed Miliband accuses Fink of U-turn in tax avoidance row
And here giving Miliband an unquestioning promotion of his rhetoric on tax avoidance and the Tories’ part in it….
Miliband pledges ‘root and branch’ HMRC review
Miliband claims that ‘the coalition is “shrugging its shoulders” on tax avoidance – which he claimed had left a £34bn hole in the UK’s finances.’
How hollow that claim is when you spend just a few minutes researching Labour’s history on tax dodging…something the BBC seems averse to but is quite happy to trawl for old history like this…
HMRC failed to prosecute tycoon over tax evasion
The BBC goes on to reinforce Labour’s message with this report…
Ed Miliband: Tax avoidance threatens ‘fabric of society’
Mr Miliband accused the prime minister of “turning a blind eye” to the issue, and said tax avoidance threatened “the fabric of society”.
Which is all a bit strange really as a few minutes on Google and you can find plenty of damning information about Labour’s history on Big Business, the mega rich and tax avoidance.
It seems the BBC just isn’t interested in Labour’s role in creating the massive inequality in society and its protection of the mega rich. Below is a run down of just some embarrassments for Labour…I had to stop looking as it was all too easy….but all too difficult for the BBC.
Here’s the Guardian in 2006…..
Super rich
For the ultra-rich few, this country is now a virtual tax haven, which is why more and more princes, tycoons and oligarchs are making it their home. James Meek sets out to uncover the secrets of Britain’s seriously wealthy
If there is more private wealth in Britain, and in London in particular, than ever before, where is it coming from? One explanation is that in the past few years London has become, even more than in the 1990s, the world’s conduit of choice for private wealth. Its generous tax treatment of the mega-rich, particularly those born abroad, makes it in some ways a virtual tax haven.
One of the big tax advantages for super-rich British residents who aren’t British-born is this country’s unique “non-domiciled” tax rule, which allows tens of thousands of wealthy people to avoid paying tax on income earned overseas. Almost four years after an investigation by Nick Davies in this newspaper showed how the Swedish billionaire Hans Rausing, then described as “the richest man in Britain”, had in one year received more from the Treasury in refunds and grants than it was getting from him in tax, the government shows no sign of closing the loophole. “Non-domicile is much bigger than people think. It’s massively important,” says the hedge fund manager.
“I’ve always thought that England would benefit a lot by becoming an ‘offshore haven’,” says Garnham. “It’s already halfway there. Why not make more of it? We’re only a tiny little island”.
In 2013 Labour’s Margaret Hodge said:
Experts offering advice on legislation they helped to create is ‘ridiculous conflict of interest’, says select committee chair Margaret Hodge…”The large accountancy firms are in a powerful position in the tax world and have an unhealthily cosy relationship with government”
Of course she was talking about the Coalition government but at the same time Labour were getting massive help from accountants PWC:
PwC said it had provided more than 6,000 hours of free technical support, worth £400,000 to political parties during the year, up by more than 20%, with almost 4,500 hours going to Labour and the balance mainly to the Liberal Democrats.
PwC’s party donation history at the Electoral Commission shows their offer of support for the main political parties is typically taken up by those on the opposition benches. The accountancy profession has been criticised for getting too close to politicians and government offices.
In its annual report, PwC said: “The firm has no political affiliation and does not make any cash donations to any political party or other groups with a political agenda. However, in the interests of the firm and its clients, we seek to develop and maintain constructive relationships with the main political parties.”
Any more stories about Labour’s dodgy donors? Yes plenty……
Labour donor Lord Sainsbury avoids £27m capital gains tax
Donor John Mills’s gift to Labour avoided tax bill of £1.5m
India Guns For Its Tax Evading Billionaires
Within a week of India’s second richest man, Lakshmi Mittal, complaining that the Indian government was too slow in permitting the construction of new steel mills, Mittal’s home country has guys like him in the cross-hairs.
This is from the Guardian in 2002 and is a damning indictment of Labour….
Rich people are costing Britain millions in lost tax by not registering their houses in their own names, according to land registry records and independent accountants’ estimates.
The wealthy individuals who appear to be enjoying the country’s choicest property virtually tax-free, thanks to their exploitation of legal loopholes include a number of Labour party donors, as well as the former Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher, an influential Saudi prince and Mohamed Al Fayed, the controversial owner of Harrods and Fulham football club.
The computer tycoon David Potter, for example, owns not only his London house but also Rush Manor, a lavish home counties retreat by the Thames.
His fortune, despite recent collapses in the value of internet enterprises, is calculated at £98m.
We estimate that he may be avoiding liability on Rush Manor for his heirs of inheritance tax of around £600,000; liability of £80,000 in stamp duty on a sale; and capital gains tax on the profit he would make if he sold the mansion, originally purchased in 1989, of at least £160,000.
Mr Potter, a Labour favourite and £90,000 donor who gave a 1999 lecture at Downing Street on wealth creation, also uses a second controversial tax loophole by claiming to be “non-domiciled”.
In the eyes of the Inland Revenue, they therefore have “non-domicile status”. Although Mr Potter will pay tax on his UK income from Psion, he does not need to pay tax on income and assets he keeps abroad.
Land registry records show the same pattern in the case of a number of high-profile recent donors to the Labour party.
We found:
· a Panama company owning the north London house of pharmaceuticals tycoon Tony Tabatznik;
· an offshore company listed as owning the£9m summer palace occupied by Indian steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal;
· an offshore trust holding the Grosvenor Square flat of the drug manufacturer Isaac Kaye;
· a Jersey trust company listed as owning the Hampstead home of businessman Uri David.
Another donor, financier and philanthropist, Christopher Ondaatje, has given £2m to the Labour party. For 17 years his second house has been Glenthorne, a coastal mansion in north Devon.
Yet although he has written lyrically about his feeling of “coming home” from Canada by buying it, the 93-acre estate is in fact in the name of the offshore Exmoor Ltd.
All these men claim non-domicile status. None wanted to comment on the allegation that they are avoiding tax liabilities on their UK homes.
And let’s not forget this one….
Tony Blair’s new government exempted Formula One from the ban on tobacco advertising after its boss, Bernie Ecclestone, had given Labour a donation of £1m.
I could go on…in fact let’s not forget that David Miliband, when Foreign Secretary, was sent the same email that the HSBC ‘whistleblower’ sent to the HMRC about tax evaders and yet he and Labour has escaped all investigation whilst the HMRC has been crucified by Labour’s Margaret Hodge in her position as chair of the Public Accounts Committee…not that I’m saying she has a conflict of interest in this…no, wouldn’t say that at all.
Nothing stopping the BBC from investigating that link though is there? Or indeed highlighting Labour’s very dodgy donor history and its role in facilitating the tax evasion industry…or indeed looking at this again….
Whilst no longer in parliament and a LibDem when he was, this post could equally apply to the loathsome Chris Huhne, who at the last count that I saw owned 8 properties, all under the proposed mansion tax threshold.
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/chris-huhne-would-escape-libdem-mansion-tax-despite-owning-eight-homes-8499707.html
For their part, the Labour mantra (at least that of Miliband and Ummuna up to now) has been “not my fault guv, my parents did it”. Shouty Owen Jones came up with a similar excuse last week when he said on the Daily Politics, “it’s not my responsibility” when asked about the Guardian’s arrangements.
Ed Balls and his wife Ms Cooper bounced their house three times in two years I remember. (it was all in the rules apparently so that’s alright).
Its obvious that hypocrisy runs in the Ball’s family as his father fought a successful campaign to get Grammar schools closed in Norfolk subsequently sending young Ed to erh…yep you guessed it…private school.
The PTAH (Pollyanna Toynbee Award for Hypocrisy) is on its way Edward! Well done that boy! Now cut along to prep…Oh yes and Up the workers!
I love the PTAH its really funny because it so accurately sums up the whole liberal left ‘Do as I say not as I Do’, thinking and of course dear old Polly is the aging queen of the hypocrits.
Anyone got a link to the BBC’s relatively recent scrape with HMRC when they were offering tax advice to their “talent” to avoid tax and also that paid by the BBC on them if salaried rather than companies?
Missus Kinnock, aka Helle Thorning-Schmidt, has just done an English-speaking news conference on the BBC NHS News Channel. Familiar Euro Common Purpose blather…. we only know he was a Danish citizen, born in Denmark,…. involved in criminal acts, … criminal gang, … no information that he was part of a ‘cell’… [Er..right… old Ronnie Biggs didn’t shoot up free-speech seminars and Jewish synagogues, though, did he? ]
Given the love of paying taxes peculiar to Labour politicians, it is informative to note the approach of Baron Kinnock’s son and daughter-in-law. [It seems a remarkably involved, error-strewn process for people keen to pay tax.]
The Danish tax authorities (SKAT) investigated reports that Thorning-Schmidt’s husband, Stephen Kinnock, was guilty of tax evasion. Kinnock had declared that he was not a resident of Denmark and thus not subject to Danish taxes, while at the same time Thorning-Schmidt had declared, in an application for dispensation for Kinnock to own property in Denmark, that he resided in Denmark “every weekend of the year from Friday through to Monday”. Thorning-Schmidt attributed the discrepancy to a “big and sloppy error”. On 16 September 2010, Danish tax authorities acquitted the couple and the charges of tax evasion were dropped.
A week before the 15 September 2011 elections to the Danish Parliament, the 2010 decision from SKAT (the taxation department) surfaced in the Danish tabloid B.T. The case had been leaked to the newspaper several months previously. It turned out that from 2000 to 2008 Thorning-Schmidt had made use of tax deductions applicable to her husband, even though he was not subject to Danish taxes and had no income in Denmark. The mistake was corrected by SKAT for the three years from 2006 to 2008, and Thorning-Schmidt paid the amount she had saved due to the error. She was however not required to pay the amounts saved for the six years from 2000 to 2005, because of the statutory time limit for liability in such cases.
Helle Thorning-Schmidt – Tax Affairs
Have just listened to BBC R4 programme A History of Britain in numbers.
One itemed claimed that VAT Notice 709 contained a definition of what is “”Hot” as though this is a State definition as per Communist China.
In fact it refers to what is classified as hot take away food such as fish and chips which are taxable at the standard rate as opposed to zero rated cold fish and spuds sold in a supermarket!
The word “hot” has therefore been used totally out of context. Should expect better from a programme trying to educate us about taxes.
Ayrshire Pullman Motor Services v Inland Revenue [1929] 14 Tax Case 754, at 763,764:
“No man in the country is under the smallest obligation, moral or other, so to arrange his legal relations to his business or property as to enable the Inland Revenue to put the largest possible shovel in his stores. The Inland Revenue is not slow, and quite rightly, to take every advantage which is open to it under the Taxing Statutes for the purposes of depleting the taxpayer’s pocket. And the taxpayer is in like manner entitled to be astute to prevent, so far as he honestly can, the depletion of his means by the Inland Revenue”
James A. Clyde, Lord Clyde
It isn’t the legitimate tax avoidance (such as it is) that’s the issue– more power to their elbows for doing it. It’s the moralising from Hodge the Dodge et co which goes down wrong.
All tax is theft. The Americans at least did something about taxation and a lack of representation. All we get is ‘consensus’ left-wing politicians saying ” you must give us more”. No-one appears to say that more tax is a bad thing for UK PLC, well, no-one since Margaret Thatcher.
Jimmy Carr agreed with this.
And the BBC still loved him for that.
So why are the faux-attacks of the vapours re HSBC etc?
It`s not as if Birt, Wogan etc are unfamiliar re getting moolah from the BBC to be creatively paid?
Or does this indulgence only apply to the talent, the beautiful people…and not Harriets window cleaner or Ed Balls valet parking?
It is the civic duty of every citizen to pay as little tax as they possibly can, just as it is the civic duty of those responsible for collecting and allocating the revenues in the most effective, corrupt-free manner possible for the benefit of the aforementioned citizens.
To be fair, John Pienaar did press Ed Balls quite hard and repeatedly on his Sunday morning 5Live programme, to admit that a donation of shares to the Labour party was a way of avoiding tax on the income from the shares. Balls wriggled and bullshitted and was accused by another contributor of basically saying that when Tories avoid paying tax it’s completely wicked and evil, but when Labour do it, it’s perfectly justifiable.
Of course MPs get receipts for every job – how else would they be able to claim them as expenses, even clipping their fuck**g hedges.
BBC News on FaceBook following up on Ed Balls’ latest receipt wheeze.
Not going well in the comments for either of them.
The Daily telegraph makes a valiant effort to point out the hypocrisy of Labour politicians when it comes to tax avoidance (news report on MPs expenses, Dan Hodges on Milliband’s deed of variation). The paper doesn’t realise that their words are lost in the wind, these Labour failings do not exist as they are barely reported by the behemoth BBC.
This morning Radio Five “gets much worse” Live was “following up” Ed Balls’ comment on the weekend that if he pays a tradesman in cash then he always gets a receipt. Nicky “Gameshow” Campbell and Co. were using this as a means to continue with the attack against those “wicked Tory donors” who indulge in tax avoidance. A window cleaner then sent a text to Gameshow, in which he claimed to have cleaned his windows for cash, but Nicky did not bother to give him a receipt. Priceless! The hypocrisy of the BBC was laid bare for all to hear this morning.
Later in the show Nicky was interviewing two representatives from ther so-called Church of England regarding a letter published by the senior bishops, which argued among other things for closer European integration and the abolition of Trident. One of the representativesa, a female clergyman from Oxford, argued that the point of the letter was to encourage people to think about these issues. Campbell to his credit did state that the majority of peole in this country are against further integration, and that most people do think about these issues. This point was clearly not accepted by the female clergyman, and you could sense that Nicky was getting annoyed with her attitude. The impression I gained was that the Church of England clearly does not trust its own parishoners to think about these issues for themselves, and the Church’s leaders such as Justin Welby and John Sentanu are nothing more that today’s Pharisees. With regards to the abolition of Trident, the Government of Egypt has stated that scores of Islamic terrorists are about to cross over from Libya to Europe in order to pursue their deadly agenda. The worrying thing is that the BBC is not prepared to even mention this issue, and the three main political parties do not plan to discuss defence as part of their election programmes. If the Caliphate arrives in Europe, I do not give much hope for the chances of survival to the female clergyman from Oxford.
Are you suggesting that we keep Trident to bomb terrorists? How would that work? On the issue of tax ,are you equating a reciept for a window cleaner to the collosal tax shortfall due to tax evasion/avoidance. 10 quid versus tens of Billions. What are you smoking dude?? Get more quick!
The usual vacuous tory rubbish. The point is tax should be paid at the rate set by Government. That should include Corporations too.
The issue is how to achieve that end because if Taxes are not paid ultimately our society will collapse. This is particularly since both the rich and the Corporations that renumerate them are gaining proportionately more wealth that they can spend. 5 Families in Britain own more than 20% of the population. About 50 % of wealth in the world is owned by 1% . The fact that this wealth doesnt come from ‘working hard and doing the right thing’ but by the simple math of returns on investment means this inequality will just get worse. Not only will economies collapse due to lack of demand but so to will the democratic state.
Maybe give the tory ya boo sucks primary school stuff a rest and concentrate on the real issues eh! If you want to stay partisan check out the video of Osbourne telling people how to get out of paying taxhttp://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/feb/16/osborne-advised-using-financial-loopholes-to-avoid-tax-and-care-costs.
Its also in the Nazi supporting Mail the proprietor of which according to the Eye runs his tax free enterprise out of Bermuda.