Rich Hall appeared on the News Quiz on Saturday. It’s probably the last time he will ever be invited on.
For some reason this troop of comedy greats were described as the ‘piranhas of satire’….more like goldfish….at least the lefties were…round and round they go, the same old stuff being trotted out time after time with no recall that they’d played that tune a thousand times…with one exception…Rich Hall.
The same old targets and the same old lazy anti-capitalism, anti-Tory, anti-anything right-wing faux morallistic bombast that we always get…and no surprise here, the first target was Google with Cameron’s ‘Bunch of migrants’ comment (A ‘Quite horrible’ comment according to the granddame of comedy Jeremy Hardy who thought any BNP voter should be shot) thrown into the mix along with the bedroom tax. Of course no mention of Labour MP Jess Phillips’ labelling of Birmingham men as brutal sex attackers…odd that the first town that didn’t come to mind was Rochdale.
No mention of the reason for Cameron’s comment…that Corbyn wants to fling open the borders and let in all migrants who want to come here….no wonder the Left are staging a massive distraction away from that one…never mind the Unite union, which backs Corbyn and Labour, were involved in the migrant storming of Calais port and probably, through their proxy ‘blackshirt’ street thugs in the UAF, involved in attacking the anti-immigration protest in Dover.
Rich Hall threw a spanner in the works (5 mins in ) when he declared that Google shouldn’t pay any taxes…why? Google is magic. Because look at what they actually provide…apart from jobs, paying large amounts of business rates in London and sucking in investment. Google provides us free at the point of use….Google Search, Maps and Earth, Google Translation, Google Books, Google image search and Android software that probably powers your phone and tablet….amongst many, many other products…not all free of course….but have you ever had a bill from Google?
Google is not avoiding tax or evading tax, it is just not paying the tax it is not required to pay. If the politicans want more tax then produce a tax system that doesn’t allow for reliefs and allowances and practises that allow companies to be based in other countries for tax purposes….and don’t create ‘enterprise zones’ and tax reductions designed to attract in businesses to the UK…and then moan about it.
The UK can’t complain, it sets one of the lowest tax rates in the world precisely in order to attract companies and their investment to the UK….as the Guardian admits.
A survey by PwC earlier this year revealed that 63% of the 1,344 chief executives surveyed worldwide put government tax policy high on the agenda when choosing where to operate their business.
Chris Morgan, head of tax policy at KPMG, said this move, along with a raft of other measures designed to attract the bigger international players has spurred investment and protected jobs.
So the government taxes a company ’til the pips squeak…then what? The company upsticks and heads to a country where the tax rate is lower…taking jobs, investment and all the other taxes they do pay along with them….and when a big company comes in it drags in with it a lot of small ones who ride on their shirt tails….they go down when the likes of Google go down. The government then loses that income and on top of that has to pay for unemployment and all that involves.
Funny thing is, when Hall first said Google should pay no tax there was a deep indrawing of breath and a stunned silence from the audience….but when he’d finished his piece he got what was probably the biggest cheer and loudest applause of the day.
Funny that.
This was nicely covered last week by Fraser Nelson http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/01/google-gives-britain-services-worth-billions-for-free-the-taxes-it-pays-are-trivial-by-comparison/. But, as he pointed out, the bBBC regards Google as a rival, so used its power (funded by us taxpayers) to run negative ‘news’ items about Google’s tax.
Yep…Google has empowered the little people to not only assess the truth of what the likes of the BBC say but also to bring that to other people’s attention.
Google and its like have given everyone a Voice. The BBC hates that.
This progression has always intrigued….
https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-barron-376b16a
The Guardian, who avoided paying any tax on the nearly-£1bn raised from the sale of Autotrader by using Caymans Islands-based accounts…
Surely Google etc. are only using one of the few benefits of the EU to reduce their tax exposure? Another way of looking at it is that paying any more tax than the legal minimum amount possible is effectively extortion by the government raising that tax.
To pay more tax than you have to is to commit a fraud on your shareholders.
Or at least, to be negligent in protecting their interests. This is always a problem when, say, large pension funds are invested in corporations by, say, trades unions.
I’m afraid I missed what Rich Hall said, I could only stand about thirty seconds of Jeremy Hardy’s bigoted unfunnyness before I switched off.
That’s the response of any sane individual as soon as you hear that dreary little communist’s whiny voice.
I have to say it is not only the BBC but the MSM generally that simply don’t get the Google reality. Oh so clever people saying can I pay tax at 3% is just embarrassing at the level of ignorance displayed. John Redwood has a good explanation at his diary site.
I’m definitely NOT in the google cheering club. Too big. Too dominant IMO.
But on the tax issue, while they may not pay any corporation tax they do pay their employees (and we would probably say well-paid jobs I’m guessing). So there is employee national insurance, employer national insurance, income tax, possibly higher rate income tax for some, and then the employees pay 20% VAT on most things they buy. That must be getting on for 50% of the total wage bill, way over any amount of corporation tax. Not ‘paid’ by google as such but arising as a direct result of google’s activity and all based on their own efforts.
Just remind me, how much corporation tax does the biased BBC pay?
And how much income does it receive unearned from licence fee payers?
I well remember the Vesteys, Dewhursts…Leona Helmsley in the USA-and, yes, Wogan, Gary Barlow and all the others.
Indeed John Birt and his accountants used to pay each other to dodge taxes, invest in spruce tree forests to reduce the tax take demanded by HMI Taxes.
Was it bloody Occupy who caused this fetishisation of “paying taxes”-and made it a cornerstone of left obsessing nastiness against Big Companies?…no small ones were left because their UN, their EU and (of course) their nasty stormtroopers at Occupy and public sector charity rattlings-had hounded out the “small business”
No-if I had any money I would NOT fund any ethical green waving corporate piece of shit that is more scared of Ed Davey than me as a shareholder…when I WANT Greenpeace to tell me how to run a business-as opposed to mugging and begging from unscientific guilt trippers with more money than sense-well, I`ll watch THEM set one up and see how it goes !
It`ll end up as Camillas rubber ring to sit on, as she wipes an onion under her eyebrow and uses my money to pay for her class warfare and drug dealing darlings.
Paying taxes only encourages them-and Somalia gets the benefits more often than not.
If Labour ever get in , it will be a national duty to not pay a f***in penny to them…
Correct me if I am wrong, but I have never, ever, ever heard the BBC complain that senior employees and extecutives of the EU do not pay any income tax whatsoever.
I am also heartily sick of the BBC wilfully and deliberately conflating sales/turnover with profits just to falsely attack commercial rivals for not paying (unowed) corporation tax. The BBC ignores the hundreds of billions of pounds of revenue generated and taxed by the commercial activities of these massive corporations. From VAT, Income tax, National insurance, business rates, green levies, and more besides, they pay billions to the treasury and help millions of businesses improve efficiency, thus adding value to the economy and creating thousands of jobs.
It woulld serve the BBC right if the BBC were blacklisted by all these commercial corporations. If google blocked their website and all broadband cables into each of the BBC premises were cut it would be justified.
Listen to the bit when Rich Hall says that he doesn’t think Google should pay taxes. Notice the way Jeremy Hardy asks “Why?”. He just can’t believe somebody has dared drift from the accepted narrative. What a complete and utter small minded little pinko tw@t Jeremy Hardy is.