Astonishing how the BBC ‘reports’ on Cameron and his father’s business affairs and how narrow the BBC’s vision can be at times…imagine this was the other way around and it was the Telegraph reporting about Labour donors…the BBC would soon have a counter-list of ‘dodgy’ Tory donors on the airwaves….but this is the Guardian denouncing Tories…..so that’s OK….
But the Guardian has reported that a number of Conservative donors, supporters and former MPs are linked to tax havens around the world.
Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell said the Conservatives had “questions to answer”.
“Is the prime minister happy to receive money from big donors who are accused of tax avoidance?” he said.
Hmmm…OK…so no surprise that Tories have used tax havens…but how about these boys….I await the BBC listing them and their sins exhaustively for us to enjoy…..
Blair’s company paid just £315,000 tax on income of more than £12m
Peter Mandelson gets £400,000 loan from own company to ease tax burden
Key Miliband backer in offshore tax row: Labour donor transferred shares to Liechtenstein and Jersey and later sold some for reported £37 million
Two Labour donors accused
ED Miliband’s misery deepened last night when two top Labour donors were also accused of avoiding tax. Green energy millionaire Dale Vince took an interest-free £3.2million loan from his company Ecotricity in a move described by financial experts as a “tax avoidance arrangement.” And property tycoon Sir David Garrard was accused of placing shares in an offshore trust that can be used in order to reduce tax. Mr Vince’s firm has given £250,000 to Labour. Sir David donated £690,000 to the party last year and has pledged to fund its fight against the SNP in Scotland.
The pair’s financial details were revealed after the HSBC Swiss bank accounts scandal sparked a political row over tax dodging.
Unite union stops advertising tax advice in avoidance battle
Unite the Union has removed references to “tax efficiency” from the financial advice service offered to members, after the Labour and Conservative parties attacked each other over the tax behaviour of their donors. Unite, which is a major Labour donor, had previously offered to help members “build up a nest-egg tax-efficiently.”
But now the union has removed the politically-sensitive phrase.
And from Guido today…..
Labour’s Brave Line on Tax Dodging Donors
This is a pretty brave attack line from John McDonnell over Tory party donors who may have avoided tax:
“Is the Prime Minister happy to receive money from big donors who are accused of tax avoidance?”
Especially when you consider that Labour’s biggest donor Unite paid no corporation tax in 2011 and 2012, despite earning £5.78 million from their £51.6 million investment portfolio. The GMB union paid zero corporation tax on its investment income of £1.6 million, neither did the Community union on their income of £4.1 million for the period. McDonnell himself received £3,000 from Unite in 2014. As of last year who were Labour’s biggest non-union donors? Accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, who have been slammed by the Public Accounts Committee for “promoting tax avoidance”. To paraphrase, is the Shadow Chancellor happy to receive money from big donors who are accused of tax avoidance?
… Guido has been keeping up with all this for a while…. note the inclusion of the Guardian in his research.
I mention this specifically since they (and the BBC) seem to be taking something of a lead in this hunt.
http://order-order.com/2016/04/04/media-organisations-using-offshore-havens/
Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Jack Straw, all have tax avoidance schemes. This si more of a party political broadcast for the Labour Party, than an unbiased reporting of the facts.
Cast your minds back a few years to 2009 when Labour were the government and the Daily Telegraph (back in the days when it was a newspaper) broke the MP’s expense scandal story.
The first tranche focused on the theft of public money by government ministers, Labour government ministers.
The initial reaction from the BBC was to ignore. When it became obvious that the story had got very big legs, the BBC’s next reaction was to punt the line that by running the story “it was bad for democracy” and the DT had a political axe to grind. Unlike the Guardian of course which is so scrupulously fair and balanced in its reporting. Must be that almost one billion that GMG have got salted away in offshore accounts in the Caribbean.
Then the BBC ran the line that the leaked information had “been stolen”, just like the climategate emails from the UEA climate guff dept. Of course when it suits the BBC narrative, leaked emails are just that, leaked, or the source is a “whistleblower”. When it doesn’t suit the narrative leaked becomes stolen.
It was only after the third day of the DT exposures when Conservatives were included that the BBC began to swarm all over the story.
Apart from the gullible and naïve does anyone really believe that the BBC runs an impartial and trustworthy news gathering service?
It’s not just Labour’s backers and the Guardian that has special ways of managing its tax affairs, it’s the Labour Party itself. Remember this that Guido dug out last year?
‘A property company run by the Labour Party has paid no tax in eight years, despite earning millions of pounds in rental revenues, the Daily Telegraph can reveal.’
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/10260728/Labours-property-firm-paid-no-tax-for-eight-years.html
And on an individual level, who can fail to remember the Balls’s flip flopping their houses to AVOID capital gains tax..
‘Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper, the husband and wife Cabinet ministers, “flipped” the designation of their second home to three different properties within the space of two years.’
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/5325590/Ed-Balls-and-Yvette-Cooper-flipped-homes-three-times-MPs-expenses.html
Not that you’ll see any of this on Panorama or anywhere else on the BBC. Out of the 11 million documents the Guardian and the BBC seem to be targeting only one particular part of the political spectrum.
I notice that Labour’s Margaret Hodge got her nose into the ‘tax avoidance’ debate going on at the moment.
I also note the BBC was quick to point out any possible link with tax avoidance, no matter how tenuous or out of date, to the Conservative Party and its supporters…. but has absolutely no interest whatsoever in creating widespread coverage or condemnation of Ms Hodge’s tax avoidance schemes for her family.
Impartial – the BBC ? – yeah, right !
Nor, indeed, does the BBC seem in the least interested in this vile woman’s extremely disturbing past history.
Hard to think why, isn’t it?
It is curious how the BBC ran with the Cameron story. They ignored it for most of Monday, almost like the glorious Russian media ignored Putin’s sticky fingerprints. (In fact RT is still pretending Putin isn’t involved).
With most of the serious newspapers having Cameron as the lead story, then this morning the BBC news site led with what was in the papers. By that point Cameron had been well and truly coshed and has been on the back foot all day. But it was the press that did it, the BBC has just reported. Indeed it did what the posters here always claim they want, that the BBC reports the news. And yet it’s still attacked. Does indicate nervousness on the BBC in reporting damaging news about the Tories, which is of course biased in consequence.
Be careful what you wish for: do you really want RT to be an exemplar?
(Oh, the Telegraph didn’t lead on Cameron but on Project Fear. It reported the latest poll (which the BBC won’t run) as having a substantial lead for staying in.)
(Oh, the Telegraph didn’t lead on Cameron but on Project Fear. It reported the latest poll (which the BBC won’t run) as having a substantial lead for staying in.)
Do read past the headlines LDV.
The DT did report lower down, like the BBC sometimes do having got their view over in the headlines, that among those most likely to vote it is rather close, and based on recent polling accuracy …….
I did read it so here it is again:
The poll finds that 51 per cent of voters now support Remain – an increase of 4 per cent from last month. Leave’s support has decreased five points to 44 per cent.
Crucially, only 5 per cent of voters said they were undecided, with those who currently say that they do not know how they will vote more likely to back the Remain campaign on June 23.
Their headline actually used the following data instead of the above
When certainty to vote is taken into account, the campaigns are virtually tied, with Remain on 49 per cent and Leave on 48 per cent.
The assumption here is that remainers will not be arsed to vote. Who knows. Except the Outers are losing momentum.
Coshed? To quote Paul Keating it was more “like being flogged with a warm lettuce”.
These Leftists do dramatise so much. Unless one believes in the sins of the father which is a very unenlightened tendency, there is no Cameron story.
Coshed? To quote Paul Keating it was more “like being flogged with a warm lettuce”.
Really? Read today’s papers, every media outlet and the continuing series of denials. Coshed might be mild to the rogering he’s now receiving. We now have the classic I’ll show you mine if you show me yours over the Tax returns.
Cameron must be really glad he set and end date for his period as PM. His fear was that after Brexit it will end in June. It may be sooner than he thinks if the Icelandic example hits home. Good entertainment value!
He’s trying to dodge it tonight. Some chance.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/05/panama-papers-david-cameron-forced-to-declare-tax-affairs-amid-o/
http://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/05/david-cameron-left-dangerously-exposed-by-panama-papers-fallout
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/david-cameron-dodges-question-when-asked-whether-he-benefited-from-offshore-fund-set-up-by-his-a6969681.html
I’m no lover of Cameron or his allegedly conservative party, however if what his father did was evasion the media have a story, if what he did was avoidance then there is only malice.
As Peter Hitchens once said we do not have a duty to pay tax, we have a duty to keep as much of our earnings as we can within the law.
All this guff about morals etc doesn’t cut mustard in a court of law.
On a separate note I see Sky tonight are still running the with the campaign aid of Trump grabbing a reporters arm, nothing more on Brussels, in fact if I were a conspiracy theorist I would suggest we are supposed to forget about it.
I’m always amused by media commentators who confuse charitable giving with extorting money by menaces. Lots of money extorted by the mafia goes to help the poor who get paid as lookouts, informants, drug couriers, etc. But no one willingly pays more protection money than demanded by their friendly local mafioso because they want to help the poor. People are reluctant to pay more tax than they have to because most of their money does not go to help the unfortunate but rather to pay various apparachiks considerably more for their activities than they would ever get in a free market.
I’m a keen subscriber to The Taxpayers’ Alliance. I wonder what they will make of all this?
I hate this country’s tax system. It must cost at least 33p in every pound just to collect the tax! How can the NHS claim it is the most cost-effective health service on the planet when the money it receives has been diluted to a factor of a third (at least!)?
How can any British government give a realistic cost of a public service if the tax system is so complicated and confusing that it sometimes costs more to collect the tax than the tax receipt is worth?
HMRC costs the taxpayer about £7bn per annum. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Bear in mind that HMRC receive taxes after they have been calculated. To do all the calculations, companies and individuals need to spend time and money on calculating their own tax affairs. And that ain’t easy! And it lowers productivity.
Never mind accountants, some companies actually profit from calculating taxes and the use of their HMRC ‘deferment account’, using it as a service cost to its customers. And it is VERY profitable.
I believe the cost of collecting taxes, before the bureaucracy of actually spending the money, must be in excess of £100bn.
And this is before factoring in the losses in tax receipts due to under-declared value of imported goods – chiefly from China and – more recently – Turkey!
If you think it’s bad on the offshore banking front, then you need to open your eyes to the world of undervalued imports, in which the importer pays substantially little VAT and/or duty because the declared invoice value is so low.
And when it comes to ‘anti-dumping’ duties (ADD), it’s easier to declare a non-ADD tariff to Customs in the hope that HMRC won’t follow it up. (This is because it is not cost-effective to spend time calculating the ADD duty for small shipments.) If they do, you just say you made a mistake. A slapped wrist and “don’t do it again!”
From experience I can honestly say that HMRC are not fit for purpose. Not only did I spend £25 trying to call them without success a few years ago (is that tax deductible?), but they failed to follow up on a consignment of counterfeit goods with the excuse that they didn’t have the manpower to investigate.