green Posted February 8, 2011 Share Posted February 8, 2011 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/07/tax-city-heist-of-century? Read this and lets discuss.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
green Posted February 8, 2011 Author Share Posted February 8, 2011 copied and pasted..... To us, it's an obscure shift of tax law. To the City, it's the heist of the century In David Cameron we have a leader whose job is to quietly legitimise a semi-criminal, money-laundering economy Share 16K Comments (814) George Monbiot guardian.co.uk, Monday 7 February 2011 22.01 GMT Article history 'I would love to see tax reductions," David Cameron told the Sunday Telegraph at the weekend, "but when you're borrowing 11% of your GDP, it's not possible to make significant net tax cuts. It just isn't." Oh no? Then how come he's planning the biggest and crudest corporate tax cut in living memory? If you've heard nothing of it, you're in good company. The obscure adjustments the government is planning to the tax acts of 1988 and 2009 have been missed by almost everyone – and are, anyway, almost impossible to understand without expert help. But as soon as you grasp the implications, you realise that a kind of corporate coup d'etat is taking place. Like the dismantling of the NHS and the sale of public forests, no one voted for this measure, as it wasn't in the manifestos. While Cameron insists that he occupies the centre ground of British politics, that he shares our burdens and feels our pain, he has quietly been plotting with banks and businesses to engineer the greatest transfer of wealth from the poor and middle to the ultra-rich that this country has seen in a century. The latest heist has been explained to me by the former tax inspector, now a Private Eye journalist, Richard Brooks and current senior tax staff who can't be named. Here's how it works. At the moment tax law ensures that companies based here, with branches in other countries, don't get taxed twice on the same money. They have to pay only the difference between our rate and that of the other country. If, for example, Dirty Oil plc pays 10% corporation tax on its profits in Oblivia, then shifts the money over here, it should pay a further 18% in the UK, to match our rate of 28%. But under the new proposals, companies will pay nothing at all in this country on money made by their foreign branches. Foreign means anywhere. If these proposals go ahead, the UK will be only the second country in the world to allow money that has passed through tax havens to remain untaxed when it gets here. The other is Switzerland. The exemption applies solely to "large and medium companies": it is not available for smaller firms. The government says it expects "large financial services companies to make the greatest use of the exemption regime". The main beneficiaries, in other words, will be the banks. But that's not the end of it. While big business will be exempt from tax on its foreign branch earnings, it will, amazingly, still be able to claim the expense of funding its foreign branches against tax it pays in the UK. No other country does this. The new measures will, as we already know, accompany a rapid reduction in the official rate of corporation tax: from 28% to 24% by 2014. This, a Treasury minister has boasted, will be the lowest rate "of any major western economy". By the time this government is done, we'll be lucky if the banks and corporations pay anything at all. In the Sunday Telegraph, David Cameron said: "What I want is tax revenue from the banks into the exchequer, so we can help rebuild this economy." He's doing just the opposite. These measures will drain not only wealth but also jobs from the UK. The new legislation will create a powerful incentive to shift business out of this country and into nations with lower corporate tax rates. Any UK business that doesn't outsource its staff or funnel its earnings through a tax haven will find itself with an extra competitive disadvantage. The new rules also threaten to degrade the tax base everywhere, as companies with headquarters in other countries will demand similar measures from their own governments. So how did this happen? You don't have to look far to find out. Almost all the members of the seven committees the government set up "to provide strategic oversight of the development of corporate tax policy" are corporate executives. Among them are representatives of Vodafone, Tesco, BP, British American Tobacco and several of the major banks: HSBC, Santander, Standard Chartered, Citigroup, Schroders, RBS and Barclays. I used to think of such processes as regulatory capture: government agencies being taken over by the companies they were supposed to restrain. But I've just read Nicholas Shaxson's Treasure Islands – perhaps the most important book published in the UK so far this year – and now I'm not so sure. Shaxson shows how the world's tax havens have not, as the OECD claims, been eliminated, but legitimised; how the City of London is itself a giant tax haven, which passes much of its business through its subsidiary havens in British dependencies, overseas territories and former colonies; how its operations mesh with and are often indistinguishable from the laundering of the proceeds of crime; and how the Corporation of the City of London in effect dictates to the government, while remaining exempt from democratic control. If Hosni Mubarak has passed his alleged $70bn through British banks, the Egyptians won't see a piastre of it. Reading Treasure Islands, I have realised that injustice of the kind described in this column is no perversion of the system; it is the system. Tony Blair came to power after assuring the City of his benign intentions. He then deregulated it and cut its taxes. Cameron didn't have to assure it of anything: his party exists to turn its demands into public policy. Our ministers are not public servants. They work for the people who fund their parties, run the banks and own the newspapers, shielding them from their obligations to society, insulating them from democratic challenge. Our political system protects and enriches a fantastically wealthy elite, much of whose money is, as a result of their interesting tax and transfer arrangements, in effect stolen from poorer countries, and poorer citizens of their own countries. Ours is a semi-criminal money-laundering economy, legitimised by the pomp of the lord mayor's show and multiple layers of defence in government. Politically irrelevant, economically invisible, the rest of us inhabit the margins of the system. Governments ensure that we are thrown enough scraps to keep us quiet, while the ultra-rich get on with the serious business of looting the global economy and crushing attempts to hold them to account. And this government? It has learned the lesson that Thatcher never grasped. If you want to turn this country into another Mexico, where the ruling elite wallows in unimaginable, state-facilitated wealth while the rest can go to hell, you don't declare war on society, you don't lambast single mothers or refuse to apologise for Bloody Sunday. You assuage, reassure, conciliate, emote. Then you shaft us. • A fully referenced version of this article can be found on George Monbiot's website Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Oil Man Posted February 8, 2011 Share Posted February 8, 2011 ooh no, it`s too complicated, I will get muddled up, soz Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
max Posted February 8, 2011 Share Posted February 8, 2011 Not willing to score points, well go on then, but I beat you by 30 minutes: Another thread. Probably someone beat me to it as well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wednesday1 Posted February 8, 2011 Share Posted February 8, 2011 Not willing to score points, well go on then, but I beat you by 30 minutes: Another thread. Probably someone beat me to it as well. Deserves a thread of it's own though. What did people expect when they got back in. A leopard never changes it's spots. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
daftlad Posted February 8, 2011 Share Posted February 8, 2011 cant see clegg and the lib dums putting up any opposition to this either so these shysters agree with it to, which is amazing as they have stopped cameron trying to put an end to the european court of human rights being in britain. smarmy dave wanted a british bill of human rights but cleggy and his bunch of clowns objected. this means we cannit deport the people who wish to do harm to us. shame on you clegg and your band of half wits Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mj.scuba Posted February 8, 2011 Share Posted February 8, 2011 cant see clegg and the lib dums putting up any opposition to this either so these shysters agree with it to, which is amazing as they have stopped cameron trying to put an end to the european court of human rights being in britain. smarmy dave wanted a british bill of human rights but cleggy and his bunch of clowns objected. this means we cannit deport the people who wish to do harm to us. shame on you clegg and your band of half wits Why have we not heard anything from Ed Milliband on this? We'll have to see if it's important enough for him to mention in PMQs tomorrow. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andyofborg Posted February 8, 2011 Share Posted February 8, 2011 cant see clegg and the lib dums putting up any opposition to this either so these shysters agree with it to, which is amazing as they have stopped cameron trying to put an end to the european court of human rights being in britain. smarmy dave wanted a british bill of human rights but cleggy and his bunch of clowns objected. this means we cannit deport the people who wish to do harm to us. shame on you clegg and your band of half wits the european court of human rights isn't in britain. a british bill of human rights would have to be compatible with the european convention on human rights, and we have one of those already. it has been a long standing point of principle within the british legal system that we will not deport people to places where they are likely to suffer torture or killing. this predates any decision by the echr on the subject, if indeed there ever has been one. there is nothing to stop us deporting people who wish to do harm to us back to places where they will not be tortured or killed, though doing so would mean we could not monitor their actions and would arguably increase whatever danger they posed to us. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andyofborg Posted February 8, 2011 Share Posted February 8, 2011 anyway, getting back to the thread......... how far advanced are these proposals? i would hope that the lib dems would object to the proposal and some of them may do. it is becoming apparent that nick clegg and some of the other lib dems are rather more right wing than the public perception of the party in general. its a shame the media hasn't (yet) explored the "orange book" version of lib demmary which mr clegg and some of his colleagues expouse. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bulgarian Posted February 8, 2011 Share Posted February 8, 2011 If Cleggy want to get a job on the board of a big company once he leaves politics he needs to be nice to them now, and he will be. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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