Blair, Cameron and Gaucke give a masterclass in brass neck on the subject of tax
The former safe pair of hands Tony Blair has been defending bankers this morning, which is not surprising given that a fair wedge of his astronomical income comes from Jamie Dimon’s JP Morgan. In 2008, thanks to New Labour’s love-affair with deregulation, British bank Northern Rock smashed to the floor and became a thousand worthless pebbles, plus a few golden nuggets. The British taxpayer then spent £80bn bailing it out….while Tony Blair, special JPM agent, cherry picked the nuggets in the customer base, and recommended his employer JP Morgan as the buyer.
£80 billion is £1400 for every UK citizen, the sort of sum Blair and his Bilderberger mates spend on lunch. But he says he agrees with David Cameron that everyone should pay their taxes in full, and that bankers get an unfair press.
“We must not start thinking that society will be better off if we hang 20 bankers at the end of the street’’, he tells Charles Moore in the Telegraph, bizarrely adding, “we didn’t supervise and regulate them properly. But we mustn’t go back to the state running everything.’’
Not quite sure where this ‘we’ comes from tannedface, but I’m here to inform the one-time Labour moderniser that there is quite a lot of territory between hanging bankers and giving everything back to the State. Also my dear Moral Tone, not everything in life is about being “better off”. If we hung all guilty bankers out to dry in high security prisons following scrupulously fair trials for fraud, embezzlement, money-laundering, Libor fixing, and blackmail, the Rule of Law would be seen still to exist….an outcome far more important than any amount of money.
Blair took it up the arse from Murdoch for a decade, invaded Iraq partly on his sayso, conspired to interfere with the course of Justice over the BaE affair, and helped create the sense of entitled ‘above the law’ self-image now rigidly enjoyed by bankers across the Globe. But David Cameron (whose circle is even more despicable than Blair’s) is a great admirer of Tony’s Teflon quality; and he displays precisely the same unethical greed shown by all those people who feel they deserve more than single helpings: it’s double standards or nothing for him.
Jimmy Carr’s tax avoidance is immoral, but Jeremy Hunt’s is brushed aside. Vince Cable’s bias against Murdoch is bad, but Hunt’s bias in favour of Murdoch is good. Gordon Brown lying to Leveson is appalling, but Jeremy Hunt’s lies to the Commons are oversights. Andy Coulson was a serial perjurer who hacked phones, but he was very good at his job. Rebekah Brooks is a delusional sociopath, but she was very caring towards the Camerons’ late child. Michael Spencer is a shady broker and Libor cheat, but he raised a lot of money for the Party. Lord Green ran an ethically empty HSBC for ten years, but they had Chinese Walls there – and anyway, he is crucial to the business success of the Olympics.
What a role model for social morality Dave King of Camerlot is. How great is his commitment to an nhs whose funding he has lied about for two years running. How unacceptable is a tax avoidance attitude that made his father a very rich man. How ghastly are these grubby welfare and tax cheats who pay three times the tax rate of the average multinational company based in Britain.
But The British-based Tax Justice Network (TJN) said in a report at the weekend that a mind-blowing $32 trillion of totally evaded tax – representing criminal wealth, pure and simple – is hidden away in tax havens across the world. Forty-eight hours later, Mr Cameron has not thought of a single word to utter about that.
However, his Treasury Minister David Gaucke has had plenty to say about paying household suppliers in cash.
Yes, you read it right: I wrote ‘paying household suppliers in cash’. Fifty quid made on the black is being given greater priority in the political Establishment to $32trillion around the world.
The insensitive insouciance of the political class has rarely been on better display than in the stream of bollocks that’s been pouring forth from Treasury Minister David Gauke over the last 36 hours. Not only does he fail utterly to address the grossly unfair way in which rich globalists hire devious tax lawyers and accountants to reduce their corporate tax rate to around 6%: not for one second anywhere in this bloke’s thought processes is there an even passing glimmer in relation to WHY more and more citizens in the West feel less and less inclined to pay tax.
Could it be something to do with:
1. Major tax cheats get minor fines, and the HMRC/IRS tax authorities do crooked deals to get payment in lieu of prosecution.
2. Individuals pay at a rate 3 x higher than most multinationals, whose banks and their sovereign chums have rigged every investment sector on the planet against the individual taxpayer.
3. The outrageous waste of tax monies on everything from Connecting for Health in the UK and the US mortgage relief scheme in the States to ridiculous bank bailouts totalling $23trillion around the world.
4. The sense of being ignored by the politicians who set the tax rates (all the while lying about how much tax they are really after) and paying tax to subsidise the illegally self-awarded pensions (a cool £1.15 trillion) of Whitehall bureaucrats and reckless mania of Robert E. Diamond.
There is an old adage from the American side of the Anglo-Saxon Pond: ‘No taxation without representation’. I have not had more than a few of my hundreds of entirely respectable and perfectly argued socio-economic views represented for over 35 years. I know Americans ranging in age from 18 to 79 who feel the same way.
Can I therefore have my tax monies back please?
The answer, of course, will be “no”. So the only alternative the sensible, respectable, law-abiding Squeezed Middlers have is to say this: OK Lord Brassneck of Bollocks, you go back to listening to us, and we’ll go back to paying your taxes.
The Slog 