Translated by Tom Gill from the original in l’Humanité
Since the Swiss / EU agreement on the free movement of people, a sense of unease has been growing in Switzerland, fuelled by the crisis and exacerbated by the demagoguery of the extreme nationalist right.
The success of the anti-immigration initiative of the far-right Swiss People’s Party, led by billionaire Christoph Blocher, represents a political and diplomatic earthquake in Switzerland. It is mainly a failure of representative bodies of the country : all other political forces avoided this issue, which appears to be a back door way of rejecting bilateral relations between Switzerland and the European Union ( EU). The fear is that it opens a period of uncertainty, politically and economically, damaging the country. The initiative of populist nationalist Swiss People’s Party doesn’t come out of nowhere, however. Continue reading
After unveiling an anti-tax avoidance deal with the Swiss two weeks ago, the day before the budget, with the self-righteous puff “I regard tax evasion as morally repugnant”, Osborne is now under pressure to backtrack fast. What he did not say is that the tax rate he negotiated with the Swiss authorities that would be payable by rich UK nationals hiding their gains in Zug and other Swiss tax havens would be between 21-34% and that he would accept that HMRC would continue to be denied access to details of the owners and size of these accounts. 
You have to give it to Osborne: he can dress up a pig’s bladder and make it look like a silk glove. He’s just announced today that “stashing the profits of tax evasion in Switzerland is over”. It’s nothing of the kind. 