Tagged with Tax Evasion

Corporate tax dodging is father of austerity

tax justice logoIndustrial scale tax evasion and avoidance is not only symptomatic of the insatiable greed of the hyper-rich and the over-mighty corporations, it also serves another purpose which is much less recognised. The touchstone of the neoliberal ideology is globalisation – let the markets be all-powerful and governments get out of the way. That is served by light-touch (i.e. minimalist) regulation, blind trust in free markets, and the unfettered mobility of capital. But it further demands that the state should be kept deprived of adequate funding so that its capacity for intervention is short-circuited. That is exactly what widespread tax evasion/avoidance achieves. A state starved of tax revenues – even HMRC admits it loses £35bn a year on tax scams, though Richard Murphy of Tax Justice Network argues it’s nearer £120bn a year – cannot deliver the goals of social democracy which a majority of the electorate desire. Increasingly the government falls prey to the markets even to raise its own revenues. Continue reading →

Building the tax justice consensus

For more than thirty years the politics of the UK and most other western democracies has been dominated by a notable and consistent adherence to a single consensus on tax issues. That persistent policy approach has been built around what has been described as the Washington Consensus. That agenda, which translated neoliberal thinking into policy prescriptions, had powerful implications for the political economy of tax. Continue reading →

Make super-rich Brits pay their fair (very large) share

It’s remarkable that the hyper-rich in France (Bettencourt and others) and in the US (Warren Buffett and others) are now calling at a time of austerity that they should be taxed more. Not a peep however out of the hyper-rich in Britain. Yet they, more than any of such wealth anywhere else in the world (with the possible exception of America), have good grounds to contribute increased taxation dues for three very strong reasons. Continue reading →

Osborne’s delusion over Swiss deal on tax evasion

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. Switzerland is making a one-off deduction from all UK accounts held in Swiss tax havens like Zug or Zurich, but at a much lower rate (34%) than is chargeable in the UK, only from 2013 onwards, and without proper exchange of information which would end the secrecy as the fertile terrain in which tax cheating can flourish. Continue reading →

Some alternatives to the VAT rise

What a cheek!   Osborne asks if he didn’t increase VAT, what alternative is there to raising the £13bn for cutting the budget deficit – the usual Tory canard of TINA (there is no alternative).   What nonsense – there are plenty of alternatives, all of them preferable to hiking VAT which will hit the poorest hardest and will stifle demand at a critical point in a fragile recovery for business.   Here are just a few examples. Continue reading →