While working I listen to BBC3’s online radio stream of classical music: yes, it's state radio, but it’s pleasant to have in the background, and helps keep me calm. It also means I get to listen to the BBC’s hourly newscast. I don’t think I’m lying when I say there hasn’t been a broadcast this week that did not mention the UK’s IR - Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs - vicious war being waged with the multinationals: Google, Amazon, Starbucks, et al – the British government has just allocated £104 million of consumers money to HMRC to fight for same
consumers to pay more for the goods and services these innovative firms sell to them - (as if life isn't hard enough for many struggling consumers).
No wait a minute: what did I just say? Surely a government doing that to its people would be absurd?
Anyway ...
According to UK politicians, the amount of tax paid by these multinationals is not enough to be ‘moral’ - apparently, as with 'fairness' there's a level of tax that is either moral or fair, or the alternate. But what and whom determines that?
And as for morality, as Dominic Lawson has ably shown
in The Independent, politicians should not be in the business of throwing stones from their particular glasshouse:
… one should always be wary of legislators when they talk of morality …. For example, Danny Alexander, who as Chief Secretary to the Treasury is responsible for making the public budgets add up, has said that he is personally boycotting Starbucks because of its artful tax avoidance. Yet the talented Mr Alexander had designated his London apartment as his second home, for the purpose of claiming £37,000 in “parliamentary” expenses, but then described the self-same residence to HMRC as his main home, to avoid Capital Gains tax when he sold it.
In so doing, he behaved quite legally, as many other MPs had done, including the present Speaker of the Commons, John Bercow; but this constituted tax avoidance, in the sense that a course of action was undertaken solely for the purpose of reducing tax payable. There is, naturally, a vast difference in scale between the operations of Starbucks and that of the MPs, but I am not sure where the moral distinction lies and therefore how much authority these MPs have in criticising such businesses as “immoral”.
This may also be a doubt in the public’s mind; who knows, they might actually have more trust in Starbucks and Amazon than they ever would for the politicians urging a boycott.
It is timely I put this post up for on Twitter last night, Labour’s Opposition member allocated to the Revenue - and there is no less aptly named portfolio, a government doesn’t earn revenue, it just take yours - Mr David Clark, advocated publicly for a boycott of these multi-nationals in New Zealand.
I simply pointed him to my
piece on Amazon … and asked who the real enemy of the people was: Amazon that delivers me cheap books wherever I am in the world, and whom I can trade with (or not) voluntarily, or him and the government gun he wishes to hold at consumers heads from 2014, as he empties out their wallets? And perhaps he could have a go at devising the required
legislation of 'fairness' our taxing law needs so it might attain some semblance of, well, fairness. He never replied to me, though I see I’ve had .govt.nz trawling through my blog this morning.
Yours in the Freedom you would know nothing of, David.
David Clark