The Google motto is "don't be evil", but taking cash from a particular political party to help them undermine democracy with a vicious smear campaign is pretty damned evil isn't it?
The Labour manifesto
The Labour Party has produced a fantastic manifesto full of policies to help ordinary British people, and rescue the economy from the damage inflicted by seven punishing years of socially and economically ruinous hard-right Tory austerity dogma, but anyone who attempts to find it with a Google search is confronted by an outrageous Tory attack advert as the first link.
As you can see the first hit is a Tory party attack advert full of lies, the next hits are mixed mainstream press coverage of the manifesto, and the actual link to the manifesto is off the bottom of the screen (I had to zoom right out to to take the screenshot).
Tory smears
The Tories are able to flood the Internet with these attack adverts because they're being bankrolled by huge donations from the mega-rich who don't want Corbyn to win the election and make them start paying their fair share.
Several of the major donors who are bankrolling the Tory election campaign are proven tax-dodgers and people running their businesses out of tax havens.
The attack ad itself is an absolute abomination full of misrepresentations, out-of-context quotations, smears, and outright lies.
One of the most brazen misrepresentations is where they claim that Corbyn wants to raise income tax to 25% simply because he once observed that the income tax rate used to be 25% in previous generations (which is true).
In reality Labour have pledged to not raise income tax for the 95% of ordinary workers and it's the Tories who have scrapped their 2015 manifesto commitment to not raise income tax (don't you just wonder why they would scrap such a pledge?).
Another lie is that he won't reduce the deficit (the Institute for Fiscal Studies report on his spending plans says that he will reduce the deficit) and another lie is that he wants "unlimited immigration" (just read the Labour manifesto on immigration for yourself to see their actually very sensible immigration policies).
This kind of manipulative Tory lying and smearing is indicative of the entire 2017 Tory general election campaign. There's nothing positive about their own manifesto at all, just a constant barrage of misrepresentations, lies and smears about the Labour Party.
Google's role in this
By allowing the Tories to hijack Google searches for the Labour Manifesto with their astoundingly dishonest smear campaign, Google are ensuring that thousands upon thousands of people who were looking for Labour Party policies end up looking at savage Tory smears against the Labour Party instead.
We know that huge numbers of people will have fallen for the attack ad because there is mountains of research to show that huge numbers of people are incapable of differentiating between sponsored adverts and legitimate content. There's also research to show that once the link is far down enough that people have to scroll down to see it, it's very much more unlikely that it gets clicked than the top results.
The electoral rules are a total farce if they allow one party with a lot of cash to hijack Internet searches for other parties' manifestos with brutally dishonest attack adverts, but even if this thing is technically legal, Google has no actual obligation to take the Tory cash and help them subvert democracy.
If Google had any company ethics whatever, they'd specify that political Google searches during democratic elections are off limits for sponsored adverts, especially sponsored adverts from rival political parties.
One other thing to note is that under David Cameron's Tory government Google were given an extraordinary sweetheart tax deal by the HMRC that worked out at an effective tax rate of just 3%.
The manifesto that Google is helping the Tories to hijack and suppress with their attack ads actually contains a pledge to make the taxation system fairer. One of Labour's key taxation policies is to put an end to sweetheart tax deals between major corporations and HMRC.
I'm not saying that Google are deliberately interfering in our election in order to ensure defeat for a party that would make them pay their fair share of tax.
I can't say that because I don't have any evidence of conspiracy. In to prove that there has been collusion we'd need incriminating evidence like internal company emails or emails between Google and the Tory party.
It would be interesting to see what Google did about these attack ads, and whether executive decisions were taken to allow this kind of political hijacking in full knowledge that it was an obvious subversion of the British people's democratic right to seek accurate representations of Labour's own policies.
I can't allege a Google conspiracy to undermine our democracy in order to ensure a government that is favourable to their financial interests. But even without hard evidence of conspiracy it still looks very very bad for Google to be taking cash from the Tory party in return for allowing them to hijack the Labour manifesto with outrageous attack adverts.
If Google had any kind of corporate ethics at all, they simply wouldn't allow this kind of democracy-wrecking smear attacks on their search engine.
Streisand effect
If enough people share this article and inspire others to go and read the Labour Party manifesto for themselves, we could create what is called the Streisand effect.
The Streisand effect is the phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicising the information more widely, usually facilitated by the Internet.
It is an example of psychological reactance, wherein once people are aware something is being kept from them, their motivation to access and spread the information is significantly increased.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
In 2012 David Cameron reacted to the tax-dodging activities of the comedian Jimmy Carr by saying that "Tax-dodging is morally wrong", in May 2013 he said that he was "opposed to all aggressive tax avoidance", in April 2016 when the Panama Papers were leaked he said that offshore tax secrecy is "not morally acceptable", yet in the six years his government have been in power, nothing serious has been done to stop it.
If you are the kind of gullible person who takes the words of politicians at face value without engaging your critical judgement you might imagine that the Tories are sincere, and that they have actually been clamping down on the tax-dodging activities of multinational corporations and the super-wealthy minority, but you'd be completely wrong. They've made a few token gestures, but under David Cameron's watch only one out of the 1,000+ people caught up in the Swiss HSBC tax-dodging scandal has faced prosecution and multinational corporations have continued to get away with shifting their UK profits overseas in order to avoid paying tax here.
The Tories know that the tax-dodging activities of corporations and the super-rich are an issue that the public feel very strongly about, but they've assumed that the general public are so gullible that they'll simply believe it if the Tories do nothing more than say that they're getting tough on tax-dodging, whilst simultaneously benefiting from tax-dodging themselves, and even actively facilitating the tax-dodging activities of others.
In this article I'm going to give a few examples that prove that Tory party statements on tax-dodging are just empty rhetoric and deliberate misdirection.
David Cameron
David Cameron is a direct beneficiary of tax-dodging as a result of inheriting £300,000 from his father, which was made via a network of offshore "investment funds" in places like Panama and Geneva, which were explicitly designed to help wealthy people avoid paying UK tax. [source]
Samantha Cameron
David Cameron's wife works for Smythson, which is a leather goods and luxury stationary company that is based in Luxembourg for the purposes of avoiding tax, and controlled via a network of other shell companies based in the British tax havens of Jersey and Guernsey. [source]
Eton college
David Cameron was educated at the most elitist private school in the United Kingdom, which charges more than the average annual wage in tuition fees (currently £34,500 per year). What many people don't realise is that since November 2010 this elitist training camp for the children of the establishment is registered as a charity for the purpose of avoiding tax.
Gary Barlow
Within a week of David Cameron publicly condemning the tax-dodging activities of Jimmy Carr, he absolutely refused to make a similar public condemnation of the former Take That member Gary Barlow when it was revealed that he too had been using an elaborate scheme to avoid paying UK tax. It hardly seems like a coincidence that Gary Barlow is a very high profile Tory party supporter. [source]
British tax havens
Several of the biggest tax havens in the world are British Crown dependencies and overseas territories (Cayman Islands, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Jersey, Guernsey, Isle of Man ...). If the UK government had been serious they could have forced these places to clean up their acts any time in the last six years, but they choose not to, presumably because they're actually happy that the super-wealthy global elite choose to stash their ill-gotten gains in British territories rather than in non-British ones.
The City of London
London is indisputably the global capital of the tax avoidance industry. If an individual or corporate entity want to avoid paying tax in whatever jurisdiction, there's always plenty of London tax lawyers to advise them on how to set up the chain of shell companies they need in order to make their wealth "evaporate" and reappear in some secretive offshore bank account. This industry exists to service the selfishness of the super-rich. They help the super-rich avoid paying tax, then take a slice of that money for themselves in fees. The idea of David Cameron and the Tories clamping down on the tax avoidance industry is laughable because the Tory party take huge amounts in donations from the beneficiaries of such services.
HSBC
Not only do HSBC have a track record of helping wealthy UK citizens dodge paying their tax, they've also ripped off their own customers with the PPI fraud, rigged the Libor and Forex markets, channelled funds to terrorist organisations and laundered hundreds of billions of dollars for murderous Mexican drug cartels.
David Cameron has numerous links to HSBC. Not only have the holders of HSBC Swiss accounts donated £5 million to the Tory party, but Cameron also handed the former HSBC boss Stephen Green a place in the unelected House of Lords and appointed him as the Trade and Investment minister. In February 2015 when the HSBC tax-dodging scandal reignited, Cameron refused to answer a simple question about whether he had ever discussed HSBC tax-dodging with Stephen Green four times in a single debate.
HMRC cuts
One of the things that really puts the Tory rhetoric on combating tax-dodging into perspective is the fact that they have ruthlessly cut the number of HMRC staff working to recover tax from high net worth individuals. Not only does this totally undermine their "tough on tax-dodging" rhetoric, it's also a display of economic illiteracy because cutting the jobs of tax investigators who recover far more than their salaries in unpaid tax each year is almost the definition of a false economy. [source]
Tax-dodging Lords
Since coming to power in 2010 David Cameron has handed out peerages to a whole load of Tory party donors. Several of these wealthy Tory donors that Cameron has stuffed into the unelected and anti-democratic House of Lords are tax-dodgers.
One of the most notable examples of Cameron's unelected tax-dodging Lords is Stanley Fink, who at first threatened to sue Ed Miliband for saying that he had avoided tax, only to change his tune and admit that he had been dodging tax, but that it was Okay because it was only "vanilla" tax avoidance, that it is "normal in British society" because "everyone does it". [source]
New tax-loopholes
Despite harping on about how much they oppose tax-dodging, the Tories have actually opened up a number of new tax loopholes for the benefit of British businesses seeking to avoid paying tax. One of the most egregious of these new loopholes was a scheme announced in the 2013 budget to allow British companies to avoid paying tax in 3rd world countries by shifting their profits into tax havens.
Distracting public attention
Instead of taking the revelations about the Tory Party accepting millions of pounds in funding from tax-dodgers, David Cameron desperately tried to distract attention away from the scandal by announcing social security sanctions for benefits claimants who are deemed by the state to be overweight.
There is a damn good reason that the Tory party and the right-wing press love to fixate on people like benefits claimants and immigrants as if they're the biggest problems in society instead of dealing with the bankers who wrecked the economy, the corporate fat cats who are enriching themselves at a faster rate than ever whilst contributing to the longest sustained decline in wages since records began, and the tax-dodgers who cost the country tens of billions a year by hiding their wealth in offshore accounts.
Conclusion
The reason that the Tories are always so keen to distract attention away from the much more serious problem of tax-dodging is that the people responsible are David Cameron's donors. They are the people that the Tory party exists in order to serve. There's absolutely no way that David Cameron could turn on his wealthy paymasters, even if he wanted to. All Cameron and the Tories can do is spout some tough talking rhetoric on tax-dodging, then use the Lynton Crosby tactic of throwing a dead cat on the table in order to distract public attention away from the issue.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
When it comes to Tory politics, there's nothing that Tory tribalists love more than a good bit of tough-talking rhetoric. Whether that tough-talking rhetoric matches observable reality, or is followed up by any meaningful action, appears to be completely and utterly irrelevant to the Tory faithful.
Tax-dodging
In March 2016 it was revealed that HMRC had paid £27,000 to Facebook for targeted adverts in 2015, which is more than six times what Facebook paid in UK Corporation Tax in 2013 and 2014 combined.
The fact that Facebook paid virtually nothing in UK corporation tax between 2013 and 2014 contrasts incredibly sharply with George Osborne's tough-talking rhetoric back in early 2013 when he said "the last Labour government turned a blind eye to these abuses for too long ... this government is taking action domestically on avoidance and evasion" [source].
If confronted with the fact that a £multi-billion business like Facebook paid less in UK Corporation tax between 2013 and 2014 than the average British worker has paid in Income Tax, what's the betting that George Osborne would simply trot out some more tough-talking rhetoric about getting tough on tax-dodging, while trying to distract attention towards New Labour's poor track record (even though that all ended six long years ago)?
Immigration
Back in 2010 Theresa May and the Tory party pledged to reduce net migration to below 100,000 by 2015. What they actually achieved (despite the introduction of numerous incredibly callous family-destroying economic apartheid schemes) was the biggest spike in net migration since records began (336,000).
Whether you agree with the 100,000 target or not, it's absolutely obvious that Theresa May abjectly failed to achieve it.
When it became clear that their pre-election promises to cut migration to below 100,000 were going to be impossible to keep, the Tories audaciously deleted the promises off their website in the hope that everyone (including the mainstream press) would simply forget about the whole thing.
It turns out that the public are so forgetful the Tories ended up getting re-elected, and the Tory faithful are so forgetful that they even gave Theresa May a rousing ovation after she decided to recycle her broken promise to cut migration to below 100,000 at the 2015 Tory party conference!
Who needs any actual achievements when empty tough-talking rhetoric will do eh?
Ideological austerity
Back in 2010 towel re-folder and Modern History graduate turned Tory Chancellor George Osborne and his Tory party colleagues promised that their austerity agenda would completely eliminate the budget deficit by 2015.
Lot's of people tried to point out that ideological austerity is economically illiterate rubbish that couldn't possible work because "lets cut our way to growth" is a poor strategy at the best of times, but in the wake of an gigantic global financial sector insolvency crisis, it's economically suicidal.
When it became clear that eliminating the budget deficit by 2015 would be completely impossible, the Tories simply re-branded their monumental failure as a success by constantly repeating "we've cut the deficit by a third"!
Obviously the Tory tribalists lapped it up, then during the 2015 General Election campaign George Osborne promised that the Tories would eliminate the budget deficit by 2020 and the Tory faithful lapped that up too!
What's the betting that by the time we get to the 2020 General Election, the budget deficit still won't be gone and the Tories will still be blaming a New Labour administration that left office a full decade before, and promising to eliminate the budget deficit by 2025 with more ideological austerity?
Conclusion
Britain is a country where some 24% of the electorate (11 million+ people) are happy to judge Tory politicians on what they say, rather than what they actually do. Unfortunately our embarrassingly outdated and pathetically unrepresentative voting system means that such a small percentage of the electorate is sufficient to guarantee the Tories more than 50% of the MPs and a majority government!
Given that this is the case, it seems that all the Tories will ever need to do to hold onto power is to continue repeatedly re-branding their failures as successes, spouting empty tough-talking rhetoric for the Tory faithful to lap up, and deflecting attention away from their own culpability by blaming a previous New Labour administration that is receding further and further into the past.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
In 2012 David Cameron reacted to the tax-dodging activities of the (so-called) comedian Jimmy Carr by saying that "Tax-dodging is morally wrong"; in May 2013 he said that he was "opposed to all aggressive tax avoidance"; and for the last four and a half years Cameron and the Tories have been churning out their "getting tough on tax-dodging rhetoric" every time the subject comes up.
If you are the kind of gullible person who takes the words of politicians at face value without engaging your critical judgement you might imagine that the Tories are sincere, and that they have actually been clamping down on the tax-dodging activities of multinational corporations and the super-wealthy minority, but you'd be completely wrong. They've made a few token gestures, but under David Cameron's watch only one out of the 1,000+ people caught up in the Swiss HSBC tax-dodging scandal has faced prosecution and multinational corporations have continued to get away with shifting their UK profits overseas in order to avoid paying tax here.
The Tories know that the tax-dodging activities of corporations and the super-rich are an issue that the public feel very strongly about, but they've assumed that the general public are so gullible that they'll simply believe it if the Tories do nothing more than say that they're getting tough on tax-dodging, whilst simultaneously benefiting from tax-dodging themselves, and even actively facilitating the tax-dodging activities of others.
In this article I'm going to give a few examples that prove that Tory party statements on tax-dodging are just empty rhetoric and deliberate misdirection.
David Cameron
David Cameron is a direct beneficiary of tax-dodging as a result of inheriting £300,000 from his father, which was made via a network of offshore "investment funds" in places like Panama and Geneva, which were explicitly designed to help wealthy people avoid paying UK tax. [source]
Samantha Cameron
David Cameron's wife works for Smythson, which is a leather goods and luxury stationary company that is based in Luxembourg for the purposes of avoiding tax, and controlled via a network of other shell companies based in the British tax havens of Jersey and Guernsey. [source]
Eton college
David Cameron was educated at the most elitist private school in the United Kingdom, which charges more than the average annual wage in tuition fees (currently £34,500 per year). What many people don't realise is that since November 2010 this elitist training camp for the children of the establishment is registered as a charity for the purpose of avoiding tax.
Gary Barlow
Within a week of David Cameron publicly condemning the tax-dodging activities of Jimmy Carr, he absolutely refused to make a similar public condemnation of the former Take That member Gary Barlow when it was revealed that he too had been using an elaborate scheme to avoid paying UK tax. It hardly seems like a coincidence that Gary Barlow is a very high profile Tory party supporter. [source]
HSBC
Not only do HSBC have a track record of helping wealthy UK citizens dodge paying their tax, they've also ripped off their own customers with the PPI fraud, rigged the Libor and Forex markets, channeled funds to terrorist organisations and laundered hundreds of billions of dollars for murderous Mexican drug cartels.
David Cameron has numerous links to HSBC. Not only have the holders of HSBC Swiss accounts donated £5 million to the Tory party, but Cameron also handed the former HSBC boss Stephen Green a place in the unelected House of Lords and appointed him as the Trade and Investment minister. In February 2015 when the HSBC tax-dodging scandal reignited, Cameron refused to answer a simple question about whether he had ever discussed HSBC tax-dodging with Stephen Green four times in a single debate.
HMRC cuts
One of the things that really puts the Tory rhetoric on combating tax-dodging into perspective is the fact that they have ruthlessly cut the number of HMRC staff working to recover tax from high net worth individuals. Not only does this totally undermine their "tough on tax-dodging" rhetoric, it's also a display of economic illiteracy because cutting the jobs of tax investigators who recover far more than their salaries in unpaid tax each year is almost the definition of a false economy. [source]
Tax-dodging Lords
Since coming to power in 2010 David Cameron has handed out peerages to a whole load of Tory party donors. Several of these wealthy Tory donors that Cameron has stuffed into the unelected and anti-democratic House of Lords are tax-dodgers.
One of the most notable examples of Cameron's unelected tax-dodging Lords is Stanley Fink, who at first threatened to sue Ed Miliband for saying that he had avoided tax, only to change his tune and admit that he had been dodging tax, but that it was Okay because it was only "vanilla" tax avoidance, that it is "normal in British society" because "everyone does it". [source]
New tax-loopholes
Despite harping on about how much they oppose tax-dodging, the Tories have actually opened up a number of new tax loopholes for the benefit of British businesses seeking to avoid paying tax. One of the most egregious of these new loopholes was a scheme announced in the 2013 budget to allow British companies to avoid paying tax in 3rd world countries by shifting their profits into tax havens.Distracting public attention
Instead of taking the revelations about the Tory Party accepting millions of pounds in funding from tax-dodgers, David Cameron desperately tried to distract attention away from the scandal by announcing social security sanctions for benefits claimants who are deemed by the state to be overweight.
There is a damn good reason that the Tory party and the right-wing press love to fixate on people like benefits claimants and immigrants as if they're the biggest problems in society instead of dealing with the bankers who wrecked the economy, the corporate fat cats who are enriching themselves at a faster rate than ever whilst contributing to the longest sustained decline in wages since records began, and the tax-dodgers who cost the country tens of billions a year by hiding their wealth in offshore accounts.
The reason that the Tories are so keen to distract attention away from these much more serious problems is that the people responsible are David Cameron's donors. They are the people that the Tory party exists in order to serve. There's absolutely no way that David Cameron could turn on his wealthy paymasters, even if he wanted to.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
After a couple of months of extremely bad press about their corporation tax avoiding activities, Starbucks finally caved into massive public pressure and declared that they intend to pay £20 million in UK corporation tax over the next two years.
There are positives and negatives to take from this story. I'll start by noting that this voluntary tax contribution would never have been achieved without massive public pressure. Had UK Uncut not targeted Starbucks and had bloggers and social media activists not spread the word about Starbucks elaborate tax dodging scams, the company would never have offered to cough up a token tax contribution. This is absolutely clear evidence that public activism works. If Starbucks weren't looking at severe damage to their "brand identity" and massive revenue reductions due to the Boycott Starbucks campaign, they would certainly never have voluntarily offered to reduce the scale of their tax-dodging operations.
This brings us to the negative aspects. The offer to pay a predetermined "token tax" contribution is quite obviously nothing but a desperate attempt to stop the savaging of the Starbucks brand. Starbucks bean-counters have realised that if the Boycott Starbucks campaign continues, they'll loose £millions in revenues. Their solution is to slash labour conditions and paid benefits such as sick pay, maternity pay and paid lunch breaks to make some savings and then offer those savings up as their voluntary "token tax" contribution. Staff have been told to sign revised employment contracts or face dismissal. Starbucks have claimed that the new contracts being forced on their staff have nothing to do with their tax arrangements, however the fact that staff are being made to sign new contracts in the week that Starbucks have announced their "token tax" contribution looks extremely suspicious.
The next negative aspect of Starbucks' voluntary tax contribution is that the rules that allow such huge tax avoidance arrangements that provoked the Boycott Starbucks campaign remain completely unchanged. The Tory led government keep insisting that no new anti-avoidance legislation is necessary and that their "race to the bottom" cuts in corporation tax rates are the "best" way of reducing tax avoidance. HMRC are no better, they seem absolutely intent on maintaining their cosy relationships with major corporate tax avoiders.
The Boycott Starbucks campaign has been relatively successful, in that the company have decided to make a "token tax" contribution in order to mitigate the damage, however, the rules that allow multinational corporate tax-dodging remain in place. Without government intervention and an end to HMRC's "kid gloves" approach to major tax-dodging corporations, the scale of tax-dodging won't be reduced, especially given that 98 of the 100 FTSE 100 companies maintain offshore subsidiaries for tax dodging purposes.
The reason the Boycott Starbucks campaign has achieved a relative level of success in relation to other major tax-dodgers is that it is much easier to boycott a visible high-street chain, than it is to boycott a major online presence like Google or government service providers like Mapeley (the Bermuda based tax-dodgers that have a lucrative contract to run the HMRC property portfolio!).
The UK shouldn't be reliant upon public pressure driving large corporations to make voluntary tax donations as a response. The nation needs government intervention and a major simplification of the tax code. Here are my two suggestions:
1. A Ban on taxpayer funding of tax avoiding companies.
There is absolutely no justification for allowing taxpayer generated
funds to be provided to tax-dodging companies (in the form of subsidies,
outsourcing contracts, R&D loans, procurement contracts, health
contracts, IT contracts, training schemes, PFI deals...)*. If an
enterprise won't demonstrate that they are a British based company (or
registered subsidiary) that pay their fair share of taxes, they mustn't
get a penny from the government. They should also have to demonstrate
that all employees are paid in a tax transparent way, with no personal
service companies, offshore dividends and the like.
2. A blanket ban on all tax avoidance schemes. After the government spending regulations have been brought into effect, a simple change to
the tax code should be made to legislate that if a scheme is designed for the explicit
purpose of avoiding tax, then it is by definition a criminal activity.
* More details on why tax-dodging is harmful to the UK economy can be found on the Economic Case Against Tax-Dodging article.
The obvious problem with these proposals is that the Tory party receives donations from a number of tax-dodgers, and are led by a man that inherited £300,000 from his father's offshore tax-dodging empire. Despite all of their rhetoric on combating tax-dodging, the Tory party have actually been opening up even more tax loopholes for the benefit of multinational tax-dodging corporations. Expecting the Tory party to actually clamp down on tax-dodging is like expecting UKIP to endorse the UK's membership of the EU.
Given that the current Tory led government have a number of vested interests in keeping the UK tax regime as soft as possible, and that they have a demonstrable track record of actually opening up new tax-dodging loopholes, it seems that the most pragmatic course would seem to be to put pressure on the Labour party to include some explicit anti-tax-dodging proposals in their next manifesto.
Despite the fact that a move to end taxation asymmetry between the multinational corporations and Britain's small and medium enterprises would be extremely popular with the taxpaying public, it actually seems unlikely that Neo-Labour would do anything significant to combat tax-dodging, especially given the deep involvement of tax avoidance specialists like KPMG within the Labour party (secondment of staff, sponsorship of conference events and direct political donations). Another reason to be suspicious of Neo-Labour's willingness to clamp down on tax avoidance is the fact that they were the ones that actually introduced the Limited Liability Partnerships that have been widely used in tax-dodging scams such as the Icebreaker LLP that was used in the Jimmy Carr tax-dodging scandal and the Sloane Robinson LLP that was used to facilitate the tax-dodging activities of the major Tory donor George Robinson.
However sceptical we are that any of the three establishment political parties would be prepared to offer anything but empty rhetoric on tax-dodging, the pressure must be maintained, so that they know that if they do choose to take a genuine tough stance on multinational corporate tax-dodging, there would be millions of votes from hard pressed taxpayers and the owners of Britain's taxpaying small and medium enterprises in it for them.
See Also
