David Cameron the innocent victim!

It took a few days of excruciating floundering from David Cameron and his party, but it's now clear that the Tory narrative on the Panama Papers has been set.

The ludicrous story they've concocted is that the Tories and the super-rich people caught up in the Panama Papers leak are the virginal innocent victims who have done nothing wrong, and the real villains in all of this are any ordinary members of the public who think they have a right to question the conduct of their Lords and masters!

The dodgy Tory donors

The Panama Papers have revealed that a whole host of major Tory party donors had links to offshore companies listed on the books of Mossack Fonseca these included:

• Anthony Bamford: £4 million in Tory donations, made into an unelected Tory peer in 2013.

• David Rowland: £3.8 million in Tory donations, former party treasurer.

• Fleming Family: Over £400,000 in Tory donations, including direct donations to David Cameron

• Juniper Equities Trading: £250,000 loan to the Tory party from an offshore fund with an opaque ownership structure. It is still not known who was behind this donation.

• Tony Buckingham: £100,000 donation to the Tories.

Cameron the "victim"

The Tory MPs and the right-wing press stumbled around for a while without a narrative to deflect criticism, leaving David Cameron to get backed into a corner. Following days of evasive answers and extraordinary press releases about how his offshore dealings during his time as an MP were supposedly a "private matter", Cameron eventually had to admit that he held a five figure stake in his fathers' dodgy offshore business which he never declared on the Parliamentary register of Members' Interests for nine years as an MP.

After all of this excruciating floundering, Tory party HQ eventually settled on the quite extraordinary story that David Cameron and the Tories are somehow the innocent victims in the Panama Papers scandal, and the villains are any ordinary members of the public with the temerity to complain about it. Here is a short selection of some of the ludicrous statements that Tory apologists have come up with:

"You often hear of people being trapped in poverty, but it's also possible to be trapped in wealth. This is David Cameron's fate" - Charles Moore, Daily Telegraph

This is shockingly offensive drivel to anybody who understands the deliberate upwards redistribution of wealth that has gone on as a consequence of Tory ideological austerity and how it has resulted in ordinary people suffering the most severe income declines since records began, reduced to food bank dependency, hit with ludicrously harsh benefits sanctions, unfairly thrown off disability benefits, rendered homeless (homelessness has risen dramatically since 2010) and even in death.

Poverty is a trap that can, and does, result in premature death. Wealth is not a trap.

David Cameron isn't under fire because he's wealthy. He's under fire because he deliberately hid his shareholding in his father's offshore business off the Parliamentary Register of Members' Interests and then spent four days obfuscating about it before finally admitting it. The problem isn't that he's rich, it's that he's dishonest.

"Shouldn't the Prime Minister’s critics snap out of their synthetic indignation and admit that they hate anyone with a hint of wealth in their life?" Tory MP Alan Duncan - Parliamentary question

This is an almost perfect example of the sanctimonious Tory "class war" ideology, where the Tories and their super-rich backers are always beyond reproach, and anyone who dares complain about anything they do must be vermin from "the lower orders" who are just filled with petty jealously and should damned well know their place.

According to Alan Duncan's smug Tory "logic", anyone who does have "a hint of wealth" who also feels entitled to be angry that David Cameron failed to register his significant offshore shareholding on the MP's Register of Interests for nine years must be a self-hater who is bitterly jealous of their own wealth!

Another thing to note is Alan Duncan's use of the term "synthetic indignation", which is quite extraordinary given the performance of Tory MP Charles Walker who gave a ludicrous display of synthetic indignation on BBC The Daily Politics show, painting David Cameron as the innocent victim of a "bullying" campaign, only to give the game away completely at the end by getting caught by the camera aiming a triumphant wink at his fellow Tory MP on the panel.

It's absolutely extraordinary that the Tories have simultaneously decided to cynically play the synthetic moral indignation card in defence of David Cameron, then smear anyone still asking questions about his failure to declare his offshore shareholding for nine years as an MP as being guilty of "synthetic indignation".

Following on from his broad-brush smear against anyone with the temerity to question their Tory betters, Alan Duncan went on to claim that non-millionaires are "under-achievers" which is a perfect example of the foul-minded Tory fallacy of natural economic justice (the idea that rich people are rich because they're virtuous, and poor people are poor because they're worthless scum).

"May I tell the Prime Minister that he should not be ashamed that he had the good fortune to be born into a well-off family" - Michael Fabricant, Parliamentary statement

This one is just absurd. It must surely be one of the weakest and most obvious straw-man fallacies ever uttered in parliament. Nobody at all is saying that David Cameron should be ashamed of being born into a wealthy family. The complaint is that he deliberately hid some of his assets off the Parliamentary Register of Members' Interests when he couldn't possibly have imagined that nobody at all in Britain could have reasonably have thought that such a shareholding might "influence his actions, speeches or votes in Parliament, or actions taken in his or her capacity as a Member of Parliament". It's completely obvious that he refused to declare the interest precisely because he thought people would think that, which means he was in clear breach of the MP's code of conduct.

The straw-man tactic (deliberately mischaracterising your opponents argument as something utterly facile and then criticising that, in place of what has actually been said) is truly one of the weakest and most contemptible debating tactics known to humanity.

It just goes to show how far the standards of public debate have fallen that Tory MPs think that they can get away with such blatantly fallacious debating tactics, and how much utter contempt they must have for "the lower orders" that they think we'd all just mindlessly accept such drivel and stop complaining.

Conclusion

The Panama Papers leak has revealed that the Tory party are funded by people with proven interests in a load of dodgy offshore companies and that they're led by a guy who cynically concealed his own offshore interests by deliberately omitting to mention them on the Parliamentary Register of Members' Interests for nine years. However, the Tory party are riddled with such utter contempt for "the lower orders" that they're trying to spin this situation to claim that they're the innocent victims and the any ordinary members of the public who dare to continue complaining are a pack of bullies motivated by nothing more than jealously!

The big thing isn't the fact they're trying to lie. distort, mislead and spin their way out of this situation. That's to be expected because the establishment class are trained to do this from a young age. The issue is the shocking level of contempt that these people clearly have for "the lower orders" that they think that they can fool us into thinking that they're the poor innocent victims and that ordinary members of the public are the contemptible bastards for daring to continue asking questions of their betters.

 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.

OR

The post-Brexit fantasy land

Both sides of the EU debate have put forward some completely inept and downright misleading arguments in favour of their positions, but the appalling opportunism and incoherence of the Brexit camp is really beginning to get on my nerves. It doesn't matter what the news story these days, there's always a pack of Brexiters ready to pounce on it and reshape it into an anti-EU diatribe, using all manner of tortured logic, fantastical thinking and downright misleading rhetoric in the process.

The purpose of this article is not to persuade you to vote one way or another, I actually believe there are good arguments to be found in favour of both sides of the debate if you're prepared to actually look for them.

The purpose is to show the shameless political opportunism and logical incoherence that elements of the Brexit camp are ever willing to present in order to dupe gullible people into supporting their cause.

Once you've read this article you'll be able to keep an eye out for people jumping into political debates about serious issues with the sole objective of piggybacking their personal political agenda onto the debate by any means possible (including the complete abandonment of logic, reason and basic common sense).

Steel

When the EU tried to intervene in the steel market by imposing import tariffs on artificially cheap "dumped" Chinese steel, UKIP actively voted against the measures then the Tory party successfully vetoed the deal.

Despite these displays of utter contempt for the UK steel industry, an awful lot of right-wing Brexiters (including UKIP leader Nigel Farage) have opportunistically tried to claim that the only way to save the UK steel industry is for Britain to leave the EU.

Just a few moments thought about what a post-EU Britain would look shatters this absurd fantasy. The Tories (who in late 2015 sacrificed 3,000 jobs in Redcar because they were far too busy sucking up to the Chinese at the time, and then in February 2016 deliberately torpedoed EU measures to protect the European steel industry) would be in sole charge of the UK economy. 

Anyone who thinks that post-Brexit Tories would suddenly give up either their fanatically right-wing economic ideology or their pathetic subservience to China just to save a load of mainly Labour voting steel communities really must be imagining some kind of bizarre post-EU fantasy land where the fundamental laws of political nature have been reversed.

NHS

Another of the utterly ridiculous claims from Brexiters is that the quitting the EU is the only way to save the NHS. The same "just think about it" counter argument stands.

A post-EU Britain would be run by the Tories who have spent the last six years wrecking the NHS by deliberately underfunding it (like they promised they wouldn't), carrying out a catastrophically wasteful top-down reorganisation (like they promised they wouldn't), bringing in new rules to make forced closures of NHS services much easier (like they promised they wouldn't), carving the NHS open for privatisation and cherry-picking of profitable services (like they promised they wouldn't) and deliberately picking ideological fights with junior doctors in order to drive them overseas or out of the profession entirely.

The idea that a post-Brexit Tory party emboldened by the fact they're no longer constrained by European rules like the working time directive would suddenly decide to start looking after the NHS rather than continuing their strategy of deliberately running it into the ground, treating NHS employees like shit and privatising all the profitable bits is another example of hopelessly unrealistic utopian fantasising about what a post-Brexit UK would look like.

TTIP

Another tactic of the Brexit crowd is to claim that the only way to beat the TTIP corporate power grab is to quit the EU.

It's worth remembering that the Tory government are so fanatically in favour of the complete corporate over-writing of our democratic and judicial systems that they outright refused to ask for a TTIP exemption for NHS services or demand the removal of the highly controversial ISDS (corporate over-writing of sovereign democracy and judiciary) elements of the plan.

Let's think about this post-Brexit scenario again. Yes, we wouldn't be subject to TTIP (if it even ever goes through), but the Tories would then have free rein to draw up their own corporate power grabs disguised as "trade deals".
 However, unlike with the EU where there is a massive and growing resistance to TTIP, it's undoubtable that what the Tories would come up with on their own would be far worse than TTIP, and there would be far less opposition to stand up to it (or at the least force the withdrawal of the most rabidly pro-corporate elements). So once again, despite the Brexiter rhetoric, it would be a case of "out of the frying pan, into the fire".

EU rules

One of the most irritatingly poor Brexiter arguments is that the EU is damaging British businesses with their "pesky rules". The problem with this argument is that an awful lot of Brexiters seem to think they can have their cake and eat it. They either want to stay in the single market (but ditch the single market rule of free movement of labour) or negotiate a single market like trade deal between the UK and the EU.

The EU are not going to allow the UK to just cherry-pick the bits of the single market that they like and ditch the rest, because that would obviously open the door to other member states to begin cherry-picking which rules they want to abide by and which they want to abandon.

Even if the EU does decide to make an exception for the UK and give us continued access to the single market without having to abide by the free movement rules, all of the rules would be drawn up in Brussels, and the UK would have absolutely no say at all in their development.

Additionally, whether Britain gets to stay in the single market or not, if our companies want to continue trading with Europe, then the products they sell within the EU would still have to comply with EU standards. The UK would no longer have any say whatever in what those standards actually are, but we'd still have to abide by their "pesky rules" anyway!

Democracy

One of the central Brexiter criticisms of the EU is that it's undemocratic. I actually agree with them on this. Elements of the EU are extremely undemocratic, especially the European Commission, the European Central Bank (and the way they ganged up with the IMF to impose socially and economically toxic austerity economics on Greece). However a think about what a post-Brexit UK would look like is revealing.

The UK would still have a completely unelected House of Lords; an unelected head of state; an unelected central bank; a deeply unrepresentative and apathy inducing Westminster voting system where a mandate from just 24% of the registered electorate is sufficient to form a majority government; and an utterly bizarre hotch-potch of a constitution where the people of Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and London get their own proportionally elected parliaments, while all of the non-London English regions have to do without.

The bizarre thing is that the European elections are the actually only proportional elections that the English regions get to participate in, so Brexit (which is much more popular in the English regions than any of the places with their own proportionally elected parliaments) would clearly make the English regions less democratic!

Tax-dodging
  
After the "Panama Papers" furore and David Cameron's excruciatingly protracted admission that he personally benefited from shares in his fathers' offshore business empire while he was a serving MP (shares that he never registered on the Parliamentary Register of Members' Financial Interests) some Brexiters have even begun mouthing off about how Brexit is necessary in order to clamp down on tax-dodging!

Once again a think about what a post-Brexit UK would look like is revealing. The Tories (who have repeatedly battled and lobbied against EU efforts to clamp down on tax havens) would have an even stronger grip on the UK government, and it's absolutely clear that they they have no honest intention of cracking down on tax-dodging, heavily funded as they are by a bunch of tax-dodgers.

Additionally the Brexit faction of the Tory party would be emboldened, meaning that the likes of John Redwood would be more likely to achieve their ambition of turning the entire UK economy into one gigantic tax-haven.

Conclusion

Whether you've decided which side of the debate you support or not, it's really important that you don't allow yourself to be taken for an idiot.

Few on the "Bremain" side are promising that the EU will suddenly become some kind of fantastical utopia if Britain votes to remain. In fact many of them are prepared to admit that the EU has problems, but their solution is to fix these problems from within, rather than run away.

An awful lot of people on the Brexit side seem to want people to believe in a staggeringly unrealistic post-EU fantasy land, where the Tory government will suddenly start caring about things like the NHS, the steel industry and clamping down on tax-dodging. Even worse than, they they seem to expect people to be gullible enough to believe that the unrestrained Tories wouldn't concoct so-called "trade deals" that are much worse than the TTIP corporate power grab, and that stripping the English regions of their only proportional elections would somehow make Britain more democratic!

It's absolutely fine if you still want Britain to leave the EU, everyone is entitled to their own opinion. Just don't let yourself be taken for an idiot, and try to keep an eye out for people opportunistically using the tactic of piggy-backing their own biased political agenda onto topical news items, regardless of whether it is logically justifiable.

 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.

OR

Is it time for the public to make David Cameron resign?

When the first details of the "Panama Papers" were released, David Cameron thought he could bluster his way out of it. He thought that he could just recycle the same tired old Tory rhetoric about getting tough on tax-dodging, and tell the public how the use of secretive offshore shell companies is "not morally acceptable". He thought he could put on this kind of performance for a little while until the public furore died down, then go back to doing nothing serious about the tax-dodging issue, as he'd been doing for the last six years.

As more and more of the dodgy details of his fathers' offshore business empire came out (like the fact it never paid a penny of tax on its UK profits for 30 years) David Cameron thought that he could stonewall the public with evasiveness, outright refusals to answer simple questions, and absurd press releases about how his financial affairs are supposedly a "private matter".

The problem for David Cameron is that the financial affairs of our elected officials (and their immediate families) are not actually a "private matter" at all. The reason the Parliamentary Register of Members' Financial Interests exists is so that the public can see whether our elected officials have financial conflicts of interest when they are making or voting on legislation.

Once a person decides to run for public office (any kind of elected position from lowly parish councillor to a Member of Parliament, cabinet minister or Prime Minister) they are obligated to accept the rule that they must declare their financial interests, meaning that their personal financial arrangements are no longer a "private matter".

This isn't just the opinion of some "leftie" blogger. It's a fact. It's part of the job description of all politicians in democratically accountable societies.

On Thursday the 7th of April (three days after the Panama Papers crisis erupted) David Cameron finally admitted that he personally benefited from his father's dodgy offshore business interests when he sold £31,500 worth of shares in January 2010 (just months before he became Prime Minister).

This admission was made in a specially arranged ITV interview with the notoriously Tory-friendly journalist Robert Peston, who even allowed David Cameron to make pathetic appeals for public sympathy with claims it had been "a difficult few days".

The worst aspect of Peston's interview (and an awful lot of the subsequent mainstream media press coverage), is that Cameron hasn't been asked whether he ever considered declaring his shares in Blairmore (or the profits from his sale) on the Register of Members' Financial Interests.

A look at the specific rules shows how ridiculously lax they are when it comes to MPs shareholdings. According to articles 9a and 9b of the code of conduct, an MP can apparently hold shares in a company without declaring it on the register as long as the value of the shares does not exceed 100% of their parliamentary salary, or 15% of the share capital of the company. This means that a front bench minister could hold £130,000 worth of shares in a huge array of different companies without specifically having to declare any of them under article 9 of the rules!

In my view this staggeringly lax rule on MPs shareholdings needs to be changed to a much lower figure, something like the £500 limit on gifts, or the £1,500 limit on benefits (freebies like tickets to events).

There is however one other rule that needs to be taken into account when considering David Cameron's failure to register his shares in Blairmore (or the proceeds of their sale), which can be found in section 57 of the code of conduct:

"It is sometimes appropriate to register shareholdings falling outside Categories 9a and 9b. In considering whether to do so, Members should have regard to the definition of the main purpose of the Register: "to provide information of any financial interest or other material benefit which a Member receives which might reasonably be thought by others to influence his or her actions, speeches or votes in Parliament, or actions taken in his or her capacity as a Member of Parliament". If a Member considers that any shareholding which he or she holds falls within this definition, the Member should register the shareholding under Category 11."

Maybe David Cameron is so wealthy that he thinks that a £12,500 investment that he sold for £31,500 is such an insignificant matter that nobody could possibly believe it could have any influence over his actions as an MP?

I imagine that many of us would struggle to imagine a scenario in which a five figure financial investment would be so insignificant to us as to have no influence at all on our actions. I guess it just shows what a different world people like David Cameron must occupy if they believe that five figure investments are far too insignificant to even bother registering, and that nobody in Britain could possibly believe that such investments might have any influence over their actions.

In light of David Cameron's admission it becomes clear that every single time David Cameron has talked-tough about tax-dodging as Prime Minister (like in 2012 when he slammed Jimmy Carr's tax-dodging escapades as "morally wrong") he damned well knew that he'd personally benefited from selling a stake in his father's offshore business empire, but he was completely confident that nobody would ever see his hypocrisy because he'd deliberately failed to register his shares (or their sale) on the Register of Members' Financial Interests, and because he assumed that his offshore dealings would always remain secret.

The important issue here isn't David Cameron's hypocrisy - if MPs and Prime Ministers could be removed from office for hypocrisy, David Cameron (and several of his cabinet minsters) would have been forced out of office long ago. 

The important issue isn't David Cameron's dishonesty either. He's got away with telling one lie after another for years, completely safe in the knowledge that the worst that would ever happen to him is the sending of a stern letter by the UK statistics authority.

The important issue is that David Cameron deliberately failed to declare some of his financial interests even though it's not remotely possible that he could have thought there would have been no public interest in his offshore investments.

It's absolutely clear that the reason David Cameron decided not to declare his offshore investments is because he knew perfectly well that such an investment "might reasonably be thought by others to influence his or her actions, speeches or votes in Parliament, or actions taken in his or her capacity as a Member of Parliament", which means that he was in clear violation of article 57 of the code of conduct for nine years.

This issue is a matter of public standards. If David Cameron is allowed to simply brush off his failure to declare his financial interests in his fathers' offshore business empire for nine years of his parliamentary career as some kind of oversight, or try to argue that "it wasn't against the exact letter of the law - so it's OK"* - the public would be giving our acquiescence to more of this kind of moral impropriety in the future.

If David Cameron doesn't have the moral decency to resign over this issue (which no doubt he doesn't), the British public have a duty to make him resign, otherwise we'd be sending the message to all the other self-serving MPs in parliament that they're absolutely fine to continue owning and not declaring significant chunks of offshore business empires (as long as the value of their chunk does not exceed their annual parliamentary salary).

The people of Iceland have shown that it's possible to force a Prime Minister's resignation over financial impropriety, so it's not beyond the bounds of reason that David Cameron could be forced to resign if the public pressure became strong enough.

What we can do

There is going to be a protest outside Downing Street calling for David Cameron's resignation. You could sign up to the protest on the Facebook page, but more importantly you could spread the word by using the "invite" function to invite anyone you think might be interested in joining in, or inviting other people to join in. The more people who know about this protest, the bigger it's likely to be.

Write to your MP to ask that they support a move to introduce significantly lower limits on MPs shareholdings so that scandals like David Cameron's Blairmore shares can never arise again.

 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.

OR

* Coincidentally the"it wasn't against the exact letter of the law - so it's OK" argument for David Cameron not declaring his significant offshore investments on the Register of Members' Financial Interests is precisely the same argument used by tax-dodgers to justify their use of elaborate tax avoidance schemes.

Bernie Sanders was right about Panama

The leak of the Panama Papers has vindicated Bernie Sanders stance against tax-dodging. In 2011 Sanders strongly criticised the Panama Free Trade agreement while his rival for the 2016 Democratic Presidential nomination Hillary Clinton voted in favour of the Panama free trade agreement.

Here's what he said to Congress on October 12th 2011.

"Panama is a world leader when it comes to allowing wealthy Americans and large corporations to evade US taxes by stashing their cash in offshore tax havens. The Panama free trade agreement will make this bad situation much worse. Each and every year, the wealthiest people in this country and the largest corporations evade about $100 billion in taxes through abusive and illegal offshore tax havens in Panama and in other countries." [source]

As Secretary of State in the Obama administration Hillary Clinton not only voted for the Panama free trade agreement, she also publicly advocated it, and congratulated President Obama when the deal was passed saying "these initiatives are the leading edge of a job-creating trade agenda that will open markets, level the playing field for our businesses and workers, and champion America’s working families in an age of tough global competition".

The confidence with which Clinton celebrated this deal with one of the most notorious tax havens in the world is staggering. As Bernie Sanders pointed out during his speech opposing the deal, the Panamanian economy is only 0.2% of the size of the US economy, so anyone talking up a free trade agreement between the two countries in terms of being some kind of jobs bonanza is clearly being disingenuous. As for the bits about "levelling the playing field" and "championing working families" they're utterly absurd black=white assertions. How on earth is a trade agreement with a notorious tax haven where wealthy US citizens and corporations stash their ill-gotten gains good for ordinary working families?

After the initial furore over the high profile politicians implicated in the Panama Papers had died down, the media team who are carefully stage-managing the release of information quietly announced some of the first American names in the Mosack Fonseca client list which included:

• Robert Miracle (convicted fraudster)
• Benjamin Wey (indicted on securities fraud charges in 2015)
• Igor Olenicoff (found guilty of stashing $200m in offshore accounts in 2007)
• Anthony J. Gumbiner (guilty of SEC fraud in the 1980s)
• John Michael 'Red' Crim (found guilty of a $10m tax fraud in 2008)
• Jonathan Kaplan (found guilty in 2007 of accepting a $400,000 commercial bribe) 

It's astonishing that back in 2011 Hillary Clinton used such misleading language to celebrate a free trade deal with an economy that provides a bolt hole for criminals like those listed above to stash the ill-gotten gains they've ripped off from American working families (either directly through fraud, or indirectly by dodging their taxes meaning either services have to be cut, or other American citizens have to make up the shortfall).

It's also worth noting that the vast majority of Republicans (in Congress and in the Senate) supported Barack Obama's Panama free trade agreement, while the bulk of the limited opposition in both houses came from Democrats.

Here is what Bernie Sanders had to say after the Panama Papers came out:

"I was opposed to the Panama Free Trade Agreement from day one. I predicted that the passage of this disastrous trade deal would make it easier, not harder, for the wealthy and large corporations to evade taxes by sheltering billions of dollars offshore. I wish I had been proven wrong about this, but it has now come to light that the extent of Panama’s tax avoidance scams is even worse than I had feared.  

My opponent [Hillary Clinton], on the other hand, opposed this trade agreement when she was running against Barack Obama for president in 2008. But when it really mattered she quickly reversed course and helped push the Panama Free Trade Agreement through Congress as Secretary of State. The results have been a disaster.

The American people are sick and tired of establishment politicians who say one thing during a campaign and do the exact opposite the day after the election. “It is time for real change. As president, I will use my authority to terminate the Panama Free Trade Agreement within six months. My administration will conduct an immediate investigation into U.S. banks, corporations and wealthy individuals who have been stashing their cash in Panama to avoid taxes. If any of them have violated U.S. law, my administration will prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law."

In stark contrast to the empty tough-talking rhetoric about tax-dodging from UK Prime Minister David Cameron, it's possible to actually believe Bernie Sanders is serious about confronting the problem because he's got an actual track record of opposing tax-dodging, and opposing free trade deals with notorious tax haven economies.

 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.

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Are you gullible enough to believe the Tory rhetoric on tax-dodging?

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.

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