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

Isn't it amazing what people choose to forget?

It's amazing how public perceptions can be manipulated by the mainstream media to accept completely ahistorical narratives about fundamentally important issues.

Take the EU referendum debate as an example. Anyone who mindlessly absorbs their political opinions fro the corporate mainstream media would probably end up believing that the EU debate is between anti-EU "common sense" right-wingers vs pro-EU "do-gooder" lefties.

The strange thing is that last time there was a referendum on membership of the European community, by far the most vocal opponents of EU membership were left-wingers like Tony Benn, while the right-wing fringe of the Tory party were the most vocal champions of the European project. This right-wing pro-European stance was exemplified by Margaret Thatcher's pro-European jumper (see picture above). This was at a time when Thatcher represented the extreme-right fringe of the Tory party, while most Tories were still of the "one nation Conservative" ilk; content with the prosperous post-war consensus that there should be a mix between state socialism and regulated capitalism. Meanwhile the left-wing of the Labour party provided by far the strongest opposition the the European project.

Nowadays the polarity of the EU debate has been completely switched. The figureheads of the anti-EU movement are people like Nigel Farage (who gets the votes of millions of working class people despite describing himself as "keeping the flame of Thatcherism alive"!) and Michael Gove (the arch-Thatcherite who oversaw the privatisation of thousands of English schools into the hands of unaccountable private pseudo-charities), while the more left-wing elements of the British political spectrum (Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party, the Green Party, the SNP and Plaid Cymru) are taking a more pro-European stance.

It's interesting to consider how this complete reversal of British political polarity has come about.

Back in the 1970s the right-wing fringe saw the European project as an excellent opportunity to push their extremist right-wing economic dogma onto the whole of Western Europe, and in many ways they were successful. Take the EU competition rules that prevent member states from renationalising public infrastructure (no matter how abysmally it is run by the private sector), the anti-democratic European Central Bank, the free movement of labour within Europe or the brutal socially and economically destructive austerity ideology forced on Greece. In many ways the EU has been an absolute triumph for right-wing economic fanaticism.

The problem for militant right-wing fanatics is that the EU is a collaborative project, so for every bit of fanatically right-wing economic dogma they've managed to force onto the entire European community, there's always some pesky left-wing and liberal rules too, like the Working Time Directive, environmental regulations, animal welfare laws, curbs on bankers' bonuses or assertions of the human rights of EU citizens.

The extreme-right fringe of the Tory party (and I include UKIP in that definition) have given up on the European project not because they haven't managed to force right-wing economic dogma onto the rest of Europe (because they undeniably have), but because the structure of the EU means that they're constrained from pushing the even more militant right-wing agenda they want in the UK.

If the Tories get to quit the EU and become the first country ever to tear up the European Convention on Human Rights, they'll be liberated to create the most extreme-right authoritarian government in Europe since the fall of fascism, and they'll do this without the slightest regard for the fact that their ideological figurehead (Margaret Thatcher) was one of the most vocal supporters of the European project back in the 1970s.

The situation for the left is perhaps even more bamboozling. The EU is clearly completely riddled with toxic right-wing economic dogma (look at the deliberate annihilation of the Greek economy to serve the interests of German and French banks and the circling pack of multinational vulture funds), yet it's absolutely clear to the left-wing parties that continued membership of the EU is far less bad than jumping out of the frying pan of the EU technocracy and into searing fire of unconstrained Tory economic insanity.

The best the left seem to be able to come up with is the idea that the EU is deeply flawed, but that the solution is to fix it from within, rather than to fire the ejector seat and land in a putrefying ocean of unconstrained Tory fanaticism.

There are signs of hope that the EU can be reformed from within (the rise of left-wing parties in Greece, Portugal and Spain), however the EU technocrats have demonstrated their abject fear of democratic socialism through their treatment of Greece and their insistence on continuation of their negotiations towards the TTIP corporate power grab, despite the fact that pretty much everyone in Europe who has actually heard of it thinks that it's an unspeakably awful idea to allow corporations to completely over-write sovereign democratic and judicial institutions with secretive unaccountable transnational corporate tribunals.

As far as I'm concerned, the EU stinks. However unconstrained Tory fanaticism stinks an awful lot more. I guess the debate boils down to whether you have more faith that the EU institutions can be shifted away from the promotion of fanatically right-wing economic dogma, or whether you think there is some way of stopping the even more fanatically right-wing Tories should they be handed absolute power through a vote for Brexit.

I think I've made it pretty clear in this article that I don't want to tell you how to vote. As far as I'm concerned it's a choice between a rock and a hard place. I just hope that my explanation of the complete polarity shift in the EU referendum debate since the last referendum gives you some idea that the majority of contemporary opinion on the subject is politically partisan rubbish (which is nothing less that you'd expect from the billionaire sociopaths who own most of the UK media).

 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 rip-off PFI fiasco continues

The Private Finance Initiative (PFI) has proven to be a disastrous policy for pretty much everyone apart from the profiteering corporate beneficiaries and the consultancy firms that rake in cash by helping them draw up their rip-off one-sided deals to extract vast sums of money from the taxpayer.

The idea of PFI is that instead of the government funding infrastructure projects directly (using their access to very cheap finance) they get the private sector to borrow the money at much higher market rates, then rent the infrastructure off the private sector on long-term contracts that end up costing many multiples of what the thing would have actually cost to build.

PFI is like the government turning to those parasitical Hire Purchase companies to buy things slowly at five times the price, rather than getting a low interest loan to pay a realistic upfront cost for what they're buying.

In 2011 The Parliamentary Treasury Select Committee finally got around to admitting that PFI is as an "extremely inefficient method of financing [public infrastructure] projects", yet one government after another has continued using them because, although they are a rip-off, they provide a means of hiding public spending off the public balance sheet by loading current infrastructure investment costs onto future generations.

The Tories began introducing rip-off PFI deals in the early 1990s and New Labour continued rolling them out because it helped them hide chunks of public spending off the public balance sheet in order to stick to Gordon Brown's absurd and arbitrary "Golden Rule" that public borrowing shouldn't exceed 40% of GDP (a rule the was quickly forgotten about when they found £1.5 trillion to bail out the banks that had gambled themselves into insolvency).

One of the recurring themes with PFI is that the opposition parties criticise it, then as soon as they're in power they begin using it to their own advantage. When the Tories introduced it in the early 1990s Labour politicians like Harriet Harman and Alistair Darling condemned it as a form of stealth-privatisation that burdens future generations with the costs of current investment. When New Labour took power these concerns were instantly forgotten about. Towards the end of New Labour, when they were signing up to one rip-off PFI contract after another, the shadow chancellor George Osborne began whinging on about PFI being a rip-off. When George Osborne and the Tories were enabled into power by the Lib-Dems, he simply re-branded PFI as PF2 and continued using the same kind of rip-off financing deals to load current infrastructure costs onto the shoulders of future generations.

Another recurring theme with PFI is the procession of disastrous projects. From NHS trusts crippled under the financial burden of servicing their PFI debts to local councils being forced to pay £millions in rent and service charges on completely empty PFI schools, PFI keeps proving to be a disaster to everyone but the corporate profiteers.

The latest in this long line of monumental PFI cock-ups is the closure of 17 PFI built schools in Edinburgh over safety concerns, which has left some 9,000 students stranded. The decision to indefinitely shut the schools came after the PFI consortium that operates the schools admitted that they couldn't ensure the structural safety of the buildings after serious structural issues were uncovered during repair work to Oxgangs Primary School where a huge section of wall collapsed in January 2016. 

The Edinburgh Schools Partnership consortium (Amey, Miller Construction & Bank of Scotland) who are responsible for this fiasco released a public statement that made it sound like they were doing the public a favour by investing why the schools they built are so structurally unsound that they have a tendency to collapse! They shouldn't just be accepting "full financial responsibility for investigating and resolving these issues", they should be accepting full financial responsibility for the alternative childcare arrangements made by the parents of the 9,000 kids who can't go to school because the profiteers who built and operate their school buildings have no idea if they're going to fall down or not.

It's easy to blame New Labour for this situation in Edinburgh because all of those buildings were built on their watch as part of a £360 million PFI, but it's important to note that the SNP government in Scotland has done their own huge splurge of PFI spending too:

● The Aberdeen western peripheral route: Capital cost £469m, cost of PFI payments £1.45bn 

● City of Glasgow College campus: Capital cost £193m, cost of PFI payments £604m  

● Scottish Blood Transfusion Service HQ: Capital cost £33.3m, cost of PFI payments £100m 

● Anderson high school, Shetland: Capital cost £41m, cost of PFI payments £102m

The Tories invented PFI; New Labour created far more PFI debt legacies than any other party during their 13 years in power; the Lib-Dems enabled the Tories back into power and helped them continue using PFIs; and the SNP have signed up to all kinds of rip-off PFI deals since they came to power in Scotland too.

It turns out that the Green Party are the biggest political party in Scotland to actually oppose these appalling rip-off PFI deals. The Green candidate for Lothian Andy Wightman is calling for a full review of all PFI contracts in Scotland. Here's what he said:

"The Edinburgh school fiasco opens up a massive can of worms as to what the true legacy is of years of private financing of core public services. That is why Green MSPs, in the new parliament, will be demanding a root and branch review of all PPP/PFI contracts."

The SNP look set to win a landslide victory in the 2016 Scottish Parliamentary elections, so it looks like PFI will be there to stay. Given their pro-PFI histories it seems very unlikely that the Tories, Labour or the Lib-Dems would be able to effectively hold the SNP government to account on PFI, so if I was a Scottish resident I'd definitely be looking into who my local Scottish Green candidate is at the very least.

 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.

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* 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.

The former Prime Minister, his wife, the vulture fund and their son

After the inconclusive Spanish general election in December 2015 the ruling right-wing Partido Popular (PP) government have tried to hang onto power, despite not having enough MPs to form a majority (even with the support of the centre-right Trojan Horse protest party Ciudadanos). In the months since the election PP has been rocked by one corruption scandal after another, including a huge corruption scandal in Valencia (24 PP politicians and people with ties to the party arrested) and the implication of the wife of their environment minister in the Panama Papers scandal.

One of the biggest PP corruption scandals of all is going on in Madrid, where PP ran the city council from 1991 until they were turfed out by a Podemos led coalition in 2015. The scandal involved the sale of hundreds of units of social housing to a consortium between a US based vulture fund called Blackstone and an entity called Magic Real Estate.

The Mayor of Madrid who oversaw this corrupt fire-sale of public property was Ana Botella, who is the wife of former Prime Minister Aznar (you might remember him as one of the few world leaders to back Bush and Blair's catastrophic invasion and occupation of Iraq). Botella was a controversial figure before she decided to sell off a load of public property on the cheap because she never actually won a Mayoral election, she was parachuted into the role after the resignation of her predecessor.

The sale of the 1,890 apartments at the heart of the corruption scandal came during the biggest sell-off of public property in Spanish history, with billions of euros worth of public assets being distributed to the likes of Blackstone and HIG Capital (USA) AXA (France), Burlington Asset Management (UK) and the even the Bank of China!

The €128.5 million sale of the 1,890 social housing units was highly controversial at the time because it violated the first option rights of the tenants, and nobody but the utterly credulous believed the promises that rents wouldn't be hiked by the new owners. Within a couple of years, as expected, the new private owners raised the rents by up to 43% and began the process of evicting dozens of families (social cleansing).

The next revelation, in the summer of 2015, was that the American vulture fund Blackstone had significant links with José María Aznar Botella (the son of the Mayor and her husband, the ex-Prime Minister of Spain) and Juan Hoyos Martínez de Irujo (the ex-Prime Minister's close childhood friend). So it's established that the major of Madrid oversaw the sale of public property to an American vulture fund with links to her own son and to her husband's childhood friend!

In April 2016 a preliminary investigation into the sell-off was released establishing a number facts. Here are some of the findings:

• The sale price significantly undervalued the properties, meaning the buyers benefited from a €32 million discount  on the actual value of the assets (about a 20% discount).

• The council acted unlawfully by not conducting any official valuation of the properties before allowing the buyer to set the sale price and then simply accepting it without consideration of whether it represented value for money.

• The sale was not put out to competitive tender, as was legally required.

• The housing units were sold as a block which violated the rights of the tenants who had the contractual right to purchase the properties for themselves after 7-10 years of occupancy.

It's becoming increasingly clear that the PP Mayor of Madrid oversaw an unlawful sale of public property, at a massive discount, in an uncompetitive manner (the client got to set the price) to a consortium with which her her own son and her husband's close friend had significant connections.

The current Podemos led city council have stated that they would try to reverse the unlawful sale if the irregularities in the preliminary report are confirmed. Meanwhile the party responsible for this corruption scandal (and countless others) are doing all they can to cling onto political power at the national level.

The appalling thing is that despite all of the corruption scandals, PP have a core demographic of mainly older tribalist voters who will under no circumstances vote for any other party. This is a very similar situation to the Tory party in England, who can always rely on backing from some 20% of likely voters, no matter how extreme their incompetent, or how many scandals the party is rocked by.

There is no doubt that the 2011-2015 right-wing government of Spain was the most corrupt of all since the fall of General Franco's fascist dictatorship in 1975. Aside from the aforementioned scandals there's also been the €449 million Gürtel embezzlement case, the secret Bárcenas slush fund for PP politicians,  the former PP economics minister Rodrigo Rato's involvement in the Bankia collapse and bailout, the imprisonment of Carlos Fabra for tax fraud, the Palma Arena corruption scandal, and on and on ... However even with all of these scandals being public knowledge, PP still somehow managed to secure more votes than any other party in the inconclusive December 2015 general election!

If no coalition government is agreed by the 2nd of May, the Spanish constitution dictates that there will need to be another election no later than the 26th of June. Podemos (who broke through at the last election to become the third largest party in Spain within just two years of their foundation) look likely to make more gains because of their consistent anti-corruption stance, but PP can't be ruled out of the equation because they have plenty of older tribalist voters to support them. The existence of the PP tribalist voter block means that if younger Spanish voters (who are much less likely to support PP, but also much less likely to vote) don't turn out in force because of "election fatigue", PP could end up creeping back into power despite their disgusting track record of corruption.

 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.