WEAR A GOOD SUIT, DO UP YOUR TIE, SING GOD SAVE THE QUEEN, AND AVOID THE TAX SYSTEM

These are the people for whom tax IS a private matter.

The British attitude.

We are waiting for the outcome of negotiations between the Icelandic prime minister, his coalition partners and the president. But it looks like he may be gone by the end of the day.

Update 7pm: Icelandic Prime Minister has resigned.

MAGGIE, MAGGIE, MAGGIE

'Angus' just posted this over on WoS (where Stuart unveils another series of out and out lies from Anas Sarwar, this time about the Joseph Rowantree Foundation's report into poverty. Labour and the No Campaign need to watch how many different people they slander. Ms Lamont may have protection if she lies in parliament, but Anas might find himself being sued for this kind of "misrepresentation").

I thought it was worth watching, just to remind ourselves of a couple of things:

Firstly, that this is the level of argument we can expect if we stay with the UK and in the decreasingly likely event that the UK elects Ed Miliband and his team to government. Curren was pathetic;

Secondly, that it looks to me that Labour isn't going to do anything much about the people at the poorer end of the scale. 

You can say that she argues that it's only the richer pensioners that will lose their heating allowance, but even Curren said that she believed that universal benefits should be universal. 

That's not because the poor pensioners need it the money; it's because once you means test, you make the benefit a handout to the poor. No one in power then has personal interest in it, except that they pay for it. It becomes as resented as benefits for the unemployed and the sick...and people who do need it, and are entitled to it, are made to feel like scroungers.

Once these changes are made, they will never be reversed. It's not "while we are in this terrible financial situation". It's forever. 

Click to enlarge

And what follows? If heating benefits are only for the poor, then why not other benefits? Most obviously the retirement pension itself. 

Already one of the most niggardly in Europe (as a percentage of average earnings), most well-off people don't desperately need it. So the next time the government needs to save money, why not cut the pension for the rich? Then the retirement pension becomes a hand out for the poor in which the rich have no stake and poor pensioners become scroungers.

Of course what Mrs Curren and Labour fail to consider in their quest for savings (£100 million in nothing in governmental terms) is the massive tax fraud that is allowed in the UK. 

Indeed the whole of the London economy appears to be based on the fact that tax fiddling here is like taking candy from a baby. It's hardly fashionable to be paying more tax than your servants, dear boy!

The figures show that even by HMRC's own figures there is a sum of £30 billion (approx Scottish government's running costs) of uncollected taxes annually.  According to the Tax Justice Network the figure is actually four times that size. 

We know that the Tories neither care that pensioners should be made to feel like paupers begging for their pension, nor do they wish to make any inroads into the excellent tax avoidance schemes that have been set up with government acquiescence over the years. But instead of making poorer pensioner feel like they are scroungers, why doesn't Labour (the party of the workers, remember) look to these tax evaders to lay their hands on the £100 million that Margaret needs for her houses. 

Incidentally, why does Labour let this woman anywhere near a tv or radio studio? She is a car crash every time she goes near a mic.

SILLY OLD NIGEL CAUGHT OUT OVER OFFSHORE FUNDS

Nigel Farage, it emerges, opened an offshore trust fund in the Isle of Man in a plan to avoid tax bill. The revelations come just the day after UKIP lost its deposit at the Aberdeen South by-election. I wonder what would have happened had they come a day earlier.

Farage has said that his financial advisers recommended the Trust  for inheritance purposes as a vehicle to build up a trust fund for his children or grandchildren.

He told the Daily Mirror:  “It was a mistake for three reasons. Firstly, I'm not rich enough to need one and I am never going to be.

“Secondly, frankly, the world has changed. Things that we thought were absolutely fair practice 10 years, 20 years ago, 30 years ago aren't any more.

"Thirdly, it was a mistake because it cost me money.”

However, whatever the dubious truth of that is, it sits badly with his criticism of offshore tax havens, including the Isle of Man, which he actually named in a speech in the European Parliament.

There are, apparently, only two good reasons to set up an Isle of Man trust.

One is secrecy, and the other is tax avoidance. Of course, as he says he had nothing to do with either of these,  it  begs the question that if he was setting up a trust for his grandchildren, why would he not do it in his own country?

Tax dodging costs the UK billions of pounds a year, far more than benefit fraud, which the government is trying to stamp out, killing off poor people in its trail.  Tax Research experts say the sum involved could be as much as £123 billion.

David Cameron backed a deal at the G8 summit this week to crack down on corporate tax evasion. He must be laughing like a drain that Farage has got himself into this mess.

TAKE THAT PRIME MINISTER

Further to the last post.... not not The Last Post, just the last post... and Danny Alexander's comments on Jimmy Carr, no less an exulted figure than the prime minister himself (everybody stand in hushed and awed respect) has weighed in with his 1/2p worth in the debate on moral repugnance.


It seems Camernob also feels a revulsion at the LEFT-WING entertainer's tax regime (a tax regime which, the moment he thought it looked like costing him ticket sales, or tv gigs, he appears to have abandoned with left-wing fervour, agonising over the error of his ways). 


However, when asked by ITN’s Tom Bradby how he felt about Gary Barlow, another entertainer, but this time a RIGHT-WING one, and whether Mr Barlow should now return the OBE he got for his part in organising the Queen's Jubilee concert, Camergit passed up the chance to comment on his fellow Tory, saying he "would not give a running commentary on different people’s tax affairs” as “that would not be right”.  

It shouldn't be any surprise to those of us who know and loathe the schoolboy prime minister's ability to U-turn on a U-turn, and simultaneously feel two different things about the same thing, that he could actually believe that it is wrong for him to comment on people's tax affairs, except in the case of people who make a living out of making a fool of him. So watch out Mr Hislop and Ms Toksvig, and a cast of thousands... 


Amazingly, or not, the idiot that plays the part of the prime minister had nothing to say about Philip Green, one of his advisors, who is doing nothing wrong by transferring the ownership of his company to his Monegasque wife, knowing that she will not be obliged to pay a €cent in tax, based as she is in her home country of Monaco. 


Nor was he prepared to talk about Ashcroft, Goldman-Sacks or Vodafone. Well of course he couldn't. It wouldn't be right for him to give a running commentary, blah, blah, blah.

He also strangely appears to be prepared to give succour to French tax dodgers, no matter how morally repugnant they are. Indeed he said he will roll out the red carpet for them, if they wish to come to England to escape the new and very popular French president's proposed 75% tax on the highest earners. (So is it now 'British jobs for British people, and morally repugnant French tax evaders'...?). 


The wine must have been flowing and he must have had rather too much of it... or maybe he really is just that stupid and naive about the way that so called allies behave.


One of the candidate's for the presiding officer's position in the new parliament, Claude Bartelon, implied that he thought that Mr C had imbibed a little, and pointed out that there were already many French people who lived in England, but that most had to have their children educated in France, and all their medical needs catered for in France, because the quality of all public service was so low in England. 


Oh well... as my granny would say...'whit's gaed tae gie's no ull tae tak', or as they might say in France :Ce qui on est content à donner, on ne doit pas être mécontent à recevoir.

FIT FOR WORK? LABOUR'S SCHEME LETS PEOPLE DIE WAITING FOR TRIBUNAL

Inspired by an excellent piece by John Souter, on Subrosa’s blog, about the Welfare Reforms introduced by the last government and pursued vigorously by this one, I was encouraged to develop the theme a little, both by comments on the story, and by this story I read relating to deaths of people found fit under the new scheme.

Let’s start of by making it clear that I know that people abuse the system; work and claim benefits, lie about circumstances. There will always be. Just as at the other end of the scale there are and always will be people who avoid paying millions in tax.

Of course one benefit cheat may fiddle a few thousands; a tax cheat, a few million a year.

I condemn both whilst accepting that they as inevitable as the sunrise.

But I caution that whatever the Daily Mail says, most "welfare" goes to people who do need it; people who would work if there was decent and suitable work, or people who desperately need help in their illnesses, or old age.

The new Welfare laws, as well as clamping down on the cheats, put these people’s lives at risk. Witness the stories told in After Atos. In one case the representative of a claimant went to Tribunal to say that his client would be unable to attend due to the unfortunate fact that he had died.

And the decision to cut pensioners’ benefits (Tory policy) is unspeakable. Private or company pensions are flat lining, bank interest which used to be a mainstay of elderly people, is practically zero (unless of course you have your money in the British Virgin Islands), domestic fuel prices are rising at twice the rate of inflation so far this year and more increases are predicted before winter, we already have a jaw-dropping annual death rate from cold related illness, and Osborne cuts £100 from old people’s winter fuel payment?

How would the cabinet feel if their own parents were shivering in the house, wrapped in blankets with one bar of a fire to keep them warm, checking the meter every half hour and spending most of the day in bed, eventually giving up trying to keep warm and just slowly slipping away, alone, cold and miserable?

Despite their best efforts to make us forget it by encouraging a wild orgy of celebration over this extended bank holiday (on credit cards), which is estimated to have cost the British economy in excess of £6 billion in lost productivity, and to have had a -0.25% effect on next quarter’s figures, they can’t hide that we are suffering with static wages, reduced in-work benefits, increased taxation (direct and indirect) and horrific price increases (4% inflation my butt!).

And in the meantime we are fighting two wars from which we are detached, and can afford weddings which they say make the country more cohesive. Well tell that to the “benefit cheat” who died before the tribunal could reverse the stopping of his benefits. He’ll not be feeling like he was part of one big happy Britain.

And remember, that could be you. Not today maybe, but next year, or in 5 years’ time. The stories in “After Atos” happened in Scotland. Ahead of Thursday’s elections I’d love to know if Iain Gray, Annabel Goldie and Tavish Scott support this very unScottish treatment of Scots perpetrated by their London counterparts.