Big Society Revenues & Customs
Dec 2010 17

Big Society Revenues & Customs47

Campaigners are planning to protest outside Topshop, Barclays and Vodafone branches tomorrow as part of the UK Uncut ‘Pay Day’ event. The group claims various organisations are underpaying tax by £25bn. Most alarmingly, they do not accuse the “tax thieves” of breaking any laws and accept that the disputed figures are simply derived from their opinions about what the law on tax ought to be. Vodafone, for example, is alleged to have been “let off” paying £6bn in taxes by UK Uncut’s reckoning. Vodafone denies this. HMRC have called the figure an “urban myth”. None of that has put off the people who style themselves as the “Big Society Revenues & Customs”, though, as the Public and Commercial Services Union’s Mark Serwotka explained:

“How can it be fair to close libraries, sack public sector workers and hike up student fees while there are people who are exploiting loop holes and not paying their way in this country. It’s about the type of morals that I would like to see in this country, and it’s about trying to solve our financial difficulties by concentrating on taxing those who can most afford it.”

The ideas behind the campaign are both morally disturbing and practically dangerous. They are morally disturbing because we rely on the principle that individuals and companies are forced to pay the tax they are legally required to and no more. We plan our lives based on the rules of the game and those rules determine tax liabilities. I don’t want to live in a society where government officials can ignore the law and decide for themselves that you cannot take advantage of something the law says you can. I don’t want the sort of society where it is left to vigilantes to decide on the guilt and punishment of a defendant, nor one where it is left to political activists to determine someone’s tax bill.

But it’s not just the moral issue. UK Uncut need to wake up to the reality of the situation we are in. Hiking up already high taxes is not the answer to our giant deficit. Before tomorrow’s events, protesters should read the Adam Smith Institute think piece on why tax and spend makes us all poorer, the TaxPayers’ Alliance report “Can tax increases solve the United Kingdom’s public finance crisis?” and then Matthew Sinclair’s book “How to cut public spending and still win an election”.

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  • http://www.taxpayersalliance.org Clifford Singer

    This is typical of the TPA – you just don’t like success do you? There you were expecting Tea Party protests against taxes; instead we got them against tax dodgers. And despite your £1m a year income and supposed 60,000 supporter (ie a big mailing list), the most you can muster on the streets is seven people to complain about speed cameras.

  • Nick Brompton

    What a ridiculous little group you are. You should be championing this action as if every company paid proper corporation tax in the uk & all the rich paid income tax instead of sending profits & dividends offshore then we could all end up paying less which is your stated aim. Instead you show your true colours in wanting the rich to be able to continue avoiding tax as they are the ones that fund you.

  • Lee

    Whatever happened to “We’re all in this together”? How much unpaid tax is flooding out of the country? We need to be told.

  • Cutthericnotthepo

    It is hypocrisy for the TPA to attack public expenditure while defending private sector greed. Tax avoidance is endemic, cynical and boasted about by people and organisations who depend on doctors, teachers and other public servants to provide the services they happily undermine by exploiting tax dodges. This is immoral and you just don’t get it do you.

    • Meerkat

      Doctors on £110K+, Council CEO’s on £150K+, the appalling Sharon Shoesmith on similar and claiming the buck should not stop with her. NONE of them available form Friday afternoon until Monday Morning. The wife of a close friend dying in pain told ‘the pain management team doesn’t do weekends’. As someone who HAS to work 6+ days a week in my own business I resent the overweeining sense of entitlement of the Public Sector. In business, if we want to spen, we FIRST have to earn. If turnover/profitability fall, we have LESS revenue to spend (pay ourselves). We can’t whinge our way onto the front page of the Guardian; we have to find new ways of doing business AND quickly cut our coats to suit our cloth. The private sector continues to go through hell while the public sector award themselves pay-rise, keep their gold-plated pensions, and RETIRE early. I’ll probably die at my own ‘coal-face’ struggling to pay tax to keep these overentitled whingers in the stle to which they’re accustomed!

      • James

        As most of the public sector are on low pay, work long hours, work extra unpaid hours, get treated as scum by those they are trying to help and by the media and politicians, I think perhaps you should reconsider your diatribe as one that may make you feel better but has scant basis in reality. Exceptional cases make news but they don’t reflect the true picture.

        • Orac54aq

          A friend of mine works at the Home Office. He went there from the same company that I work for. I went for a drink with him after he’d been there a few months, and what he told me was incredible. He said a THIRD of the people there DO NOTHING. They’re just waiting for their pension.

          My brother-in-law just got a job as a surveyor within the NHS, looking after building maintenance. In his first week, he asked one of the managers for a meeting to discuss some things, and got told he was “far too busy”. This happened twice more, until eventually my brother-in-law kept surreptitiously peering into this guy’s office all day. In the middle of the afternoon, on a day when he’d been told the guy was “far too busy” to see my brother in law, he was asleep with his head on the desk.

          When you paint a picture of the poor-downtrodden, low paid public worker, remember that it isn’t those guys that the taxpayers have a problem with.

        • Orac54aq

          A friend of mine works at the Home Office. He went there from the same company that I work for. I went for a drink with him after he’d been there a few months, and what he told me was incredible. He said a THIRD of the people there DO NOTHING. They’re just waiting for their pension.

          My brother-in-law just got a job as a surveyor within the NHS, looking after building maintenance. In his first week, he asked one of the managers for a meeting to discuss some things, and got told he was “far too busy”. This happened twice more, until eventually my brother-in-law kept surreptitiously peering into this guy’s office all day. In the middle of the afternoon, on a day when he’d been told the guy was “far too busy” to see my brother in law, he was asleep with his head on the desk.

          When you paint a picture of the poor-downtrodden, low paid public worker, remember that it isn’t those guys that the taxpayers have a problem with.

      • George

        Bankers on Millions when they nearly broke the country, Bosses paying themselves fortunes through shell companies, High Street chains claiming all their profits comes from a small office abroad so they can avoid tax.

        The big fish have become sharks and should be hunted.

        These are ones causing the problem. The crash was not caused by an international conspiracy of teaching assistants and dinner ladies.

        • LabourMadeUsBroke

          The crash was caused by banks, but already earlier than planned, it has be shown that when RBS is sold the government will make a profit. A profit which can be passed onto us. It was confirmed ahead of time in a clear example that the private sector as a structure is more productive than the public sector.

          The huge debt has everything to do with Labour’s irresponsible spending and promising of money that wasn’t there and we will have to pay back and the money they spent never trickled down to the positions you mention because of the public sector sponge. The problem isn’t the crash, the problem is that every person in the country, including teaching assistants and dinner ladies, are in tens of thousands of pounds of debt.

          • Orac54aq

            Bailing out the banks is a drop in the ocean of the total indebtedness of this country. Labour inflated public expenditure during a boom, when tax revenue was high. They did this to such a huge extent that expenditure even outstripped the booming tax revenues. They masked it by lying about having “abolished boom and bust”, making people think it wouldn’t have consequences. They made up a phoney-baloney “golden rule” about borrowing, justifying 8 straight years of compounding budget deficit. That was exposed as rubbish when they did the King Canute act and said the “economic cycle” was different from what the rest of the world thought. And then we were left staring at ruin.

            Banks aren’t what’s caused this. Socialism has caused this.

          • Imnotinyouralliance

            “Banks aren’t what’s caused this. Socialism has caused this.”

            You show an astonishing level of stupidity, even by TPA standards. Do you even know what socialism is? It isn’t Labour, incidentally.

          • Orac54aq

            Typical left winger. Lose the argument, start the insults. Yes, I do know what socialism is. I know all about Clause 4 and the notion that the state should be the owner of the means of production.

            It is socialist dogma that the ‘rich’ must be ‘progressively’ (an interesting word, whose meaning has been deliberately distorted in debate) to fund universal provision. I just don’t agree that the “redistribution of wealth” from those who have earned it to those (and by this I don’t mean the super-rich, who will always be able to avoid taxation anyway) who haven’t.

            Now, have you ever heard of Adam Smith?

          • An Uncivil Servant

            Adam Smith wrote “It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.”
            ( Book V of The Wealth of Nations)

            So progressive taxation isn’t just a socialist dogma.

          • Orac54aq

            He did indeed. He also said, in effect, that no nation could tax itself to prosperity. But taking your line for a minute, what should that proportion be, if the “standard” band is 20%? If Adam Smith were here today, he’d laugh his head off to find that the next band was 40%, and the band after 50%.

          • Tony

            Orac54aq

            Blimey! your drunk mate told you this and that and your brother in law told you this and that…..blimey a fat bloke in a pub told me this and that….blah, blah, blah, whats your point?

      • Cuttherichnotthepoor

        Spectacular ignorance of the reality of the vast majority of public sector worker’s working lives is actively encouraged by the press and highly selective ‘research’ by the TPA.

        It is the shameless abuse of remuneration by fat cats in the private sector which fuels the wage inflation at the top of the public sector. Even then there is no comparison in the public sector with the hyper inflation of executive pay in poorly administered companies and banks. Small business people are victims of the failure of regulation and the frankly immoral behaviour of the rich, and so are workers in the public sector. Time to make common cause against the kleptocracy and their coalition apologists.

        • Orac54aq

          Great. Let’s start with the arrest of Gordon Brown and Ed Balls, the two greatest liars and thieves in this country since the Great Train Robbers got away.

  • Nonofyourbusiness

    Dipshit tory tossers. Thick uber evil morons. pissants

  • Fred

    Tory stooges.

  • punkscience

    Hahaaaaa! I love seeing a genuine grassroots reaction to corporate propaganda.

    Suck it, you sociopathic scum.

  • Ellalawlessjones

    And I thought the TPA was there to represent us taxpayers. They cheat us out of what’s rightfully ours so we have to pay more tax or accept cuts to our public services. TPA represents big business not tax payers: right-wing pressure group, how dare you claim to represent us!

  • Larry

    It is a shame that as an organisation you appear to stand up for those who earn the most, and the largest corporations. You do not appear to be interested in what the average taxpayer is interested in, or is faced with. Why should avoidance (which is entirely legal) be largely only open to the biggest corporations and the richest individuals? As an employee, all my income is taxable, I cannot claim that some of my earnings actually belong to my wife who is a non resident, and I cannot avoid. Why should all my income be taxable (which I am happy with) while different rules apply to the generally richer and / or larger few?

    • Curious

      You can avoid some tax in a scheme called the “personal allowance” which allows individuals to dodge the first £1500 of tax. Why not take advantage of it and then you too will be able to claim you’re avoiding tax and that not all your income is taxable…

      • Larry

        Firstly, all my income is taxable as it is all employment income in the form of wages. The fact that the first £6475 of my income in 2010 – 2011 is not taxed because of the personal allowance doesn’t change the fact that all wages are taxable income. Suggesting that applying rules that the government has introduced and using them in the way the government intended and comparing that to wholly artificial avoidance situations is very strange.
        I can’t ask my employer to pay part of my wages as a dividend payable to my wife who is non resident can I? I know small businesses based in the UK who are really struggling. They can’t say hey you know what, we are now owned by a Swiss holding company, and by the way the Swiss holding company now owns all the rights to our brand and we’ll be paying them tax deductible royalties, and diverting profits to Switzerland to pay lower corporation taxes (but almost all my assets, sales and employees will still be in the UK). That is my point.

  • fulufel

    “I don’t want the sort of society where it is left to vigilantes to decide on the guilt and punishment of a defendant, nor one where it is left to political activists to determine someone’s tax bill.”

    Then elect a government who’ll manage taxation fairly… not this sorry shower.

  • Ian

    Why dont you just change your name to the Tax Avoidance Alliance?
    Why doesnt the Adam Smith Institute enter the modern world and stop living in the past?

  • Bluetheatre

    The Taxpayers Speak. And Ashcroft feeds you this drivel. Wake up.

  • DK

    It’s worth noting that Vodafone massively overpaid for a 3G licence, as did all the other mobile phone companies. Also that dividends are paid out of profits that have been taxed.
    Income tax can also be argued to be paid by companies as if they did not provide the employment, there would be no income to pay tax on.

  • George

    “But it’s not just the moral issue. UK Uncut need to wake up to the reality of the situation we are in. Hiking up already high taxes is not the answer to our giant deficit. ”

    At time of austerity it is precisely a moral issue as to whether necessary servcies are cut or whether the filthy rich pay theior share.

    I think it’s the TPA that needs to wake up. You represent tax avoiders and corporate interests, the very people who cause everyone else’s taxes to be higher than they need to be because they pay politicians to leave lopholes in the law.

    It’s not about ‘hiking up taxes’; it’s about everyone paying their fare share.

    Look if you’re not with this get out of the way as at the moment YOU are the ones making the problem worse.

    Useless tory tossers.

  • George

    Oh and get an edit function so I can fix my typos. It’s hard typing when your hands are freezing.

  • http://www.taxpayersalliance.org Clifford Singer

    Surprised that you’ve started deleting comments (and not just the sweary ones) – including mine from earlier. Is your failure to get people on the streets protesting against tax – in the way that UK Uncut has managed to get people protesting against tax dodging – such a sensitive topic?

  • Scotney Alex

    What an spectacular exampleof point-missing. It’s not about raising taxes at all, it’s about ensuring that companies who make billions in this country, and are liable to be taxed in this country, pay their tax in this country. If they did, the needs for cuts would be reduced, and hey presto, maybe we would all pay less tax!

    • Orac54aq

      BUT IT DOESN’T WORK LIKE THAT. Companies aren’t people. If they don’t like the tax regime here, they move somewhere else, and take whatever tax they would have paid and pay it to the lowest bidder. Socialists don’t accept that, but there is nothing that can be done about it – end of story. What actually happens is that socialists turn their tax hunger on the middle classes, who can’t just move abroad.

      • Mike (UK)

        I agree with Orac54 – I have now set up a holding company in Guernsey and my company profits now end up there. Instead of paying corporation tax at 28% (changed to 24% in budget) I now pay at 2%. This retention of profit doesn’t give me any advantage personally as I pay my personal tax at UK rates, but allows my company to retain a greater proportion of its profit to invest back into what we do in this country, and it also allows us to reduce our bank liabilities too by strengthening our cash reserves.

  • Orac54aq

    I don’t want to live in a society where it can be described as “fair” that a public sector worker can get a guaranteed pension aged 60, and my pension fund is wrecked to pay for it.

    Labour spent 13 years robbing the future of every person (except public sector workers) in the UK, and now some politicians are bravely trying to do something about it, the whingeing left wingers come out of the woodwork, ignoring democracy, and start with some ludicrous red herring about “Big business”. The banks paid BILLIONS in taxes during the good times, and it went straight into the maw of the socialist monster.

    8 consecutive imbalanced budgets, too. If we’re really interested in “fairness”, we should set up a Guilt Fund, where everyone who voted Labour in 2001 and 2005 can contribute 50% of their earnings until we’re out of this mess. And no, I don’t work for a bank, or have any interest in one, other than having an account at HSBC.

    • Cuttherichnotthepoor

      orac -your pension problems are caused by your employer’s stinginess. Public sector pensions are targeted because many employers don’t want to pay decent pensions, and will use any excuse to justify this. Employers lied about the effect of the minumum wage for the same reason -because they don’t want to pay decent wages either. Unions are demonised because employers don’t want their staff to have any protection from their desire to pay as little as they can get away with. Tax payers have to subsidise poor wages through the benefit system to compensate for this. Banks have become casinos, wth one big difference, if they bet right they win; if they bet wrong we pay. if you want to see the ultimate state aspired to by the coalition look to the USA where tax cuts for the rich are protected by corrupt politicians in hock to big business and soup kitches and shanty towns for the defenceless poor are growing in number by the day

      • Orac54aq

        Actually, I work for a small company, and have for nearly 20 years. They aren’t going to pay the pensions of the 40-odd people that work there. I know for a fact that they can’t afford to. They contribute to my private pension (more than any public sector worker contributes to his, as a %). And Gordon Brown wrecked my private pension, to raise some taxes to employ public sector workers, and pay their pensions. Fair? Yeah, right.

        • Tony

          Orac54q

          Actually i work for a small company – you are a TPA website moderator… yeah, right……. If I discuss matters on these boards I would rather discuss issues with ” Joe Public “, who i might disagree with and and I am sure they may disagree with me. Why do you have to lie and dilute any pretense of a meaningful arguement

  • LabourMadeUsBroke

    The point is that targeting businesses, growth creating, employment creating businesses who are being relied upon to drag us out of the massive debt racked up by the last government, is wrong. It is also counterproductive and a misguided way to apportion blame.

    The deficit and even larger national debt was not created by a banker or a CEO, it was a much more evil conspiracy theory, one that takes money from the poorest people in the country and gives it to skyrocketing numbers of bureaucrats both here and in Europe who have no obligation to produce anything of value in return.

    These protests don’t achieve anything. Sir Phil will be just fine, he doesn’t need the money, but retail staff many on minimum wage get extra pay based on sales and this should have been the day of the year they could end up with some spare money in their pocket. Action like this to highlight an opinion that the tax system can be avoided by the rich and hits the poor the hardest, will not affect the rich and will hit the poor the hardest.

    A thoughtless own goal. It shows the protester’s level of understanding and reminds us why they haven’t managed to get their head around what caused the national debt.

  • AdrianS

    Well it does seem that its up to the goverment to deal with tax avoidance schemes. new avoidance schemes have to be notified to HMRC in advance. Some civil servants will get there pensions at 60— but this was always the agreement. Challenge it and millions will go into the hands of Lawyers. many civil servants are on low incomes below the average wage in fact. I dont dispute there are some “fat cats however”
    The minimum wage should be increased to draw people off benefit at the same time we need to significantly reduce immigration. What is happening in many areas is that low wage immigrant labour is undercutting lower paid UK workers, so they go onto benefit ( there isnt much else for them to do). So in effect we bring in from outside low paid workers to keep some companies profits high and some consumers costs high, BUT the flip side of this is we end up paying through the tax system for the people who its is uneconomic for them to work. Also remember foreign labour may not be accounting properly for National Insurance Contributions and other taxes, which properly employed UK workers will be paying. We do need to make incentives for people to work and I have no objection to the long term unemployed being challenged on this. At the same time we need to insure that we do tax evenly higher rate tax payers and coporations

  • Steve Collins

    “I don’t want the sort of society where it is left to vigilantes to decide on the guilt and punishment of a defendant, nor one where it is left to political activists to determine someone’s tax bill.”

    Isn’t this exactly what the ‘grassroots’ TPA does?

  • http://www.greenerblog.blogspot.com Richard Lawson

    You have a superficial view of this affair. There is much more going on. HMRC are complicit in taking an easy line on wealthy corporations, but a hard line on private individuals. This is clearly unfair, and fairness is the value Coalition trumpets. Therefore the Coalition is behaving not just unfairly, but hypocritically.

    Also, you assert “Hiking up already high taxes is not the answer to our giant deficit.” Relative to European countries, our taxes are not high. And in fact, if taxes can be obtained sustainably, from those who can afford to pay them then taxes are an answer to the deficit.

    • Orac54aq

      If what you’re saying is that I have a personal view, then Yes, I do. HMRC does nothing beyond what it is told to do – as policy – by the Chancellor of the time. In regard to businesses, the Coalition isn’t doing anything that Blair didn’t do – they’re just doing it at a much more difficult time.

      The more you tax businesses, the more jobs you destroy. It’s easy and ruinous to soak those jobs up by “creating” them in the public sector. But the private sector will still have to fund them. You can hide that funding by borrowing, but look where that ends up.

  • John

    It’s an interesting argument, TPA. You’re saying that if something is legal, we shouldn’t protest about it. Yet virtually ALL of the abuses which this website exposes are legal – they’re just morally wrong!

    I think this issue cuts to the heart of the TPA’s claim to be non-partisan. Any sane person can see that there are abuses out there – not just big business, but also self-employed people – resulting in an unfair distribution of the tax burden.

  • Tony

    Orac54aq

    Less of the insults please.. no idea what leftfootforward is. I did not try to suppress what you have to say, I was trying to define it. For your consideration – i firmly agree with Boris Johnson’s appeal to reduce the 50 per cent higher tax rate… is that on left footforward? I also agree with Uk Uncut that various organisations are underpaying tax. Strangely enough I work and pay tax (more than i would like because of Gordon Browns ineptitude and Big Busineses getting away with it?). I also wasn’t a l wing student or a strawman……………..