Map o' the Day

Zooming in on the capital...

David Cameron, whose family surely wouldn't have any of their millions hidden away in tax-havens, will be addressing this any day now.

And yes, the actual map is interactive and searchable (sadly only by address), if you want to see properties down to the level of individual flats & parking-spaces, and which shell-companies based in which countries or territories, which as the Eye points out may or may not be tax-havens, own them.

Better a screenshot of this address perhaps, than some random flat owned improbably by a company in Liberia.

Though the Channel Islands, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Hong Kong, Seychelles, and the like sure do seem to own a remarkable amount of property in London, for what are surely, entirely normal legitimate reasons.

Maybe They Should Just Tow the Whole Island to the Caribbean

What with the United Kingdom turning into a tax-haven, foreigners buying up swathes of London as investment-property, and Cameron & Co. seemingly determined to turn Britain into a banana republic.

The Government is reviewing the Bribery Act after business leaders claimed it was making it difficult for British firms to export goods.

The Business Secretary, Sajid Javid, is inviting companies to comment on whether the tough anti-corruption measures are “a problem”.

Critics fear it is a way of weakening the law at a time when the Government should be clamping down on existing loopholes, and supporters of the Act say they are surprised by the move.

They warn that any attempt to water down the Act will seriously damage the UK’s credibility on corruption. They also claim it is undermining David Cameron’s tough personal anti-bribery message, which he reinforced during his visit to South-east Asia to drum up business for Britain.

Simply shameless.  Too difficult to do business without being able to more easily bribe people ?  In Britain ?  Oh, and what was that about a visit to South-east Asia ?

An investigation into alleged corruption worth hundreds of millions of pounds at Malaysia’s national investment company threatened to overshadow David Cameron’s arrival in Kuala Lumpur on 30 July.

Malaysia’s Prime Minister, Najib Razak, has been forced to deny allegations that he has personally benefited to the tune of $700m (£447.5m) from the investment fund that investigators have traced to what they allege are his own bank accounts.

...  

Mr Cameron, whose stop in Malaysia is part of a tour of South-east Asia, during which he hopes to open new markets for British business, said recently that “the wind of economic change is blowing east. “We still do more trade with Belgium than we do with Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam combined,” he said.

The Sarawak Report, an investigative website run by the sister-in-law of Gordon Brown, Clare Rewcastle Brown, which has reported on the allegations, called on Mr Cameron to cancel his visit.

“The British Prime Minister has made the issue of rooting out global corruption one of his key platforms as a world leader,” the website said.

Doesn't sound like it to me.  Well, maybe that's why Cameron was so eager to talk up the merits of doing business with countries with problems of corruption prior to the trip.  So glad British voters voted in the grown-ups in the last election.

That Tax-Haven Trolling in the Telegraph

Far be it from me to suggest the central paradox of leftism, but the recent election campaign seemed to highlight it better than ever. If you believe so passionately in the redistribution of wealth, shouldn’t you also believe in the creation of some wealth to redistribute? But Labour knows that would defeat its fundamental object of building a client state that would obediently vote for it. If you have policies that encourage wealth creation, you encourage job creation, and a rise in real earnings. Then you don’t need a massive welfare state, and you end up with a clientele too small to be politically effective. Simples, as the meerkat says.

...

Even the Tory party believes in redistribution of wealth – if it didn’t it would be unable to fund the NHS, state schools, care services and welfare provision that a civilised society requires....

Erm, there's honest ideological purity, and then there's just blatant lying.

...And you only raise the money to fund those services by having successful businesses that pay taxes and put millions of people in work.

It is time to become aggressive about this point, even though the election is won, because it is fundamental to the difference between conservatism and socialism; and it is not appreciated enough by a public for whom the narcotic spell of the welfare state has yet to be thoroughly broken. Again, it is simple. You don’t tax a loss. You only tax a profit. If you want to raise revenue, business has to be profitable. If you want to cut public spending, business has to be profitable too, because when it is making money it adds people to its payroll.

...

Mr Osborne should raise the 40 per cent tax threshold considerably this year, and every year of this parliament. Currently 4.6m people pay 40p in the pound, and the present threshold is £41,900. HM Revenue and Customs forecast that even if the threshold reached £50,000 by 2020 an additional 900,000 people would be paying it. This is a brake on aspiration and enterprise. It is also a brake on incentive and therefore on productivity, and low productivity is the most poisonous problem in our economy today. He should also abolish the 45p rate, which raises hardly any extra revenue but gives enormous amounts of work to accountants, and take as many low-paid people out of taxation as possible, to encourage their aspiration.

Some public spending is always necessary. But it is not a good in itself. The state has fundamental responsibilities, but providing employment for the masses is not one of them.

...

Indeed, I can’t see what is wrong with making the whole country a tax haven: for I have yet to visit a tax haven where the people are mired in poverty. If Mr Osborne makes that his aim for July 8, he won’t go far wrong.

This piece by Simon Heffer in The Telegraph is fairly blatant Tory Trolling, complete with all the expected requisite buzzwords.  But it does rather beg the question: What if the City, the part of the economy with which Heffer is presumably most enamoured, were itself, alone to become a separate country ?  It already acts virtually as a haven from tax, law, and decency, with the inconvenience of having to drag the long tails of regular England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland behind it.

The new tax-haven city-state would lose guaranteed access to the outside workforce, infrastructure, and so on, but might soon be attracting ever more criminal plutocratic elements away from places such as Switzerland and the far-east.  And the remaining UK, (with or without Scotland, and minus the all-destroying black-hole that is central London, why not, with ?) would have to get over the short-term tax-losses from the City, in so far as such taxes were being paid in the first place, but might learn again what it is to build a real economy -- One based upon the creation & sale of actual physical goods and real (legal) services, rather than the manipulation by corrupt bankers & traders of mere digits in a database.  And one dedicated to the employment, the welfare, and betterment of all its citizens, and not just the get-ahead-at-any-costs City-strivers with the club tie, the firm handshake, and the knife always at the ready.*

It might be a better future for everyone in question.


* Pink Floyd, obvs.  http://www.metrolyrics.com/dogs-lyrics-pink-floyd.html  Although not also finding a way to mention the 'Pigs' in the same sentence rather spoils the metaphor perhaps.