I'm coming over a bit all Craig Revel Horwood this morning as a result of a report in the Guardian this morning that says:
Theresa May discussed the Paradise Papers with the leaders of 10 British overseas territories at their annual gathering in Downing Street on Tuesday, with the prime minister urging further action to combat tax avoidance.
A cross-party group of 12 MPs wrote to the prime minister last week requesting she set a deadline for tax haven jurisdictions under British control to publish registers of the real owners of shell companies.
May raised the issue of public registers at the meeting, a government source confirmed, and said work on tax avoidance could help enhance reputations internationally. However, the prime minister has so far refused to endorse the measure, which was championed by her predecessor, David Cameron.
There's just one word that can be said in response to that. Path-et-ic.
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The are rumours that the fact the EU are clamping down on tax evasion was one of the reasons for the Brexit Referendum
http://www.thejist.co.uk/politics/uk/eu-tax-evasion-regulation-reason-brexit-referendum/
Not sure how reliable “the jist” is
Gina Miller also has an interesting article re funding of the Brexit Referendum
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/28/brexit-layers-allegations-opaque-funding-brexiters
I have no idea how realistic this is
I do know the Crown Dependencies and Territories are very worried by leaving, and that’s not just Gibraltar. Being in protected them from EU attack. That’s now gone
Thanks Richard
strictly interesting!
🙂
I’m a bit concerned that Gina Miller carries on with the allegations of Russian interference in the US election and now Brexit. She claims that all 17 US intelligence agencies agree that Russia interfered yet not one of them appears to, as yet, have brought forward any hard evidence to that effect.
Maybe you’re living in a different planet to the one I am on?
I note that what you claim is not true according to US reports
Do you rely on Breitbart and Russia Today for your news by any chance?
Even the Mail is reporting on it now.
Actually Richard and Robin, Gordon is absolutely right about the falsehood of the 17 US intelligence agencies and their supposed agreement on Russian interference and hacking.
The former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and the former FBI director John Brennan both confirmd under oath this year that this ‘assessment’ was in fact made by just a few hand-picked analysts from just 3 or 4 agencies. The FBI have still not actually inspected the Clinton email server and have relied upon the judgement of a private company whose methods simply cannot be trusted.
The NYTimes has quietly backtracked on their 17 agency claim, adding a correction to their original article, but the falsehood persists as fact – seemingly in your US sources Richard.
This has been reported by the most excellent Robert Parry (who broke a lot of Regan’s Iran-Contra dealings) and is just about as far removed as you could get from the loons at Breitbart etc.
As he points out, if you hand pick the analysts you can predetermine the outcome of the assessment – something that the full 17 agency approach was supposed to mitigate against.
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/06/29/nyt-finally-retracts-russia-gate-canard/
There are all sorts of reasons why the US Government, the Dems, the Clintons and the US media might want to blow this out of proportion – and it looks like the hysteria is spreading this side of the pond now too (Theresa May used it as a timely distraction last week).
I’ve asked the BBC (Today, Amol Rajan & Nick Robinson) all to please add some context to their coverage of this alleged Russian interference – how does the ‘Russian linked’ FB and twitter spending compare to that linked to Greece, Germany, Israel, China, France, Senegal or anywhere else for that matter? They told me that this would be too much trouble.
A touch more scepticism on your behalf s required I think.
But it’s not zero, is it?
4 or 17 makes overall little difference, does it?
I’m sorry Richard, but 4 versus 17 makes a world of difference. The former approach is what gave us the Iraq war, the latter is the approach that was designed to stop such ‘mistakes’ happening again.
I’m not saying there was no Russian interference, but that the evidence so far presented is woefully short on substance or any kind of context.
This is hugely important. We’re heading towards a new Cold War (if we’re not in one already) and Google and FB are already using this to tweak their algorithms in a way that amounts to censorship on the basis of a few hundren thousand dollars of adverts somehow linked to the Kremlin.
And on that censorship, and if you’ve not already seen it, check out Steve Keen’s views on RT:
https://www.rt.com/op-edge/409261-soros-putin-conspiracy-keen/
I had to find that link with duckduckgo – google de-ranked the search on the third page.
Sorry – but I think you’re more than splitting hairs and I wonder why
Why? Because I’m amazed by how much traction this Russian meddling story has gained on the flimsiest of evidence and the prospect of a new cold war troubles me more than a little.
There’s a huge amount of trust being placed on the words of very dubious sources with all sorts of axes to grind (nobbling Trump, expanding funding, deflecting attention from rigged primaries etc etc).
But it looks like we’ll just have to disagree on this. a
So the National Security Adviser at the start of this year has been charged without reason?
Pull the other one
Of course Trump’s team of billionaires and their cronies are likely dirty, well used to lying and mostly getting away with it, and the special investigation was always going to find something on some or all of them.
But still that’s not evidence of collusion with the Russians. The indictment against Flynn doesn’t mention any kind of collusion, just a failure to report conversations. He’s actually got more to answer for about undisclosed payments from Turkey (via a Dutch front company). He did do some work for RT, but RT haggled hard to get his fee reduced which hardly speaks of trying to influence him.
In the meantime Mueller and the FBI are stil refusing to analyse the Clinton email servers — the analysis of which could put a major part of this furore to bed.
I don’t think we’re going to get much further with this here though. I don’t think I’m going to convince you that much of this is dangerous Macarthyite claptrap.
From Sean’s link to the Vince Cable ‘revelations’:
“It detailed numerous ways to cut the numbers of EU nationals coming to work in the UK, including a two-year residency restriction for unskilled workers and curbs on bringing family members over.”
I really don’t understand why one would want to restrict access to the family coming with the breadwinner. Surely it would make sense to have that whole income spent in our economy rather than have it sent ‘home’?
The hedge fund for which Mrs May’s husband works, is reported to be paying very little tax. I don’t agree with personal attacks but one wonders how far this influences her thinking.
There is another word I can think of that applies to May and her kind and that is: Pathological
In the sense of ‘being such to a degree that is extreme, excessive, or markedly abnormal’.
May and her hinterland are pathologically committed to maintaining libertarian concepts like tax havens, austerity and the further hollowing out of the state and democracy itself. They want a world where wealth validates individual power and a ‘new divine right to rule’ and not mass democracy.
True
a ‘new divine right to rule’ and not mass democracy.
That, of course, is another angle, even another way of describing, the re-feudalization of society that I have long argued was Thatcher’s unstated game-plan and objective, where the new Barons/1% have ALL the rights, and NONE of the duties and obligations (including the obligation to pay tax, from which they would be totally exempt), and the 99% new serfs, with ALL the obligations and NONE of the rights.
On the last point, there’s a reason why these Tories want us out of the European Convention on Human Rights, and to repeal the Human Rights Act, and to restrict the ordinary person’s access to judicial review – to do with the untrammelled and unrestricted power of the new Tory “nomenkatura” within the 1% – amounting to nothing other than the overturning of one of the cornerstones of a free society, namely “the rule of law”.
That, of course, USED to be a key component of Conservatism. But that was the “One Nation” Conservatism of my youth, which has been, alas, replaced by the Mafiosi brigandage of contemporary “Selfservatism”.
Frighteningly incompetent they may be, at anything and everything important to us, in the urgent (to them) task of asset-stripping the nation, they are proving worryingly effective.
Andrew Dickie says:
November 29 2017 at 12:30 pm
“That, of course, is another angle, even another way of describing, the re-feudalization of society that I have long argued was Thatcher’s unstated game-plan ..”
You buy the lionising of Mrs Thatcher, implicitly. This wasn’t the ‘Thatcher’ plan (unless you mean Dennis) she was an unwitting mouthpiece. She was NOT bright. She said all the right things (well many right things), but the policies were all turned upside down when they were enacted by the power brokers who showed their contempt for her in the way she was dismissed from office. By which time she was (understandably perhaps) barking mad. This is an inevitable consequence of believing everything you say is true, and being told so, even when it is patently false.
A classic case of the Emperor and his new clothes I think.
I disagree
Thatcher was bright and knew exactly why she was doing. It’s absurd to excuse her by saying otherwise, and wrong too
“It’s absurd to excuse her [Thatcher] by saying otherwise, and wrong too”
You might be right, Richard, but I think you underestimate the power of reinforced delusion.
She consistently stated the equivalent of ‘black is white’ and I don’t think anybody is capable of lying so consummately without believing the nonsense they are spouting. I don’t accept that as a signifier of ‘brightness’ and I don’t excuse her, nor the constituency that were, and still are, her admirers.
Is stupidity pathological?
May is stupid. She means well, but doesn’t know how to deliver. It’s a sate of ‘pathological’ naivety perhaps based on ignorance and a lack of ….vision?…perception? Certainly a lack of some of the aspects of what we might call humanity. Don’t forget this is a daughter of the manse. She will have taken her cues from a father who was an Anglican clergyman. Her relationship and trust in that doctrinal bullshit will have been very different to my own upbringing because father to daughter and father to son is a different category of relationship. Also my father was an unusual clergyman. He actually liked people. I never understood his relationship to God, but it wasn’t heritable and that didn’t seem to matter to him.
If May bought the essence of religion which is social control, then that would explain a great deal.
Had she not, she would not have ever joined the Conservative Party. The Conservative party is Pauline (paul-ian) not Christian as is the Church (in all its sectarian and schismatic manifestations). ‘Christian church’ is an oxymoron.
If that produces ‘pathology’ then I’m in agreement. The churches are, after all, the epitome of hierarchical organisations. You can’t get more hierarchical than having ‘God’ at the top.
Isn’t Toryism the political arm of “Callous Capitalism” delegated to scour the world to find any argument that will support it and then promote it to the public? Here, for example, is Theresa May last month:-
“the government has no money of its own”:-
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/oct/18/pmqs-verdict-corbyns-easy-win-on-the-economy-should-worry-tories
It takes stupidity in a staggering scale to say that
Or rather the kind of deeply ideological view which is able to ignore or dismiss any evidence that might conflict with the ideology
Makes me think that Mays comments about the ‘nasty party’ reflected just a concern with public perception, not a concern with the reality. The reality under May has got dramatically worse
A right wing US politician suggested that they wanted to ‘reduce the size of government until it was small enough to be drowned in a bath-tub’. That seems to be a pretty fair summary of those who are driving todays Tory party, and Brexit. Though I’m not convinced that it reflects the views of the majority of Tory MPs, they are too cowed to speak out.
Unfortunately, those in Corbyn’s inner circle give the impression of wanting to do something similar with the private sector. I don’t mean just bringing in say rail or energy into some form of public ownership, or tackling the banking system but much more.
Corbyn might make a lot more friends, including many in the business world if he was a lot clearer about this