Tax Research UK

I haven’t got time for a long review of 2009. Its pace has not slowed as the year draws to a close, and there is a great deal of work to get through. As a result some lists of highs and lows, hopes and aspirations will have to do.

Highs from the world at large for 2009 include:

1) Barack Obama becoming US president. Make no mistake: no progress would have been made on the tax haven issue if the Republicans had won;

2) The April G20. Oh, I know, it could have done so much more - but let’s celebrate what we got;

3) Gordon Brown and Nicholas Sarkozy endorsing country by country reporting. There is a long way to go - but again, let’s celebrate what we have got;

4) The UK government committing to government spending to keep us out of recession – as is essential;

5) The unfolding financial crises in the world’s secrecy jurisdictions, as foretold here, which foretells the demise of their so called ‘business model’. I stress, this has nothing to do with the places in question – and all to do with the finance industry that operates from them.

Lows from that same world at large are:

1) The OECD undermining the G20 process by setting absurdly low targets for tax havens to achieve on information, linked to the fundamentally useless Tax Information Exchange Agreements;

2) The failure of the UK and USA to really tackle banking reform;

3) The failure of the UK to adopt the Green New Deal;

4) The Copenhagen summit;

5) Everything George Osborne has said, all year – the man is a walking economic disaster that I hope might not happen.

There were also personal highs:

1) I’ve worked with some great people – from the TUC, Tax Justice Network, the Green New Deal group, the Task Force on Financial Integrity and Economic Development, Christian Aid, Action Aid, Compass, the World Bank, Global Witness, PCS, the BBC, Greenpeace and more besides. To them all a big thanks.

2) I guess being a blogger at the G20 was a high.

3) Getting a radical tax agenda into the public domain has also been a high – whether it be on tax havens, progressive taxation or now the Tobin Tax. All are real indications of change, and the agenda is really changing as a result.

4) Finishing a book on tax havens – to be published in January 2010 – was also a high. Thanks to my co-authors, Ronen Palan and Christian Chavagneux are appropriate.

5) In a small way the change in the VAT relationship between the UK and the Isle of Man was a high, because it showed one person and a blog can change things.

And personal lows? I’ve had a few, but too few to mention.

It was a good year. The tax justice agenda has made massive steps forward. Of course it is dismissed by its opponents more vociferously than ever – but precisely because they are so worried about our success. And right now I see no reason why that success cannot continue, not least because this is a worldwide agenda, not one for any country in isolation. And around the world the appetite for change, to collect tax that is rightfully due, and to tackle the cheats (and most especially those who assist them) is growing. That is good news for all democrats, all believers in the rule of law, all who believe in society and all who want a fair world in which each can play their part in a way the market will never allow without government correcting for its inherent weaknesses. That’s me. I go forward in hope, and expectation.

Richard Murphy Blogging

This award goes to Alex (who claims to be author of the Alex cartoon strips, but I very much doubt he is as I know those who do).

He wrote a comment on this blog on the Google tax story at 9.22pm on Christmas evening.

Normally I’d have deleted it as it was so obviously and absurdly wrong. But it was so sad I let it on.

Richard Murphy Blogging

Happy Christmas to all readers of this blog

And thanks for your interest, support and constructive disagreement in 2009

Richard Murphy Blogging

A few weeks ago the Guardian announced a competition. The winner had to offer the best explanation for the complicated structuring of Tony Blair’s financial affairs.

And this afternoon I gathered I won.

So that’s small kudos and a rather nice Steve Bell cartoon coming my way.

The winning entry was this blog. Which may, or may not of course be the correct reason for the structure used, but which does, whatever else it says, not suggest he’s done anything wrong in structuring things as he has.

Richard Murphy Blogging

I get people who tell me “if only you weren’t so awkward Richard we could deal with you”.

Others tell me “we don’t understand why you are so angry”.

John Christensen recently told me someone had said to him “we don’t understand your language”. Neither of us could work out what was hard to understand about “secrecy facilitates crime”.

The appeal is always that I or we moderate our view; that we take a less hostile line, offer more amenability.

I was interested therefore to read Robert McCrum in the Observer today. He notes, talking of art that:

Something has happened to Britain’s creative community and there’s no better way to understand this than to go back to a speech that Graham Greene, one of the most admired novelists of his day, gave in Germany in 1969 "on the virtue of disloyalty".

Responding to being awarded the distinguished Shakespeare prize, Greene used the occasion to extol the writers and artists for whom he had the most respect, those who by their calling were "troublers of the poor world’s peace".

The writer’s duty, said Greene, was to be "a piece of grit in the state machinery".

I make no claim to be an artist. But I have complete sympathy with McCrum’s conclusion:

the dreadful cultural cost of complicity is simply stated. If disloyalty encourages the writer to roam at will through human hearts and minds, and gives the novelist a fourth dimension of sympathy and intuition, then complicity just narrows the creative arteries. It propagates a me-too-ism in the community that works against originality and promotes a wannabe mentality that has nothing to do with Ezra Pound’s famous injunction to "make it new".

Such lowered standards extend to the media, too: journalists following other journalists, like sheep; reviewers schmoozed by PRs; the newspaper commentariat looking over its shoulder, as it did in the run-up to the Iraq war. The complicity of all artists makes them fearful of risk, vulnerable to propaganda, and the prisoners of conventional wisdom. Disloyalty liberates, complicity enslaves.

I don’t seek to be awkward. I am because, like George Orwell “I write it because there is some lie I want to expose.”

There are such lies.

I think neo-liberal economics is a lie. It does not seek to maximise well being. It seeks to shift resources from many to a few.

I think much right wing and libertarian philosophy is a lie seeking subjugation for a majority.

I think accountancy lies when it says it is based on ethics, when much of what it does abuses all ethical principles.

I think the way we present public company accounts is a lie that hides the truth from the user.

I think our pension system is a lie that lets the City benefit now at cost to our future.

I think many say we can live without limits now, and that is a lie: we live in a finite world.

I think those who promote tax avoidance lie: they seek to destroy the nature of society whilst free-loading on its back.

I think tax havens are a lie: they claim to be well regulated when we know they wilfully turn a blind eye to what they facilitate beyond their shores.

I could keep listing the lies that make me angry.

And those who do not agree with me ask me to be “nice” to them? To be less disagreeable on this blog? To be complicit in their story?

No thank you: complicity enslaves. We need grit in the system. I, for some reason, seem to be made of grit.

The job of those who have, for too long, been used to a lack of opposition, to complicit acceptance of their narrative is to accept that there are alternative narratives, that they are valid, and they need to be not just accommodated but adopted. If not we will sink under the conventional wisdom that brought us the credit crisis, global warming, the enslavement of billions in poverty, a lack of real democratic representation, a world too divided to be sustainable.

Don’t ask me to be nice and accept those things. I won’t.

I will hold discussion with anyone in private and unblogged if it helps progress ideas about which I have concern: that makes complete sense, and happens far more often than most readers of this blog will, inevitably, ever know.  That is, I think, an acceptable condition for some discussions. But to ask me to “be reasonable”, which means “see it my way” as a pre-condition for discussion is not possible when the problem being addressed is that the world is seeing and doing it “your way”.

As McCrum says, we have reached an awful state of complicity. For a great many – in the professions, business, the professions – even politics, there is an expectation that all will be complicit in the consensus of the current leadership. For those who have grown used to that it is time to get used to something unfamiliar: reasoned opposition. Progress is dependent upon its existence.

That’s why is it necessary to be awkward.

Richard Murphy Blogging, Ethics

I will be twittering during the PBR as other blogs are picking up my tweets during the broadcast

As soon as the speech is over I’ll be back on blogging

Richard Murphy Blogging

On being No.2.

Dennis Howlett got me into blogging.

Now he’s ranked #2 blogger analyst in the world.

Congratulations Dennis.

And he also remains spot on with regard to accounting ethics.

Richard Murphy Blogging, Dennis Howlett

The libertarian blogs raged over the weekend about my revised comments policy. Many said my traffic would suffer as a result of it, which i confess I thought a somewhat egocentric view.

Yesterday was the first week day with the new policy in operation. About half of all comments were rejected – an increase from about 10%.

And traffic was 20% up on the previous week and 15% above a normal Monday. There was no especial reason for this – my Comment is Free piece not driving traffic, for example.

I call that a success: it looks like people would really rather not have those comments on this site. And that contrary to the libertarian view, they are really not the epicentre of all that happens on the web. Much as the rest of us always thought.

Richard Murphy Blogging

The comments policy of this bog has been revised.

The addition is items 6 and 7 in the following:

For a comment to be published I must be satisfied that:

1. It is legal;

2. It is polite;

3. It includes an argument that adds value to readers;

4. It appears factually accurate;

5. That the commentator is genuine;

6. It is not promoting an opinion usually associated with the far right political fringes (for these purposes the UK Independence Party and beyond within the UK domestic environment);

7. It is not posted by a person I consider to be usually associated with the far right of the political spectrum.

There are three good reasons for this change in policy:

1. People tell me they are bored with the contributions of those from the far right and they spoil enjoyment of this blog and of 95% of all blogs they want to read. These comments do not, therefore, add value to this site;
2. I do not think it my job to provide these people with a platform;
3. I no longer have the time to rebut their comments, as I feel compelled to do if they are on this blog. I have too much more urgent and important work to do than engage with those of closed mind who wish to undermine society.

Richard Murphy Blogging

The Other TaxPayers’ Alliance | Happy birthday to us!.

Good work Clifford

Keep at them!

Richard Murphy Blogging, Tax Payers Alliance