Tax Research UK

Pressure on Tories to name mystery MP who sabotaged anti-poverty bill | Politics | The Observer .

Sorry nothing else will do.

The Guardian reports:

Pressure is growing on David Cameron to identify the mystery Tory MP who deliberately scuppered a landmark anti-poverty bill that could have stopped “vulture” bankers profiteering from the developing world’s debt burdens.

Debt campaigners have reacted in fury and disbelief to the killing of the bill and Labour MP Sally Keeble, one of the bill’s backers, has accused the Conservatives of “duplicity” by pretending to back the legislation and then sabotaging it at the last minute.

That’s blood on Cameron’s hands - especially as it is thought that Tory whips did this.

In the circumstances to call them bastards is polite.

Richard Murphy Conservatives, Corruption

Vulture fund bill under threat from Tory backbencher | Business | guardian.co.uk .

The Tories are rightly known as the nasty party.

But I’m not really sure that’s an adequate description. Vicious would be better. Take this example:

Legislation to protect some of the world’s poorest countries from being sued by rapacious “vulture funds” in UK courts risks being scuppered tomorrow, after a Conservative backbencher tabled a last-minute amendment.

The private members’ bill, sponsored by Labour MP Andrew Gwynne, has won the support of both the government and the Conservative front bench. However, its supporters fear that with parliamentary time severely limited, the amendment, from Skipton MP Philip Davies, could prevent the bill reaching its third reading tomorrow, leaving it little chance of passing before a general election.

Vulture funds buy up the debts of poor countries, often at a fraction of their face value, and pursue them through the international courts, in many instances despite agreements by other creditors to give the country debt relief.

Davies’ amendment is aimed at stopping the bill applying to past judgments - an issue its sponsors believed they had resolved in parliamentary committee.

Campaigners are keen for the legislation to apply retrospectively, because it could help countries such as Liberia, which lost a $20m (£13m) case in London against two vulture funds late last year. Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleef has urged parliament to pass the new law.

A Tory goes out of his way to help corruption and abuse that exploits the poorest people on earth.

Where is David Cameron shouting No! Where are the whips telling him to back off? They’re not to be seen.

This is the true Tory at work - an enemy of the poor, a friend of the abuser.

Heaven help us if they get anywhere near power.

The corrupt, the powerful and the elites would prosper. For the rest - well, what do the Tories care?

Richard Murphy Conservatives, Corruption

Tories boycott Commons inquiry into Ashcroft peerage | Politics | The Guardian .

The Guardian reports:

A Westminster inquiry into the row over Lord Ashcroft’s peerage was thrown into turmoil when the Tory MPs on the committee walked out and said they were boycotting it permanently.

In what is understood to be an unprecedented move, Conservative members have withdrawn from the public administration select committee, some following discussions with the party whips.

The committee, regarded as one of the most influential in parliament, announced an inquiry into Ashcroft’s ennoblement in the aftermath of the peer’s revelation last week that he has non-dom status.

Sources close to the committee have confirmed the three Tory members have walked out, claiming the inquiry is pursuing a Labour vendetta. Some are under pressure from their leadership via the party whips, one senior source claimed.

It also emerged that Lord Ashcroft failed to meet a 9.30am deadline today to respond to an invitation to give evidence to the committee next Thursday. Gordon Prentice, a Labour committee member who has campaigned vociferously against the peer, made the announcement on his website. The committee has no powers to order members of the Lords to give evidence.

Unprecedented.

But then so is the situation.

No wonder the Tories are slipping in the polls.

Day by day they reveal themselves to be the same old nasty party.

Richard Murphy Conservatives

UK party-funding scrutiny doesn’t work | Prem Sikka | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk .

Strong analysis from Prem Sikka.

Well worth reading.

Richard Murphy Conservatives, Secrecy jurisdictions, Tax Havens

Tory madrasa preaches radical message to would-be MPs | Politics | The Guardian .

The Guardian reports:

Tory parliamentary candidates have undergone training by a rightwing group whose leadership has described the NHS as “the biggest waste of money in the UK”, claimed global warming is “a scam” and suggested that the waterboarding of prisoners can be justified.

At least 11 prospective Tory candidates, an estimated seven of whom have a reasonable chance of winning their seats, have been delegates or speakers at training conferences run by the Young Britons’ Foundation, which claims to have trained 2,500 Conservative party activists.

This is the reality of the libertarian right - openly hostile to humanity at large, embracing abuses of human rights, putting profits before else, contemptuous of the needs of the majority, denying facts when it suits them, seeking to destroy society as we know it, and wishing to make life for most considerably worse than it is now to advance their own enrichment.

That’s why I take them on here - and the bogus economics some of them use to support their arguments.

It’s why others need to as well.

These people are a threat to the vast majority who live in the UK. And we should say it out loud, time and again.

Richard Murphy Conservatives

Embarrassment of riches | Editorial | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk .

I don’t think I can or need to comment further on the problems of the Conservative party: the Guardian deals with the issue very well here.

But do remember this: it’s the opacity of offshore that created this problem.

And the question is, can democracy survive if offshore does?

Richard Murphy Conservatives, Secrecy jurisdictions, Tax Havens

Policy Exchange, the key Tory think tank, has a meeting at 12.30 today under the title “Offshore Financial Centres: Help or Hindrance?”. The timing is staggering. I thought they’d know the answer right now. But the wade on, none the less, saying:

Prominent US economist Professor James R. Hines Jr is the Richard A. Musgrave Collegiate Professor of Economics and the L. Hart Wright Collegiate Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. He recently published a research report commissioned by the Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners highlighting the importance of offshore financial centres, and their contribution to the investment, employment, and the efficient functioning of markets and government policies in other countries.

He has written that:

“Offshore financial centres play a key role in the international financial system, improving the availability of credit and encouraging competition in domestic banking systems. The result is a boost in investment in the major economies, which ultimately support job creation and growth.

The evidence indicates that offshore centres contribute to financial development and stability in neighbouring countries, encouraging investment, employment and other aspects of business development. They have salutary effects on tax competition, promote good government, and enhance economic growth elsewhere in the world.”

I’m attending. I hope to put at least three questions to Prof Hines. The first is:

Offshore financial centres, or secrecy jurisdictions as I prefer to call them, reduce opacity. Anyone who researches this issue knows, and the research of the Tax Justice Network has proven, that it is difficult or nigh on impossible to secure any information on an entity trading from a secrecy jurisdiction. Efficient markets apparently require free flow of information to ensure the efficient allocation of resources. In that case how can it be that creating opacity improves the efficient functioning of markets?

My second question might be:

Domestic banking is, in all major markets and for all practical purposes, closed to new market entrants. There is clear evidence that in very many ways it is oligopolistic and that monopoly pricing occurs, particularly with regard to consumers and small and medium size enterprises. If offshore financial centres enhance domestic banking profits isn’t that because that helps them disguise their monopolistic behaviour, undertaken at cost to society as a whole?

A third might be:

There is clear evidence that the most successful offshore financial centres / secrecy jurisdictions exist close to and under the protection of major states. The UK does, of course, play a major role in this activity. You argue that they contribute to financial development and stability in neighbouring countries, encouraging investment, employment and other aspects of business development but haven’t you actually got the whole causality of this relationship wrong? Isn’t it true that they actually exist to undermine the strong regulation, effective taxation systems and rule of law that create all those outcomes you observe and as such they do not promote the activities you observe but hinder them by encouraging free riding or the system, tax evasion, by undermining the rule of law, attacking the fundamental tenets of democratic government and the right of a government to deliver its electoral mandate without interference whilst diverting profit from productive to unproductive activity because it is artificially declared in tax havens and cannot therefore be remitted for productive use on the places in which it is really earned?

There are, of course, plenty of other possible questions. These will do for now.

I’m not expecting adequate answers.

Richard Murphy Conservatives, Economics, Secrecy jurisdictions, Tax Havens

The Mole: Ashcroft non-dom admission piles pressure on Tory party | News & Politics | News & Comment | The First Post.

Let’s be clear: Lord Ashcroft has broken no tax laws, I’m sure.

But this column explains rather well why this is a crisis for the Tories. People don’t like offshore. And they don’t like obfuscation.

That’s what this is about: politics and the ethics of the Tory leadership, but not tax.  As the First Post notes:

When the Best Quotes of the 2010 Election come to be compiled on May 7 or whenever, this will surely make the top three: “While I value my privacy, I do not want my affairs to distract from the general election campaign.”

The Ashcroft revelation is not going to impress that growing band of sceptics one little bit. And neither is Cameron’s response to media pressure following Ashcroft’s statement.

“I have always taken the view that someone’s tax status is a matter between them and the Revenue,” said Cameron. “I think that now we can get on with the election.”

Only a few weeks ago, this general election was the Tories’ to lose and Labour’s to win. Much more of this, and it’s going to be the other way round. Unbelievable.

Quite so.

And if you ever wanted an argument for tax compliance this is it. Tax compliance is seeking to pay the right amount of tax (but no more) in the right place at the right time where right means that the economic substance of the transactions undertaken coincides with the place and form in which they are reported for taxation purposes. I’m not convinced claiming domicile status is tax compliant by anyone. Personalities need not come into this.

Richard Murphy Conservatives, Domicile

BBC News - UK pound drops on hung parliament fears.

The BBC has reported:

The pound has tumbled to a 10-month low as fears grow the UK will have a hung parliament in the forthcoming election.

The currency fell 1.6% to drop below the $1.50 level against the dollar for the first time since May.

Yesterday Cameron said it was people’s patriotic duty to vote Conservative. Today his friends in the City played roulette by forcing down the pound because they think it will persuade people to vote Tory.

It’s a dangerous and unpatriotic game these Tories play. Vote for us or we’ll pull the house down. Almost self fulfilling, as it happens. And that patriotism at work, is it?

Richard Murphy Conservatives, Economics

Listening to Larry Elliott speaking. He’s pointing out the problem for the Tories. What do they do when their fundamental beliefs have failed  during this crisis.

Markets have failed. How can they say the market will solve the problem created by the markets? Their confusion he says is just that – they really do not know what they are about, have no agreement between themselves on what to do, and are as a result wholly unable to present a coherent front.

It’s a simple argument. At its core it has to be true.

As he puts it then – if the Tories win there will be a massive power struggle in their ranks, the neo-liberals will win and disaster will ensue

For the social democratic left this is an opportunity. Controlling the market is saleable in this environment. That’s what Labour has to do.

Richard Murphy Conservatives, Labour