The UCATT trade union has published new work on the problem of false self employments, which I think is  a massive issue with regard to both tax lost and labour rights in the UK. As they say: False self-employment is used by many employers to evade taxes and engage workers without having to respect employment
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I felt like writing a piece on the problems with the UK’s unions this morning having spent the last two days in Brighton at their annual conference. But then I noted Seamus Milne had done it for me. As he’s said, the trouble with the UK’s unions is they’re not strong enough. I agree. Read him, here.

As the Guardian notes this morning of Vince Cable’s pretty weak announcement son a nascent industrial strategy: Joining up Britain’s future needs and opportunities with its present capabilities is a job that will probably pay little reward to the politicians who begin it. For that alone, Mr Cable deserves commendation. But he and the rest of our political class also
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I’m on the way to Brighton, one of my regular destinations these days. Today it is the TUC conference and I’m speaking twice; first at a Unite fringe this lunchtime (12.30) and then tomorrow at a PCS fringe, at 5.30. That will then be the conference season over for me: I did the LibDems earlier
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I mentioned an attack on the TUC’s tax avoidance spoof magazine ‘Kerching‘ by Mayfair lawyer Miles Dean yesterday. He followed up his attack with an article in Accountancy Age. Today I got the right to reply, as follows: “MILES DEAN thinks the Tax Union Congress’s (TUC) spoof celebrity magazine Kerching! that highlights tax avoidance is “inflammatory, ill-informed, misleading
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With tax avoidance by companies and the super-rich costing the public purse an estimated £25 billion a year, the TUC has today (Wednesday) published Kerching! - a spoof celebrity-gossip style magazine – to embarrass the government into acting against the celebrity tax dodgers who are only paying a fraction of the tax they should be. Kerching! A
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More from Kerching! And yes: in the interests of fair disclosure: I wrote it

Available here, now!

I’m proud to be on the advisory board of Class – the new think tank funded by the union movement. The Guardian did a good feature on it today. Take a read, here.