Michael Foot was commissioned to prepare a report on the British tax havens last November. There was never any doubt he was the wrong man for the job, and so it is proving to be.
The interim report of his commission is out today, and is available here.
I’ve been in recording studios much of today — see Newsnight tonight if you want the evidence — but John Christensen has provided first reactions for TJN here.
I’ve now scanned the report and will comment in more depth soon. Suffice to say Foot seems to have missed the target from a distance of three feet. So far it’s not an impressive piece of work. And I bet the tax havens will say much the same.
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We in the Land Value Taxation Campaign made numerous submissions in the early days of New Labour. They were included in appendices to the Blue Books but we might as well not have bothered as the conclusions were clearly what the government wanted to hear. Our last effort was for the Lyons Commission on Local Government Finance, where the report said what those commissioning it wanted to hear and then it will be ignored anyway.
That’s how things are done, with a bit of muddling through when the going gets really sticky. No principles.