Hang on a moment – isn’t that a ‘have you stopped beating your wife question?’ question

Posted on January 21 2012

This is quite amusing. The Isle of Man has taken umbrage with Ed Miliband for his criticisms of the island's continuing use as a tax haven (which is indisputable to anyone willing to look at the evidence) and the local paper, Isle of Man Today, has taken up the issue. As they report:

On Monday, we asked the Labour Party central office whether Ed Miliband genuinely believes the Isle of Man is not as well regulated as the UK, and asked the party to provide figures showing the number of people/amount of money that has been put into the Isle of Man illegally and what evidence it had of the island's non-co-operation with UK authorities.

We also asked the party to confirm whether it was referring to the legal practice of tax avoidance or the illegal one of tax evasion.

iomtoday had not received a response as this story went live.

Well of course they haven't received a reply. That's because I know anything about what's happening (I don't). I know no one could reply - because the information is not available. The secrecy in the Isle of Man makes it very hard to estimate any such thing - which is why best estimates had to be used by the Labour party. They happened to be mine.

But to argue Labour's wrong to criticise the abuse of secrecy because data on those using that secrecy does not exist because of the existence of that secrecy is quite absurd. Surely even the Isle of Man can see that?

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2 Responses

  1. Andrew Dickie says:
    January 21 2012 at 10:35 am

    Would that Ed Milliband could be as forthright in the matter, and on the question, of the performance of the UK economy! Yesterday I heard his interview with Stewart White of Look East, on the occasion of Ed’s visit to East Anglia – somewhere the Labour Party is keen to re-establish a secure footing and presence after the 2010 meltdown (Norwich used to have 2 Labour MPs – Ian Gibson (first rate, an expert, but a rebel, so needlessly jettisoned in the expenses scandal) and Charles Clarke (impressive, personally engaging, but far too Blairite for my taste). Now we have Tory Chloe Smith in Ian’s place, and Lib-Dem Simon Wright in Charles Clarke’s place.

    Well, to the point: Stewart White asked Ed Milliband, amongst other questions, the obvious one that “wasn’t the previous Labour Government responsible for the current economic situation?”.

    Instead of robustly saying “Quite the opposite is true. In fact it was Labour, under Gordon Brown, that took decisive action to save the situation in 2008, and certainly prevented something far worse than the present situation from resulting. And if the present Government had continued with our policies, the 3% pa growth in late 2010/early 2011, resulting from actions taken by Labour would not have collapsed to expected growth of less than 1% now, allied to rising unemployment. Besides, 60% of our current indebtedness is due to profligate speculative activity by the banks, while Government indebtedness is only 10% of the total, as the last Government’s spending was well within managemable limits. If Labour did make a mistake it was in regulating the fiancial services industry too loosely, and in government we’d make sure a tougher version of Vickers’ reforms were brought in from day one. ” – instead of such a response, we got some anodyne answer, that quickly shuffled off into warm words about the “squeezed middle”.

    Until Labour has the courage to give Brown (and Darling) the credit for the actions they took, and the effectiveness of those actions, they are always going to fall into the Tory trap of “You left the mess, and any unpleasant actions to clear it up are both necessary, and your fault.”

    Waiting for the British electorate to latch on to this fact of Labour’s effectiveness and good management (for fact it is), a vain hope; the message needs to be shamelessly pumped on every occasion, just as the Con-Dems ran the “We’re all in this together” – a really shameless and untrue message – in the dead months after the General Election, while Labour faffed about producing a Leader in all of 4 and a half months. The words of the Roman poet Hrace spring to mind “Parturiunt montes; nascitur mus ridiculus.” Translation: “The mountains are in labour; all the produce a piddling mouse.”