If big business wanted to show its true colours ahead of the G8 it succeeded yesterday. As The Time (paywall) reports:
David Cameron is facing embarrassment at a gathering of G8 leaders after Britain's biggest oil and mining companies refused to disclose fully the payments they make to resource-rich governments.
At a Whitehall meeting last Thursday, Government officials presented the companies, including BP, Shell, BG Group, BHP Billiton, Anglo American and Rio Tinto, with a draft compact on transparency.
The Prime Minister wanted to unveil the agreement, which would have been signed jointly with non-governmental organisations campaigning on the issue, at the high-level pre-G8 summit he is hosting in London on Saturday. However, the businesses declined to go ahead with the compact and are expected instead to endorse a weaker commitment to be made by the Government on Saturday to improve transparency in general.
This deal was about improving transparency in developing countries, to assist them and beat corruption. And big business refused to cooperate.
If evidence was needed that in this context they think only of the 0.1%, now we have it.
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Really hate to draw attention to this but, of the quoted companies at the meeting, only BHP appear to never have spent any money on tax research establishments in the Oxford area.
@ Richard and Ivan, that is the problem. The same day Barney Jones (the Google whistleblower) was handing HMRC his treasure trove of evidence that suggests Google went beyond “avoidance” to “evasion” in their tax arrangements by submitting tax returns on the basis that sales made in the UK by Jones and others took place in Ireland at their 100 Parliament Street offices, Eric Schmidt – Google’s boss – was rubbing shoulders with David Cameron and Nick Clegg down the road at No 10! So which official in HMRC would dare start a criminal investigation into Google’s tax arrangements on the basis of Jones’s evidence in these circumstances when HMRC have the discretion (which the UK Uncut judicial review tells us is completely unconstrained) to treat it as a civil matter at best or sweep it under the carpet?
Perhaps worse still, Richard, it demonstrates (not that for many of us any more evidence was needed) that when we have weak politicians with a neo-liberal bent in government (which therefore covers all three main parties in the UK, plus UKIP), nothing will ever be done to challenge the power of the multi-national and the 1%.
Quite simply, government is simply a cypher. It is an exercise in PR – a confidence trick that encourages people to believe that politics – and thus democracy – “works”, when in reality government either doesn’t have or doesn’t want to use the power it has to exercise some form of control over big business and the feral rich. Like it or not, a world wide “corporate government” that was long ago predicted in science fiction, and because of that widely disparaged and dismissed, has come to pass.
Richard
And this is an example of what happens when you turn a publicly accountable, public service – in this case NHS trusts – into ‘big business’ (taken staight from the PAC session), The question relates to gagging payments:
Stewart Jackson asks for a note on the legal advice given by the Treasury to the Department of Health.
Q: Six trusts have refused to give information about judicial mediation payments. What sanctions can you apply?
Nicholson says it depends whether they are NHS trusts or foundation trusts.
It is “extraordinary” for trusts not to release this information, he says.
Jackson says it is “unsatisfactory in the extreme” that the committee has only been able to obtain this information through a Freedom of Information Act request.
So much for the promised oversight and accountability of this new breed of commercialised NHS. And this is before the “new” NHS is even fully up and running.