For all practical purposes this was Day 1 of the G8. Cameron had to deliver on the UK tax havens today or his chance on Monday and Tuesday of persuading anyone else to delver on tax transparency would be dead on arrival.
What happend? Well, it's hard to tell. The messages are mixed, at best. Reuters have given as good a summary as I think I have found - by which I mean it seeks to address fact and not rhetoric. According to that reprot the one thing that has been agreed is that all the UK's tax havens have agreed to join the OECD Multilateral Convention on Mutual Assistance in Tax Matters. That's progress - if they really sign. Remember, they did not today. But also remember there are only 50 countries covered by this now - and most are not in the developed world. So, this is a commitment, not a promise. It helps the UK - who will certainly exploit this to get more data and cooperation from these havens - but we have a long way to extend the benefit to developing countries, which was a stated objective.
Let's also be clear that the Mutual Assistance Convention is not an automatic information exchange system - and is fact far from it. So no claim can be for that for this reason.
What else happened? Well the UK has promised its new register on beneficial ownership but we already know this will not be on public record - which will allow the vast amont of fraud undertaken by UK limited companies to continue. It also looks like it will simply be an addition to existing reporting requirements of companies - and we know, as I reported earlier today, that these are almost never enforced as there is no resource made available to the relevant agencies to enforce almost any company law. So this move is a bit like asking criminals to leave their calling cards on a voluntary basis: indeed, I suspect it will be as effective as a law enforcement mechanism as that would be.
And, third, it's claimed that the tax havens will look at replicating this gesture but as Gary Gibbon reported for Channel 4 today - even the Turks & Caicos aren't taking this promise as anything more than a hollow gesture - which they want to be the last they make. And I fear that is all that has happened - a promise to look at making a plan has been made, which is a meaningless gesture.
In that case today has seen only the smallest of progress on tax havens, and there may well have been a massive ost opportunity for reform in the UK that has been sensed by the tax havens who have exploited Cameron's weakness to ensure any chance of real transparency on companies, let alone trusts, may have been lost and with it real automatic information exchange that could defeat crime may not happen.
So what did Cameron score for effort today? 1, maybe. And for achievement, maybe another one.
That's a very bad start that is likely to signal worse to come. My hopes are fading fast.
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Cameron is himself a creature of tax havens. He’s hardly likely to end the culture that spawned him, that gave him his opportunity in life. From a political POV he has to pretend to, of course, as your strenuous and worthy efforts successfully managed to get the subject into the Overton window, but he’s not going to actually do anything. If push comes to shove I doubt Miliband or Balls will either. Their bread’s buttered for them by the big corporations, not the electorate, so we shouldn’t expect anything from them either.
You managed to ask Gordon Brown yourself directly at a G20 meeting and got nothing so I wouldn’t hold out much hope!
Sometimes especially recently I get tired of the anti- Milliband or anti-Balls rhetoric common in the quality press let alone the Tory Tabloids; for goodness sake lets give them a chance. It’s this personification of politics the London media village love. But the Labour movement is more than one or two people; its thousands and thousands of others too. This is not the pre-crisis (2007/8) this is real post financial crisis and the voters out there suffering with frozen wages, public service cuts and morally exasperated with the growing UK inequality are not happy to see business as usual.
But Labour have had a chance. They were in government for 13 years and did nothing to get tough with secrecy jurisdictions or tax havens.
You may say that tax avoidance is a problem that has only recently been known about. I don’t accept that: the TUC’s report “The Missing Billions” (co-authored by Richard Murphy) was published in 2008. And it’s reasonable to think that government should be on top of a problem such as this; not merely responding to work done by civil society.
I think Labour is still essentially signed up to the neo-liberal agenda. They will do more than the Tories/LibDems to ameliorate the worst aspects of it but they won’t challenge the fundamentals. They are too worried about losing their middle income voters.
I agree with much you say in the last para
But equally Labour were on much of the anti-tax haven agenda at the end of their time in office – but only at the end – and are still ahead of the Tories
I am not a member of any political party and I am under no illusion about Labour – but given a choice would prefer their form of neoliberalism – much as I want something else altogether
On the first day of the year Cameron gave his 3 priorities for chairing the G8 as
– the US/EU free trade agreement
– tax promises
and
– the ‘feed the world’ focus.
The latter 2, addressing the most vocal and clear-cut civil society calls, are there to cover the first, the real focus, the trade deal.
They are therefore just a diversionary tactic and neither was were ever going to come to anything (though the food focus will no doubt be used for the GM push that is a major part of the trade deal).