I seem to have had a busy media weekend.
Quotes on Nadhim Zahawi's tax appeared in the Guardian and FT.
Discussion on Apple's tax affairs were to be found in the Sunday Times and the Retail Gazette.
The Morning Star (it's still going) picked up my tax-cutting thread.
In the first two cases, some time was spent on story development with the journalists involved.
Despite suggesting that I have moved on from tax justice issues it seems I am still in this space as far as some are concerned.
Notably, the supposed tax justice NGOs are not these days: that's the problem with staffing campaign organisations with people who don't know anything about the subject they're campaigning about.
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The media round. The Conservative Party leadership candidates are busy revealing the grubby, poionous, tawdry nature of the Party; and at the very same time the “media” are demonstrating that the Conservative Party itself does not receive the brutal treatment dished out to any other Party, or anyone else. In spite of the unseemly, continuining chaos of Government (it can’t make urgently required decisions, or even agree on policy) and the unseemly spat into which the leadership brawl is descending; on BBC Radio Scotland GMS, the Westminster correspendent David Porter; asked whether Johnson may attempt to influence the leadership outcome, effective reads out Conservative HQ’s PR sheet – that he will have no effect on the leadership campaign, or the Government save as a caretaker PM under the control of the Cabinet. All delivered as if reading authoriatative and unchallengeable Holy Writ.
Then you muse where we actuall are, and the unseemly brawl over the Conservative leadership that was inevitable for Britain, because Johnson would have been burnt toast over six months ago, if the Conservatives had been able to find a leader with any qualities and any weight at all, or actually believed thay had a single figure who wasn’t a dud; from the same hopeless, inadequate crew that is now fighting like ferrets in a sack over the leadership; as if they offer anything to the British people – other than unmitigated disaster.
The problem is that the only people the candidates will listen to for this process, are firstly their fellow Tory MPs, in order to get to the final 2, then the 200k odd Tory party members who decide which of the 2 wins.
Everyone else in the country (99.7% of us) will just not be considered or listened to at all, until the winner is in place.
when you don’t know anything about the subject -I saw a statement by Robert Peston in the Guardian
Liz Truss’s leadership manifesto in
@Telegraph
says she wants to put £400bn of the government’s Covid related debt on a “longer term footing”. It might have been practical at the time the money was borrowed. But if refinanced now, the interest rate would probably be horrendous
I may be wrong but my understanding is that the covid spending was almost all quantitative easing and the interest on that goes straight back to the Treasury.
The only debt from Covid is to our commercial banks
There is no other debt owing from it
And the rate paid is determined solely by the BoE
“Richard Murphy… told The Times he believed that Apple had claimed the full available tax relief from the scheme, without properly accounting for all the related costs.”
An interesting claim, that Apple are not doing their accounts properly. So how are Apple accounting for these costs and how do you think they should be? Do you actually know?
That is for them to say
Richard have you thought about setting up with others such as D Blanchflower and those on the progressive side of politics a think tank/Group which is featured in all these debates on the media as for the most part all we get are Neo Liberal head bangers who more or less think the same . A Group challenging the current orthodoxy is very much needed . As you know so much or our media is ill equipped to do it The general public very often does not here any challenge to this at all .
Many will say IPPR and NEF should very diver this
They don’t
But this would take time and a lot of money
We don’t have either