Madsen Pirie<\/a> of the Adam\u00a0Smith\u00a0Institute immediately jumped on her argument.<\/p>\n\"Who is to say what's a fair rate of tax?\" he demanded (or words to that effect).<\/p>\n
Fiona's response was spot on. \"Parliament\" she replied.<\/p>\n
Quite so. It's called\u00a0democracy\u00a0Madsen. And it sets the rules, and the law.<\/p>\n
I suspect Madsen found this quite shocking. He was there, of course, to defend Google's use of tax havens to undermine the contribution it makes to the UK economy, which in the process is an act of\u00a0contempt\u00a0for UK law and so UK democracy. But in doing so all he confirmed was that the \u00a0far-right of economics in the UK holds democracy in contempt. The\u00a0fact\u00a0that it never even occurred to him that parliament sets the rules on tax is sure indication of that. And the whole tax haven world is premised on the same idea, which is that these places can be used to launch an assault on the democracy of the UK and other countries.<\/p>\n
Parliament sets fair tax rates in the UK.<\/p>\n
Tax havens are used to undermine them. But don't for a\u00a0minute\u00a0doubt\u00a0that those\u00a0who\u00a0use them reveal their\u00a0contempt\u00a0for democracy \u00a0by doing so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Fiona McTaggart MP said in a debate on Google’s tax affairs on Channel 4 on Tuesday that she expected companies to pay their fair share
Read the full article…<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,97],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tax-havens","category-tax-justice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18390"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18390\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}