So now we know

[Suff]

Corbyn wants to be King.

What do I mean? He is elected to Her Majesties government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, not of her entire realm. So to state that the UK government can tell another independent government, a Crown dependency, that it can be governed by the UK, is, basically, taking on the role of the Queen.

They are a Crown dependency. Not a UK Government dependency. The distinction may be subtle but it is absolute. So unless Corbyn wants to try and abolish the Monarchy, he'd better wind his neck in.

[Workingman]

Good on Corbyn.

He no more wants to become King than I do, and the BOT and Crown Dependencies things are all straw man stuff.

What goes on in these places straddles legality, but whichever side of the line it falls it is all morally bankrupt. 11 million files contain the dodgy dealings of millions of, ahem, "companies" as well as the dodgy dealings of their owners and directors. My bet is that there will be minimal charges made and that investigations will take years to complete; by which time it will all be forgotten - and forgiven.

[Suff]

He no more wants to become King than I do, and the BOT and Crown Dependencies things are all straw man stuff.

Actually I was taking a tongue in cheek potshot at him. He's a newb at this. You don't make statements which are the jurisdiction of the crown. No matter how badly you dislike the activities.

In simple terms, if these activities were not where they currently are they would be somewhere else.

Think of it this way. If nobody was rich the next job for our next generation would depend on kickstarter and we all know how secure that is.

Of course people want to keep their affairs segregated and you may even find that a whole chunk of the dealings are totally legal. BUT as always with these things if you chuck legal stuff into illegality for political vote reasons; expect the legal stuff to wind up in a firm that deals with illegals.

There is going to be no end of hype about this and any kind of sanity and reason will go out of the window.

Remember this. Lowering the 50% tax bracket Increased tax funds to the government without taxing the masses more. Creating a 90% tax bracket in the 1970's forced capital flight. The country went, essentially, bankrupt and everyone lost.... AND personal taxation was 33%. Remember that? So, low taxes, good economy, stronger tax receipts less government debt. High taxes, bad economy, lower tax receipts, more government debt.

I know where I stand on this.

[Workingman]

Tax rates, rat shakes.

Companies and the very rich, and I am not talking about those on £150,000 or so, do very well out of the 40% rate. However, what they then do is use tax havens to reduce their tax liabilities to below those of a person on minimum wage.

It is fine for an individual to reduce their tax liabilities where they can, we all try to do it, but there have to be limits. It is a strange old world when these people can pay more than most of us earn, on schemes to reduce their taxes to below the levels of average earners.

A lot of these schemes might look to be quasi-legal, but deep down most of us recognise them as a type of fraud.

I suppose that most of you can see where I stand on this...

[Suff]

Yet in almost every other country in Europe and in the US, the ordinary citizens use tax accountants to reduce their taxes to the state. It works out that they get significantly more back than they would have paid to the government in the first place. This is considered "normal" and anyone not doing it is considered an "idiot", given that they earn more than a modest wage.

In those EU countries, they understand that the rich and the companies are going to do exactly what they are doing and because their numbers are bigger, the final sum will be bigger. Only the people at the bottom on the minimum rates of tax who pay the very least into the system don't use tax accountants.

Whilst there are special cases like Iceland where the people believe that the government and the businesses need to pay for what they did to the island (notably the PM has resigned today), that attitude is not prevalent across the middle classes of the EU.

I find this attitude to taxation is quite British Isles ish.

I've said this before and I'll say it again. When it cost £100 Million just to put a bid in to run the East Coast main line rail services, you cannot expect to take ever increasing sums of money out of companies and entrepreneurs. Otherwise the Government will find itself paying for that itself and when the government pays it's not £100m it's £200m or £300m as everyone gets their sticky mitt in the cookie jar.

Blair and Brown though it was a good thing to keep on ramping up corporate taxes and spending money. In the end what they did was reduce economic wealth generation and fill the gap by borrowing ever larger sums of money. Osborne, on the other hand, has reduced corporate taxation, grown the economic wealth generation and reduced borrowing.

I know exactly which regime I'll vote for. Every time.

If you read Yanis' document you see that the "socialist" attitude prevalent in the EU does not work on common sense. They allied themselves to a number. 4.5%. Not viable? Just borrow more money to make it viable! This is exactly the same attitude of Blair and Brown. Simply put the EU was Taxing Greece to fund it's own poor lending, then having to lend more money to allow Greece to pay the taxes.

Economies, today, grow by keeping funds in circulation. If too much of that money winds up in Government, it strangles economic growth.

I have never argued that there should not be a social safety net. But that should be funded by a strong and vital economy. Taxation to fund an ever growing safety net is never going to work and is going to drive ever more extreme avoidance which, eventually, becomes evasion.

[Workingman]

Sorry, Suff, but you are attempting to twist the position.

I know quite a few Yanks and the average John and Jane Doe, even those on above average incomes, do not employ tax accountants any more than we do. The IRS tells them what they have to pay and, grudgingly, most pay it. Most Europeans are, like us, on some sort of PAYE like system.

An East Coast mainline upgrade, HS2 and a third runway at Heathrow are nothing to do with individuals and companies avoiding tax liabilities.... except that if they pay less we, as a country, cannot afford these things.

These new revelations are not about what countries do with their tax receipts, but what their citizens and companies do to avoid paying them.

[Suff]

As I've been involved in quite a few discussions, around the turn of the year, around the tax accountant for permanent employees in many countries in the EU, I can say that even though they pay PAYE, they also pay a tax accountant to do their tax return. Ditto Americans.

I know we won't agree on this but I did want to get my point over. It's all very well shouting about tax returns because a company that provides aggressive avoidance and evasion services has been compromised. But the reality is that this government has done more to shut down avoidance and evasion that Blair ever did in his entire government.

Which is significant food for thought ,given the, supposed, political ethos of the two governments. Tax receipts are high and borrowing is falling. So what now? Tax them some more? Great, let's get to it.

[medsec222]

They have been doing their tax avoidance for a very long time. I remember reading many years ago that Lord Vestry (he owned Dewhursts amongst other companies) paid only £10 income tax in a year. That was in the 1960s. No wonder he was a wealthy man. I would like to jump on the band waggon, as I am still working part time from home as a transcriber for 8 pence a line! It is meticulous work and obviously very underpaid yet I paid a tax bill for £1,600 in January and there is another bill for over £500 due in July. How do they get away with it. It is so wrong.

[Suff]

£10 a year is not possible with avoidance unless you only live in the country for short periods. If you only live in the country for short periods you are not a resident and your tax is due somewhere else. If you choose to leave your home country and go somewhere else that has no taxation, because you don't like the taxation in your country, then that's a message in itself.

If, however, he was tax resident, then that is evasion as it's not possible to avoid that much tax..

[Workingman]

Suff, in general terms you are correct, but this from the Guardian backs up what Meds says.

And when the prime minister still refused to play ball, the family reacted first by going into tax exile in Argentina, then by setting up an elaborate avoidance scheme centred on a Paris trust which was the bane of Inland Revenue investigators for more than 60 years. "Trying to come to grips with the Vesteys over tax," one tax officer who attempted to take on the Vesteys is reputed to have said at the time, "is like trying to squeeze a rice pudding."

In 1980, a Sunday Times investigation revealed that in 1978, the Dewhurst chain paid £10 tax on a profit of more than £2.3m.