Liz Truss had an Amazon Prime subscription in her expenses. You paid for it. She hosted a small work lunch in January and spent 3k. You paid for it. She chose a private jet to go to Australia costing half a million. You paid for it.
Perhaps someone should tell her to sit quietly and watch her telly.
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The Bank of England: why is it raising interest rates to fight inflation that won’t exist by the time the changes begin to take effect?
Interesting thread from Richard Murphy, explaining why you have less disposable cash – and questioning why the markets are so shocked about it:
Amazon forecast yesterday that it will make sales up to $15 billion dollars less than previously anticipated in the last quarter of this year. That is a due turn of maybe 10% on expectation. Markets were shocked. They shouldn’t be. Central bankers planned this. A thread….
Coordinated interest rate rises of the type we are now seeing central bankers deliver have only one goal. That is to drive down consumer spending whilst supposedly increasing the return to financial capital in the world.
That’s because right now we are still measuring prices after Putin’s war began within prices before Putin’s war started. That change is big. But next year we will compare prices after that war began with prices also after that war began. That change is going to be much smaller.
In that case the only consequence of interest rate increases (which take up to two years to reduce prices, so poor a tool are they) will be to crush the economy long after inflation will have already gone. But the central bankers are still imposing the rate rises, anyway.
Somehow this inevitable and planned outcome has caught the markets by surprise. Apparently they didn’t think such a policy would hit Amazon. Now it has and they’ve marked its share price down dramatically. At one point they were 20% down.
One day someone will look back on the last year and the interest rate rises being pursued in the US, UK and beyond and wonder how an economic policy of such crass stupidity was ever allowed to happen. I have three explanations.
And third, we told them they are wholly responsible for just one aspect of economic policy that is utterly unrelated to any other necessary policy to ensure we have a functioning state, economy and society. Having done so, their own disconnect from responsibility became complete.
Central bank independence is a neoliberal idea that was always intended to undermine the state, as the whole of that philosophy is. Unless it is ended now it is not just undermining the state, it is seeking to destroy economies and the well-being of nations and the people in them
For how long do we have to tolerate the total madness of interest rate rises that cannot address inflation (which is being caused by a reason way beyond its ability to address) and which are causing untold harm? I don’t know, is the answer.
The fall in Amazon’s share price has got headlines. What should get attention is the nightmare happening in tens of millions of households worldwide. That’s where the real pain is, all of it caused by the maliciousness of central bankers.
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Matt Hancock: as Health Secretary, it seems he has broken data protection laws by handing your information to a commercial organisation that intends to profit from it.
The Times is reporting that the Tory government has handed all your NHS health information to Amazon – free – so that company can make a profit from it.
And they did it without telling you – presumably in the hope that nobody would notice.
How do you feel about that?
When did you give your consent to it?
This is private information which, as a data controller, the NHS should not be passing on to anybody else. That’s the law.
But of course the Tories don’t think that even the laws they write apply to them.
Amazon has been handed the keys to a trove of NHS data it can use to develop products to sell internationally without paying a penny to the UK.
A government contract, revealed under freedom of information laws, shows the partnership goes far beyond the tie-up with Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant announced in July.
The health secretary, Matt Hancock, said at the time the NHS should “embrace” the technology, saying it would cut pressure on GPs and pharmacists. But the contract shows the American tech giant could access more than just NHS website data.
The $863bn company can access “all healthcare information” gathered by the NHS at the UK taxpayers’ expense, including “symptoms, causes and definitions”.
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Bolsonaro’s legacy: The fires set in the Amazon rainforest, apparently on the order of the Brazilian president – and the cost to animal life. Boris Johnson seems keen to contribute to this slaughter.
Look at the images above and bear in mind that Boris Johnson may try to sign a trade deal with Brazil that would accelerate the deaths of these animal breeds and the destruction of the so-called “lungs of the world”.
In world trade terms, after Brexit, he’ll be a beggar and not a chooser, meaning if Jair Bolsonaro – the Brazilian president most people consider responsible for the fires destroying the rainforest and its animal habitats as I type this – tells him to sign a deal that increases the harm, he’ll do it.
Labour has appealed to Mr Johnson to show sense, pointing out that “We cannot risk our planet to buy cheap beef.”
But when has BoJob ever shown any sense at all?
Consider this, from the Independent‘s report:
Mr Johnson has refused to join French president Emmanuel Macron and Irish premier Leo Varadkar in threatening to block a South American trade deal if Mr Bolsonaro fails to live up to his commitments to protect the environment.
Stressing his unwillingness to disrupt trade at a time when fears of a global showdown are rising, the PM said that some leaders at the G7 Summit in Biarritz were using the catastrophic wildfires in the Amazon as an “excuse” to interfere with free trade.
He hasn’t got a clue.
And if he has his way, we’ll all end up breathing ashes instead of oxygen. Who will he blame then?
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The people of Brazil seem to have elected a lunatic determined to trigger an environmental catastrophe.
Jair Bolsonaro seems determined to turn his enormous nation into a desert – a dustbowl incapable of supporting life.
That’s what will happen if the Amazon rainforest is allowed to disappear, you see. The soil on which it stands is not rich enough to sustain farm crops for more than one or two plantings at the most. After that, the people of Brazil will be left in the dust.
That’s science.
Mr Bolsonaro seems to be motivated by something else. Greed? It makes no sense.
He can’t make money by burning the forest. Once it is gone, his people will be doomed. And there should be no aid from other countries because they will have brought it down on themselves – and on the rest of us.
I have wondered whether this is a blackmail play – trying to get us to pay him to keep the forest from harm.
But then he would not have gone ahead and started burning it – or allowing it to be burned.
It makes no sense. It is the action of a loon.
So, while I agree with everything Tom Clark of Another Angry Voicestates below, I think there is more to it.
I’m absolutely sick of people saying that the “Amazon is burning” as if it’s some kind of unfortunate accident.
Massive swathes of the Amazon are being deliberately burned in a massive land grab by ranchers and loggers emboldened by far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s anti-environmental diatribes and racist rhetoric against the indigenous people and minorities who live there.
This is what happens when extreme-right racist untranationalists cheat their way into power.
For more detail on Mr Bolsonaro’s plans, see this article.
The strange thing is, there won’t be any military intervention by the nations of the West.
It seems that, if fossil fuel isn’t involved, the United States, the UK and the other so-called “great” democracies don’t care.
We certainly don’t care, it seems, about an environmental calamity being committed in front of our noses, despite having declared that the world is in a climate emergency. What hypocrisy.
“Climate-change protesters threw red paint at the Brazilian embassy in London on Tuesday to demonstrate against damage to the Amazon rainforest and what they described as violence against indigenous tribes living there.”
Today in London #ExtinctionRebellion occupied the balcony of the Embassy of Brazil to protest the on-going attacks on the indigenous peoples of the Amazon, which have taken on a new intensity recently!
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John McDonnell says Labour would hire hundreds more tax inspectors to claw £36 billion a year back from avoidance.
And he believes that figure could go even higher, taking into account schemes used by firms such as Apple, Starbucks, Amazon and Google to beat tax rules.
These international businesses lawfully use complex structures to shift taxable income from the UK to other overseas operations.
HMRC is replacing 170 offices across the UK with 13 larger regional centres to save £83million.
The shake-up means that 5,000 staff unable to relocate are expected to be lost.
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Mock sympathy: This is the sort of treatment Ed Miliband can expect from David Cameron if he keeps following policies that are created by the Tory media rather than the needs of the British people.
Labour could be heading for defeat next year, after it set out new policies that have the same chance of success as England’s plan for the 2014 World Cup.
The party put its weight behind a report by the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) that left the public cold. If Labour does not change direction, it seems likely the party will not win the votes it needs to get into office next year – unless its rivals make serious mistakes.
It is a situation almost exactly like that of the England football team.
All right, it’s not a perfect parallel. England got into this fix because it was outplayed by teams with ambitious and flamboyant star players – Balotelli for Italy and Suarez for Uruguay. Labour doesn’t have that problem as the closest equivalent in politics is Nigel Farage.
But, like England, Labour seems unable to defend itself against even rudimentary attacks – partly because leaders have painted themselves into a corner (marked ‘pro-austerity’) and partly because they simply refuse to use the logical arguments. Does anybody remember what a relief it was when, after years of silence in response to Tory claims that Labour caused the financial collapse, Peter Hain finally told Owen Paterson, on the BBC’s Any Questions, “It was the banks that destroyed the economy, not the Labour government – it was the international banking system!”
And where is Mr Hain now? He’s retiring at the next election. The only Labour player who was man enough to fend off this blatantly unreasonable Tory attack and he’s being taken off the field.
Meanwhile, Labour’s leaders continue to make schoolboy mistakes that create the opportunity for the other side to score. Ed Miliband’s publicity-seeking pose with The Sun was a spectacular example; yesterday’s IPPR report was a more subtle one.
The lack of ambition is staggering; it seems that, after four years, the Miliband camp still hasn’t understood that copying Tory austerity will scare voters away. Committing to Tory-imposed constraints that require any new idea to be covered by a cut or a tax increase will just increase the exodus – Labour needs to be ambitious.
Everybody knows now that austerity is nonsense. It’s an excuse to drive money into the hands of those who have too much of it already. After four years of it, we are told that this government is on course to put five million British children in poverty by 2020. Food bank use is at its highest ever. The number of people claiming in-work benefits is at its highest ever because employers refuse to pay a living wage and expect the taxpayer to subsidise them instead; by the time of the 2015 election, working families will be around £2,000 per year worse off than they were in 2010.
You are worse-off under the Tory Coalition. You are worse-off under austerity.
Meanwhile, business bosses and shareholders have been having a spectacularly good time, with incomes skyrocketing. There’s no austerity for the One Per Cent!
Indeed, income inequality has increased hugely to place the UK seventh on the international table, behind the USA (fourth) and Chile (first) – and we all know that Tory neoliberals are huge fans of the systems in those two countries.
What are the wealthy doing with all the money they have parasitised from the rest of us?
Well, they’re not using it to pay their taxes, that’s for sure!
One of the main plans put forward in Labour’s IPPR report was to save money by means-testing benefits for 100,000 young people – saving £65 million. That’s a pittance compared to the £600 million in taxes that is being withheld by Google, Amazon and Apple, according to an infographic that’s currently doing the rounds.
Labour is very quiet about that – copying the Tory attitude of diverting people with stories about welfare abuses because Miliband’s know-nothing advisors think being “hard on benefits” is popular with the public, who don’t like “scroungers”.
They’re not intelligent enough to understand that this attitude has been carefully nurtured in the public consciousness by a right-wing, Tory-controlled media. It has nothing to do with reality, in which only a tiny minority of people are in fact defrauding the taxpayer out of benefit money. Lord Fraud – sorry, Freud – was taken to task for this only days ago.
It seems that – like England’s football team – the Labour Party has been off chasing a fantasy. Austerity and the persecution of people on benefits (most of whom are entirely deserving of them, plus massive amounts of compensation for the despicable way they have been treated for the past few years) are Conservative-created blind alleys. In politics, you don’t oppose anybody by copying them.
If Labour concentrated on the real causes of Britain’s problems, the party might have a hope of success.
Otherwise, like the England team, Labour will have to be content with hoping that the Tories make a big mistake.
And, like the England team, they are most likely to learn that this is not good enough.
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0sborne has every reason to be red-raced with embarrassment over his pitiful record regarding tax avoidance. Parliament’s public accounts committee has done all the hard work for him and he still can’t put it into practice!
Revenue and Customs bosses, reeling from the broadside they took for claiming the UK’s tax-dodging public enemy number one was a hairdresser from Liverpool, can take no solace from the attitude of Parliament’s own public accounts committee.
Three days before HMRC published its silly little list, the committee called on it to “publically name and shame” all organisations and individuals who sell or use tax avoidance schemes, in order to discourage such activity.
The fact that the organisation has not taken the opportunity to do so serious undermines its position.
Let’s have a look at what the UK Parliament’s website – www.parliament.uk – has to say about the government’s stance, because the criticism is so heavy it’s almost funny:
Tax avoidance—using tax law to gain a tax advantage not intended by Parliament—reduces the money available to fund public services and is completely unfair to the majority who pay the tax due. HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) estimates that in 2010-11 the tax gap due to avoidance was £5 billion. HMRC further estimates that the present total tax at risk from avoidance over time is £10.2 billion.
In Australia, promoters have to get clearance for schemes before they introduce them. An advance ruling system of this type could deter contrived avoidance schemes and increase certainty in the tax system. Australia has also introduced powers to fine those who promote schemes that could not reasonably be expected to work or comply with the advance ruling system.
“Promoters of ‘boutique’ tax avoidance schemes like the one brought to our attention by the case of Jimmy Carr, are running rings around HMRC,” said Margaret Hodge, chair of the public accounts committee.
“They create schemes which exploit loopholes in legislation or abuse available tax reliefs, such as those intended to encourage investment in British films, and then sign up as many clients as possible, knowing that it will take time for HMRC to change the law and shut the scheme down.
“Their clients can then take advantage of this window of opportunity to make a lot of money at the expense of the taxpayer, while the promoter simply moves on to a new scheme and repeats the process. It is a game of cat and mouse and HMRC is losing.
“It has allowed a system to evolve where the die are loaded in favour of the promoters of tax avoidance schemes. The complexity of tax law creates opportunities for avoidance, there are no penalties to stop people promoting these schemes, and HMRC is ineffective in challenging promoters who are deliberately obstructive or deliberately sell schemes they know do not work. Promoters pocket their fees whether their schemes work or not.
“There is also a lack of transparency that makes it very hard to find out who is involved in marketing or using these schemes. HMRC publicises details of schemes that do not work but does not name the promoters or the clients. We have seen how public anger and consumer pressure can influence large companies, such as Starbucks, to behave more responsibly.
“HMRC should publically name and shame those who sell or use tax avoidance schemes in order to discourage such activity. With at least £5 billion lost to tax avoidance each year, HMRC has got to get much more robust in its approach.
“The requirement that promoters give early notification to HMRC of new schemes has resulted in the swift closure of some. But the Department does not know how many promoters simply choose to ignore the requirement. We are also alarmed to hear that promoters are getting off paying fines for not disclosing their schemes by pleading that, in the opinion of a QC, they have a ‘reasonable excuse’ for non-disclosure. HMRC is right to explore how to make it more difficult for this tactic to work.
“The number of cases HMRC takes to court is tiny compared to the overall caseload. It must make use of the additional resources it has been given to act much more urgently to investigate and close down new schemes and to bring more cases to court.
“Since our hearing, the Government has announced that it is consulting on draft rules designed to allow departments to ban tax-avoiding businesses from being awarded government contracts. This is a welcome move but we will want to monitor closely how any such rules are applied in practice.”
I wonder if the rules on banning tax-avoiding businesses from taking up government contracts will ever see the light of day?
It is no surprise at all that the UK has lost its triple-A credit rating from make-it-up-as-you-go Moody’s.
The change has been expected since before Christmas, but that doesn’t make it any less significant. Gideon George Osborne spent the first years of this Parliament using it as a stick to beat Labour – that the UK’s credit rating was the best it could be, thanks to his policies, not theirs.
Like all credit rating agencies, Moody’s is a group of people who meet every so often and decide on particular countries’ scores, based on nothing more concrete than their own personal opinions. They can’t predict the future; they can only react to the present. That’s why they’re dubbed “make-it-up-as-you-go” at the top of this article.
But you can work out what that means, at this moment in time: 0sborne can’t pay his debts.
That’s astonishing. This is the world’s sixth largest economy, according to the International Monetary Fund. We make staggering amounts of money every year, so the operative question now is: Why the blazes can’t he pay his debts?
The answer lies in another story that broke last week – HM Revenue and Customs’ list of tax dodgers.
This is the list compiled by HMRC in response to public outrage against the tax-dodging schemes of large corporations like Starbucks, Amazon, the water companies mentioned in this blog before Christmas, Vodafone, Arcadia group and so on.
Who do you think this list marks out as public enemy number one?
A hairdresser from Liverpool.
Apparently this person was scalped of £17,000 for deliberate default. Others include a knitwear firm, a wine firm and a pipe fitter.
Meanwhile the amount of cash seeded away in offshore tax havens by the UK’s super-rich is estimated at £21 trillion. That’s 21 TRILLION – more than enough to pay all of our debts and put us back into surplus.
There is only one conclusion to be reached: The Chancellor is using the HMRC list to laugh at us. He’s mocking the poor, who have to pay tax no matter what. He’s not going to level the playing field because that would harm his own profits and those of his friends.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer is deliberately harming the UK economy.
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