Tag Archives: gift

How do you scrap a tax hike on your digital services business? Give Labour £16,000?

Google: facing an increase in the UK’s digitial services tax from 2% to 10%, this firm and others gave Labour shadow ministers gifts worth £16,000 and it was subsequently cancelled. The increased would have brought £3 billion into the UK Treasury.

Is Keir Starmer’s Labour as bent as a figure-eight? Judge for yourself with this tale of shadow ministers scrapping plans for a 10 per cent digital services tax after receiving £16,000 in gifts from Google and other companies in the sector.

The tax hike would have brought £3bn to the Treasury, providing an opportunity to cut taxes on struggling small businesses – but it seems £16,000 for people including shadow business secretary Jonathan Reynolds was enough to put a stop to this valuable change:

Information from Open Democracy says Reynolds was talking about the tax increase right up until he took a £3,377 package for two to attend Glastonbury as a guest of YouTube, which is owned by Google. The day after, reports emerged that he had ditched the plan.

It was not the only time senior figures in Starmer’s team accepted luxury gifts from Google in the months before the party’s U-turn. Shadow culture secretary Lucy Powell’s political adviser, Labour’s executive director of policy, and the party’s head of domestic policy all accepted tickets and transport to, and ‘hospitality’ at, the Brit Awards in February from the digital giant. Powell’s register of interests estimates that the adviser’s ticket was worth £1,170.

Starmer’s political director also accepted transport to and ‘hospitality’ ahead of the event from Google, though his ticket, along with that of Starmer’s private secretary, was covered by Universal Music.

Starmer had accepted a £380 dinner from Google for him and one staff member during the World Economic Forum in January.

In total, openDemocracy estimates that Labour shadow cabinet members and their staff accepted luxury gifts from Google worth nearly £10,000 over the months before they announced their policy U-turn.

And that’s just Google. The estimate of £16,000 in total may, in fact, be low.

Take a look at the full Open Democracy article (link below). The attached comment from ‘Tory Fibs’ is also useful because it crystallises the problem with Labour – or any political organisation – taking money or gifts-in-kind from businesses facing tax increases or legislative regulation:

My perception is certainly that Labour cannot be trusted to implement the right policies for the UK because its representatives are corruptible with cheap bribes.

And no – it doesn’t matter whether Jonathan Reynolds was otherwise influenced to cancel the policy.

It seems as though he shut down a £3 billion plan to help small businesses because a digital giant gave him tickets for Glasto.

And it seems as though the total cost to the digital services industry of shutting down this £3 billion plan was a mere £16,000. That’s pocket money to these people.

Until Labour – and all the other political parties – stop accepting these gifts from people and organisations their decisions may affect, they can never be trusted.

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MPs on the take: £17.1 MILLION earned from extra jobs since 2019 election – mostly by Tories

This is a huge exposure of the amount of cash being made by MPs – mostly Conservatives. When they should be representing our best interests, they are lining their own pockets.

Sky News – yes, Sky News – has teamed up with Tortoise Media to peel back the veil covering MPs’ extra money: their earnings from second jobs, gifts and donations to individuals and political parties.

As the blurb for the video clip states,

The Westminster Accounts draw together information from several public sources and – for the first time – make it all available to the public in one place.

And it shows that since the last election in 2019, MPs earned £17.1m on top of their regular salaries, with around two thirds of the money going to just 20 MPs, including two former prime ministers.

Search for your MP with our special tool: https://news.sky.com/story/westminste…

Here’s the clip itself:

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Freebie-guzzling Tory couple spark fury over poverty wages

Philip Davies and Esther McVey: they’re raving it up on the profits firms have made by paying employees practically nothing.

Tories Philip Davies – the Friday morning filibuster king who takes joy in “talking out” legislation, not because it is bad but because it doesn’t come from the Conservative government – and Esther McVey – whose attacks on benefit claimants are notorious – have come under fire because of the free perks they have taken for themselves.

They have claimed £18,000 worth of VIP goodies on top of their £82,000 salaries (plus expenses).

And they were among 65 Tory MPs who have taken the bulk of freebies available – £160,000 worth between May and July alone.

In contrast, 23 Labour MPs have taken nearly £32,000. That puts Davies and McVey’s greed in context: between them they have claimed more than half as much as all the Labour MPs put together.

Among the gifts are several from gambling firms, coming at a time when the government is reviewing betting laws, provoking speculation on whether they came with strings attached.

Davies should be even more embarrassed because some of these gifts came from Entain, a company for whom he was paid almost £50,000 as an advisor last year, when it was known as GVC Holdings.

Here are the details:

Now you know the story, here comes the fury as people responded to this astonishing display of scrounging by members of the party that accuses people in extreme poverty of scrounging:

How indeed? Davies said his contract with GVC Holdings explicitly stated that he must not lobby on the firm’s behalf while employed by it – but he isn’t employed by it any more. And in any case, RD Hale’s comment shows that others would be imprisoned simply for accepting corporate gifts. Why not Davies and McVey?

Others have focused on McVey’s pronouncements on people who have to claim benefits in order to make ends meet because their wages don’t cover their costs – meaning that the government pays a de facto subsidy to under-paying employers.

Remember:

So the benefits paid to working people in extreme poverty are intended to help business bosses profit – not the struggling workers. Meanwhile MPs’ salaries have nearly doubled in the last 25 years:

So MPs are on an extremely good screw – and those like Davies and McVey are scrounging more freebies out of corporations (that may even be profiting by paying low wages and expecting their employees to claim benefits). Meanwhile the same MPs are happy to demand that benefit claimants must take the worst-paying jobs available, or lose those benefits:

Now, of course, the government is preparing to remove the £20 “uplift” that was provided to UC claimants during the height of the Covid-19 crisis.

Let’s put this in a little more context:

ToryFibs is slightly mistaken; making the £20 uplift permanent would not cost any money because there are hidden costs associated with cutting incomes to a point where people cannot afford the cost of living.

But we can see that the UK’s billionaires are raking in the cash as a result of not having to pay a living wage to employees.

And saying that the “uplift” costs a huge amount of money is a handy propaganda tool – that, it seems, has been used to good effect by certain news reporters…

… who are also doing very well for themselves.

And the assumptions about the amount that people need, in order to meet their living costs, has raised questions about other government payments. So the government’s claim to have legislated to ensure that people receive a “National Living Wage” has come under attack, not just because it isn’t enough, but because it reflects badly on the UK’s woefully low state pension:

So you can understand why people are furious at Davies and McVey.

While most of us struggle to survive in jobs that force us to claim benefits that still won’t cover our living costs after the Tories cut the uplift, in order to subsidise big businesses that are raking in the profits, the same firms are handing out free luxuries to these hugely well-paid Tory MPs. And when we retire we will have to try to survive on even less.

The whole system reeks of corruption and Davies and McVey stink worst of all.

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Ridicule for Labour right-whingers as they complain about ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’ toy

Joan Ryan: Apparently police were called in because she was given a ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’ toy labelled ‘deselection express’.

The Telegraph‘s headline seemed genuinely disturbing – Police called in over Labour’s deselection row after ‘menacing’ cards placed in MPs’ parliamentary offices  – until we all read what it was about.

“Officers from the Parliamentary liaison unit were last night probing how an unknown intruder was able to enter the office of one of the MPs and place the card, which contained details of an upcoming holiday to Cyprus, on their desk,” the article stated.

“Both MPs were also sent a miniature toy replica of Thomas the Tank Engine, which left-wing supporters of Jeremy Corbyn have referred to as the ‘Deselection Express’.”

Wait, what?

Police were called in because Joan Ryan and Gavin Shuker received a ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’ toy?

The howls of derision were particularly shrill:

And rightly so.

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Coalition drags out the pain with promise of many more cuts

140205cuts

The BBC has reported findings by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, showing that the Coalition government will be less than halfway through its planned spending cuts by the end of the current financial year (March 31).

The organisation said 60 per cent of the cuts were still to come.

This raises a few urgent questions. Firstly: This government was formed on the promise that it would balance the books by 2015, which presupposes that its entire plan for doing so would be in place long before then. We know that this ambitious claim was dismissed after years of failure, but part of the reason for this failure was that George Osborne stopped a recovery that was already taking place, and which would have led to economic growth of 20 per cent by now, if it had been allowed to continue (according to Michael Meacher MP). My question, therefore, is: Have the Conservatives been working to ensure that they would have an excuse to make more cuts, rather than to restore the economy and balance the deficit?

Secondly: We may presume that these further cuts will be inflicted over a period of years (as even the Tories know it is important to enact change gradually, rather than inflict sudden shocks on the economy that could create entirely unforeseen consequences). Are the Coalition parties assuming that they will be re-elected next year, and is it not supremely arrogant of them to believe this, considering the harm they have caused so far?

Thirdly: If the Coalition parties do want to be re-elected, it is clear that they will need to try to bring a majority of voters back on-side. Therefore we may reasonably expect to see all sorts of gifts coming our way over the next year – tax breaks or whatever else they can devise – aimed at increasing the amount of money in our pockets. However, knowing that 60 per cent of the Tory/Lib Dem cuts process is still to come, this means they will want to make even more cuts if they are returned to office. Why would we want to give them our vote, in return for presents they’ll grab back as soon as they’ve got what they want?

Fourthly: Iain Duncan Smith has inflicted £28 billion of cuts on people receiving benefits from his Department for Work and Pensions. If the IFS statement is accurate, then the total amount he’ll want to cut is a staggering £70 billion. If we consider that the amount spent on pensions (more than £100 billion) is safe, this leaves only tiny amounts for all the other benefits supplied by the DWP. Are people currently on Jobseekers’ Allowance to get nothing in the future? What about disabled people getting DLA or PIP? How about all the many, many people on Employment and Support Allowance, including those currently going through the appeal process because of wrong decisions? Mr… Smith might claim that all these benefits are being rolled into Universal Credit, but that won’t happen until 2016 or 2017 according to his own estimates, and the rest of us know that it’s not going to happen at all. Will we have any benefit system left if these cuts continue – or will the Tories try to trick us into buying duff health and employment insurance policies from their friends at Unum instead?

The BBC report said George Osborne wants a budget surplus by 2018-19, but “additional spending, population growth and extra demands on the NHS meant more cuts were needed”. This statement is not supported by any source material and we may take it this is a further sign of BBC right-wing bias.

The additional spending was made necessary because of unintended consequences of the cuts – the Tories got their sums wrong. Population growth, if due to the EU immigration that everyone complains about, will have led to a net growth in the economy as it has been proved that migrant workers from the European Union contribute more to the Treasury than they ever take out – so this is not a cause of increased spending. If the indigenous British population has been growing faster than expected, let us remember that Child Benefit is to be restricted to the first two children in a family (Cameron has denied it so it must be true) and therefore any further growth in individual families will have no bearing on the government’s bank balance. Extra demands on the NHS are a thorny subject as the Coalition promised to inject billions of pounds into the health service but no evidence has yet appeared to show that it has. Since this money was promised many years ago, it should have been included in national budgets and should not be a burden now.

The IFS also reports that there is no evidence of a housing bubble in the UK, as a result of Osborne’s ‘Help To Buy’ scheme. This was introduced last year, when Osborne realised that his austerity programme had failed and resorted to a Keynesian ‘pump-priming’ scheme to boost the housing market. Fears that this would lead to a debt-fuelled ‘bubble’ made commenters like myself cautious about the plan.

However, if there are no signs of a debt-fuelled bubble, then we should consider this to be proof that Keynesian economics was always the way forward and austerity has led us up an economic dead-end for the past four years.

This means none of Osborne’s ridiculous cuts were necessary (barring a few to eliminate waste and corruption – but under a Conservative-led regime we have no evidence that these took place and every reason to believe the opposite to be true. Look at the current ‘cronyism’ row over the appointment of Conservative ‘yes’-people to senior quango posts).

It also means the government and the right-wing media have been lying to you for four long years – and will continue doing so in self-justifying stridence for another 14 months to come.

Let them talk.

But don’t ever let them convince you their cuts are necessary.

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