Sixth, there are much bigger issues tax justice should be looking at. Start with the national insurance increase; link them to universal credit cuts; build in the failure to effectively tackle wealth inequality by taxation; add in the need to tackle an austerity narrative and then tax justice would be hitting new targets, instead of raking old muck.
I very much doubt that tax justice can use this old material again. It is out of date. The real question now is not what did happen, but whether it has changed? The current reports are not addressing that question well enough.
And the second current issue is that it really is time for tax justice to move on and talk about what might well be more important in tax now. Tax haven reform is important. So is UK corporate reform. But I am not sure that these revelations are going to make much difference to either of those agendas now, and that’s why I am hoping for better campaigning in the future.
What could have brought on this petulance?
From The Guardian:
The Tax Justice Network
Ah, yes….
When the rich and powerful stash their money in tax havens, they’re essentially buying secrecy…..The ICIJ gave 600 journalists around the world remote access to the leaked data…..They include reporters from the…Washington Post.
Does any of the data involve Jeff Bezos? Here’s hoping…..
Davidsb,
I dont know about Bezos but to nobody’s* surprise we have learned that Blair avoided some stamp duty.
*nobody except the BBC
I’d put Blair’s head on a spike if there were some legal way of doing it but the “Pandora” allegations of his tax-dodging are mere twaddle. Far more interesting was the business years ago when he was instructing property investments for what was purportedly a Blind Trust of his assets. Now that was crooked.
Another slimy bugger I dislike is Cameron, but I similarly thought that the accusations about him, trying to tie him to his father’s setting up of a unit trust based somewhere in the Caribbean, was fatuous poppycock. His father was a stockbroker: setting up unit trusts was the sort of thing such people did for a living. The journalistic trick was to try to mislead the mug punter into confusing a unit trust with a family trust while also trying to imply that there was necessarily something crooked about the latter sort of entity. Pure shitbaggery.
In other words, no one has called him for a quote, and he can’t see a way of making money out of it.
He’ll have to fall back on his lucrative grants, consultancies, professorships. And he’s still asking for donations!