This past weekend, Polly Toynbee was on the Andrew Marr Show, speaking about the Cameron Panama affair. The crucial thing she had to say during the spot was this:
“That’s the real story, it’s not really about him having done anything abnormal for people as rich as him, it’s about simply being that rich — and once it’s exposed in that granular way, it shocks more as lots of people have always known Cameron and Osborne — the whole lot of them — are multi-millionaires.”
Toynbee is not a Labour MP, of course. But her language on the Marr programme demonstrates an important dimension of just how and why the Left have lost the plot of late.
Polly thinking Cameron’s wealth is “the real story” is an amazing moment of being greatly out of touch with most people in the country. The real story here is that Cameron may have lied and avoided tax – that’s the real story. Everyone in the country already knew Cameron was well off on May 7, 2015. So given the election result, I think it’s fair to say that Cameron’s wealth isn’t a big deal to a lot of them.
Then McDonnell pipes up yesterday to says that essentially it’s not about Cameron’s honesty, but rather the pressing problem of inheritance taxation. In other words, he’s turned a point about the prime minister’s fundamental character into a boring barmy about a tax most people are against.
You want more? Corbyn yesterday: “there is now one rule for the super-rich, and another for the rest”. Two major points to bring up here. One, David Cameron is not “super-rich”. He is posh, yes, he comes from a privileged background which helped him get on in life, no question about that. But the man has assets seemingly worth less than half a million pounds in total. I’d like to stress, being worth half a million pounds is a very long way from being poor, but “super-rich”? When I hear that term, I think of billionaires, not people who if they liquidised everything they had in the world would just about be able to buy an average house in central London without having to take out a mortgage. I once worked for a bloke who made £110 million a year (relax – very, very little of it saw its way to me) – he was super-rich.
Which brings me to my second major point on “super-richness”. All that Labour MPs as well as members of the press who don’t like Cameron had to do was jump on the fault line with everything they’ve got: David Cameron avoided tax and tried to cover it up, repeat until you are blue in the face. Because do you want to know what people hate? It isn’t super-richness or lack of sufficient inheritance tax in the system – it is politicians who take your taxes but avoid paying it themselves. And they hate what they perceive to be lying politicians as well.
So with an open goal presented to them, Labour once again decide to stop playing football and try and turn it into a game of tiddlywinks while the other side recover, grab the ball back and storm the other end. I think Cameron will get out of this one. He has Corbyn and many of his supporters to thank for that, as usual.
Not only incompetent but predictably incompetent; Iain Martin saw exactly how it was going to go down last week: http://capx.co/which-laws-on-tax-have-the-camerons-broken/
I kind of disagree. Cameron didn’t really dodge any tax at all, as his eventual confession made all too clear (albeit a bit clumsily). To be quite clear the profits he made were taxed at the UK rate I believe.
So the anger at Cameron (and his reticence to confess) come from:
i) an assumption that offshore always is a tax dodge ( which the media have done nothing to confirm, dispel – or really even engage with). The problem with going for him on this is if you face the man with this point he is going to quite reasonably point out that he did nothing wrong.
ii) Cameron is rich and, although as you point out he is not exactly a billionaire, he has enough assets to put him above a large proportion of the electorate. I would agree with poll that it is this that sticks in the craws of many. It’s just more seemly to express by pretending to be outraged by offshore arrangements you don’t understand but must be bad right? (See i).
Although yes people knew Cameron was rich I think pointing these things out and defining the wealth does increase the profile.
It seems to me that what the British public actually want in parliament as revealed by various ‘scandals’ is a group of chaste monks and nuns who uniformly grew up in deprived areas, eschew all material wealth and had past experience in hard physical labour or low paid jobs, and 0 political experience.
An opinon I don’t share – as you may infer as I merrily build my man of straw.
Its a wierd world where it is ok to play the lottery – but not ok to have inadvertently won it.
Can’t be bothered with this stuff. Seems a more interesting story where the Chancellor’s father runs a business that pays dividends but does not pay corporation tax.
You need to make a profit to pay dividends. So how do you manage to not pay corporation tax. Or am I just a tax paying simpleton?
You need to make a profit to pay dividends. So how do you manage to not pay corporation tax.
Easy.
If I own shares in a company which is registered, say, in the United States, then that company will not pay any UK corporation tax. But any money I receive from the shares as dividends will be income which I have to pay UK income tax on.
(And if I sell the shares and make a capital gain, then I will have to pay UK capital gains tax on that).
As I understand it, Cameron’s father’s ‘company’ didn’t actually do any business itself: it was effectively just a vehicle for owning shares in other companies. So the company itself didn’t make any profit, but any profits which the companies which it owned shares in on behalf of UK-based investors distributed as dividends to those investors was subject to income tax (which there is no suggestion the PM didn’t pay).
I am puzzled. Cameron is accused of tax evasion (well, avoidance, anyway) and his answer is to publish his tax records.
Surely his tax records only show what HMRC knows about. So how does the publication of his tax records take this any further?
Rather than falling over ourselves to say what a good wheeze this was, and publishing our own records, shouldn’t we be asking for full publication of the Cameron family accounts – and bank records? Otherwise why did we bother about his Dad’s offshore tax fiddling vehicle?
Or should we now be VERY suspicious of all those politicians who have chosen to publish their tax records? What are they trying to hide?
Tax records DO NOT reveal anything about what was hidden from HMRC.