Number 4

Remember. Mossack Fonseca, of the Panama Papers, is number four. The fourth largest firm in Panama in offshore tax dodging. Not the largest. 

So the 2.9 terabytes of data squirreled out of the firm and now feeding the news is just a small slice of the action. The Legal 500 lists six firms in Panama that they regard as experts in offshore tax dodging. No, they don't use that term, but it's what they mean.

We are losing between £3.1 billion and £34 bn in tax revenues because of evasion.

It is not the poor who are skipping their taxes. As the Panama Papers underline, it is of course the wealthy. When it is the wealthy who are meant to lead by example from Westminster, the system begins to stink.

The OECD says that 27 out of the 34 OECD countries do not require information on the beneficial ownership of companies. That's a cloak over political leaders and business people. Andy Wightman is doing the right thing in digging out these relationships and questioning them.

Time for Westminster to open up. We need to see the tax returns of anyone who is in power (Andy does this each year), to see who owns the shadowy companies that buy and sell property and companies, and to reclaim from the people behind them the money that they owe to our hospitals, our schools and our social services. A proper transfer from wealth, to reduce poverty.

I want to vote Yes. Now.

I don't want the Scotland I know and love to be part of a Westminster War. This is not our, Scotland's, war. It is Osbameron's war. It is the Bullingdon Bombing Club bullying the public and the Opposition into a war that will kill us all, morally if not mortally.

I don't want the Scotland I know and love to be part of Westminster. Not when we are facing a generation of Tory terror. (It will take at least that long for a reasonable Opposition - the scrag end of Labour, and, with luck, a new socially-concerned opposition party - to form itself in England.) We are belted in to 20 more years of Osbameron.

But we are not belted in. We could be free. We could walk quietly away from Westminster and its wars, and build a Scotland that is at peace with the world. 

We could vote Yes. 

I want to do that. Now.

Death, by David Cameron

Reyaad Khan, aged 21 from Cardiff, was killed in Syria by a Royal Air Force drone on 21st August. With him were two others including Rakib Amin from Aberdeen, also a UK citizen.

At 15:30 on 7th September, Mr Cameron stood up in the House of Commons, starting his statement in the most cynical way possible: " let me update the House on what we are doing to help address the migration crisis in Europe and, in particular, to help the thousands of refugees who are fleeing Syria." His Britain, he went on to say,  "is a country of extraordinary compassion, always standing up for our values and helping those in need."

Then he dropped the bomb: 

"Today, I can inform the House that in an act of self-defence and after meticulous planning, Reyaad Khan was killed in a precision airstrike carried out on 21 August by an RAF remotely piloted aircraft while he was travelling in a vehicle in the area of Raqqa in Syria. In addition to Reyaad Khan, who was the target of the strike, two ISIL associates were also killed, one of whom, Ruhul Amin, has been identified as a UK national. They were ISIL fighters, and I can confirm that there were no civilian casualties.

We took this action because there was no alternative. In this area, there is no Government we can work with; we have no military on the ground to detain those preparing plots; and there was nothing to suggest that Reyaad Khan would ever leave Syria or desist from his desire to murder us at home, so we had no way of preventing his planned attacks on our country without taking direct action."

He followed this news with a long statement about the legal justification for this particular death penalty.


What view can we take of this? Government secret services - whether or not they were agent 007 - have long murdered and kidnapped people who represented a threat to their country. Is a knife in the back, or poison in their tea, much different from a missile fired from a "remotely piloted aircraft"? Objectively, so long as other people are not killed in collateral damage, they are not. But Westminster is engaged in a "war on terror" - a deadly tautology - and war has rules designed precisely in order to limit the barbarity of our armed forces. 

These rules are built on historic wars - lines of armed men facing each other across no-man's land.

Today we have remote wars. David Cameron's pen starts the process and an RAF pilot in a bunker in North London ends it, pressing the button that fires the missile from the drone.

Our ethics,  our rules and our laws have not caught up with remote, automated, robot wars where Governments sign the death warrant by decree, in secret and in this case, against the specific will of a Parliament. 

Nor have our geopolitics. Because this new killing - Amnesty International called it a "remote-controlled summary killing from the sky" -  will mean more hatred, not less. More bombings, not less. More refugees to be turned away by Westminster, not less. And that in turn will mean more arms trade by Britain into the Middle East, not less. Meaning more deaths, and more hatred, and thus more arms for eternity.

It is time to break this cycle. To take an ethical stance on robot killing. Above all it is time to stop the arms trade that supplies both sides - the summary killers of Daesh and the summary killers of Westminster.

45 Lords a-leaping

You are the PM of a sceptre'd isle. The plebeians are revolting and a few in the faraway North have had the temerity to call for independence.

How do you remind them that whatever they do the Establishment will win? 

You appoint 45 Lords and Ladies who will leap to the Establishment tune.

Osbameron's new Lords are there to remind us all of the natural order of things. The Establishment has wrapped itself in ermine and the SS Great Britain will steam on, bearing slightly to the right, into the Sargasso Sea of neoliberalism. The Lords and Ladies are the compass that will keep the good ship Britain on course while you build your bank or your trading house.

The message from the Lords is that there ain't nothing we, the people, can do. We can protest, we can sing revolutionary songs and we can parade through the streets, but we remain the commoners, the cannon fodder for low wages and in-work poverty. 

This is how politics has been for years; "Aw, politicians, they're a' the same." The politics of distance, of a properly ordered class structure in which those at the top who know would lead those many at the bottom who don't. 

How does that leave the people at the bottom of the pyramid? Frustrated, at least, despairing of any change, certainly, and abandoned. 

(A quick test of abandonment; how often have you spoken to a Lady or a Lord? Or been consulted by one? Or seen one at a public meeting you attended? And yet these same Ladies and Lords are taking decisions on your behalf every day.)

The PM's appointments to the Lords are Westminster politics abandoning the people. Worse, they are a propaganda move. These appointments, at this time of a resurgent democracy across Europe, are designed to put the lid on dissent, to break our spirits; the people and their votes do not matter a jot to the unelected crème de la crème.

But now we live in a different time. With the Referendum in Scotland we woke up and felt a changing wind in our faces. We don't have to carry on in the same rotten carcass of a ship. 

When Scotland is independent we can build a new boat, a hand-crafted Scottish longboat built by the people for the people, and set a new course toward a functioning democracy.

Triple Lock: Westminster

Calais, Corbyn and cocaine: Westminster is caught in a triple lock.

Calais

In Calais  there are between 1,000-5,000 refugees waiting for a chance to cross the Channel while living in conditions that would have looked good in the Dark Ages. This is a humanitarian question linked to the humanitarian question faced on both sides of the Mediterranean where refugees from Syria and the Daesh wars are getting to anarchic Libya and then risking their lives to reach Italy. 

Calais is just 20 miles from England. It is not some far away place with a difficult to pronounce name. It would be easy, terribly easy, for Westminster to help out. Basic humanitarian aid would suffice - latrines, clean water, blankets, simple housing. Irrespective of whether or not you think it is "right" that more than a thousand men, women and children are camping out in Calais, you could help, Osbameron. But you don't.

Why not? Because you are locked into a debate about migration with the right wing of your party and with UKIP, scared stiff that if you are seen to help the Calais migrants the voters in those precious marginals will slip across the border to UKIP.

Corbyn

The debate over - shock, horror - Jeremy Corbyn's anti-austerity manifesto is the key to the second of Westminster's triple locks. Westminster is locked into the belief that the only treatment for the economy - for any economy, Greek, German or English - is austerity. Cut and cut and cut until the State is bled of all its powers of intervention and the free market can have its head. Don't consider who suffers - it is always the poor - but focus on the numbers, the magical £12 billion that Osbameron believe to be our overspend. Do not, above all, do what Mr Corbyn suggests and tax the rich because then they will all jump ship, possibly moving to a shack in Calais to evade an increase in income tax.

Why are the mainstream parties in Westminster locked into austerity? It is hard to explain, but it is beginning to feel like a 594-person mass hysteria (yes, that's 650 MPs less our lovely #SNP56).

Cocaine

The Summer Silly Season story of stories is called Sewel. A Lord of the Realm caught snorting cocaine...whilst hanging around naked with prostitutes. You could not make it up. But along with the knighting of Lord Better Together it has shone a useful light on Westminster's third lock - the House of Lords. 


The House of Lords is an anachronism, a spit in the face of democracy. It is ridiculous verging on weird that the future of the people of Scotland should be decided by a bunch of charlatans in ermine selected for their safe, on-side views by Blairaq and Osbameron.

But the Commons and the Lords are padlocked locked together in Westminster. And not just for the sexy bondage sensation it seems to give them. The Lords hold the key to the safe, ensuring that whatever we commoners decide can be nudged and tweaked and adjusted so that it fits with the capital needs of the great British empire.


Westminster is truly trapped in its triple lock. People in England, just like people in Scotland, Wales and Ireland suffer as a result.

 
Time for an independent Scotland to release the people of Britain from the gargantuan padlock that is Westminster.

Northern Lights

More maths for the summer. 

Building on last week's post about progressive taxation, the economics team at Late but in Earnest (me) have been trying out the Swedish taxation system on Britain.

Sweden is reported to have the highest rates of tax in the world. Which completely undoes the argument put forward by the Tories that "if you tax people heavily they will leave the country." Have you seen evidence of mass emigration from Sweden? No.

Our team of economists (me, again, with a slide rule and a strong coffee) have simplified the tax system in Sweden by taking the key middle rate - 51% - on all income over 629,200 Swedish Krona (approximately £46,100.) Apply that rate to the UK's wealthiest 10% of households and you raise an additional £9,506 million (£9.5 billion). This would pay for three quarters of the £12bn "funding gap" that Osbameron claim to be able to see.

You could go one further.

Most of the top decile live in London and the South East of England. The poorest people in the British Isles live in the North, in Scotland, in Wales, in Ireland. So you are transferring wealth from Mr and Mrs Top Decile of Kensington to Ms Poor of Easterhouse.

This is what happens between Catalonia and the rest of Spain. Catalonia, which generates a surplus, pays out to eleven other "autonomous regions" across the Iberian Peninsula, starting with Extremadura.  This has been going on since Franco died (1975.) Catalans have been paying Extremadura, Andalucia and the other poor autonomous regions for more than 35 years. As Patrícia Gabancho points out in L’autonomia Que Ens Cal és La de Portugal ("The Autonomy we should have is that of Portugal"): Despite this, the poor regions have stayed poor.

In the British Isles wealthy regions have been contributing (modestly, considering their income) through their tax to support social services for poorer regions. Again, despite years of tax transfers, London is richer than ever while Easterhouse and so many other areas of Scotland remain poor.

In an independent Scotland the better-off burgers of Kilmacolm and Auchterarder would contribute through their income tax to the poorer regions of our new nation state. The danger is that they would pay tax but that the poor regions would stay poor.

So how would you persuade Mr and Mrs Auchterarder that their money is actually making a difference? Is there not a danger that Auctherarder would declare itself independent, to break away from the taxes imposed by Holyrood?

We could - to steal an idea that is becoming common in the charity and philanthropy field - focus on impact. We could use that money to build productive wealth (better schools, new factories, workshops, business start-ups...) in our poorest regions. Productive wealth that would create jobs, salaries and thus more income tax receipts.

Westminster has completely failed to grasp this simple idea; tax wealth and use the money to build a better educated population, jobs, and productivity. Do that and you get a fairer society (like Sweden) and a wealthier, happier society.

Scotland can tax better than Westminster. Catalonia can tax better than Madrid. 

But only when we are independent.





Reference
Gabancho, Patrícia. L’autonomia Que Ens Cal és La de Portugal. 1. ed. Palestra. Barcelona: Editorial La Mansarda, 2012. www.lamansardaeditorial.com.

The details:
Taxation in Sweden (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Sweden and https://www.nordisketax.net/main.asp?url=files/sve/eng/i07.asp) combines county and municipality taxes. Rates for 2015 were:

• 0% from 0 SEK to 18,800 SEK (£0-£1,377)
• Circa 31% (ca. 7% county and 24% municipality tax): from 18,800 SEK to 443,300 SEK (£1,377-£32,479)
• 51% (31% + 20%) from 433,900 SEK to 629,200 SEK (£32,479-£46,100)
• 56% (31% + 25%) above 615,700 SEK (£46,100)

Working poorer

David Cameron will announce today, Monday, the bad news for everyone who did not vote Tory. He will announce what the FT calls "an assault on tax credits" as part of his plan to cut £12 billion out of part of the economy.  

The part of the economy from which he and Giddy Osborne will cut £12 billion is not the part that has a lot of money. It is not the bankers, or the well-heeled-and-toed voters of the Home Counties. It is £12 billion from the poor.

What does that mean for Scotland?

The focus will be on Working Tax Credits (WTC) and Child Tax Credits (CTC). These are payments made to people on low wages or no wages. The system is designed to taper so that families in work whose total income is £6,420 or less receive the full benefit, with a reduction of 41p in each additional £1 they earn above this level. In 2013-4 the Government paid out £29 billion in tax credits, according to the National Statistical Office. It is unlikely that they will take the full £12 billion from this one area (although only "unlikely", not "impossible") but even half of that would represent a 20% reduction in tax credit payments.

The statistics (here) are clear. In Scotland 351,900 families received Working Tax Credits or Child Tax Credits in 2013-14. In these families there were 526,300 children. In 2013-14 these families received on average £5,832 in tax credits. A quick review of the constituency data shows a map of poverty in Scotland, with Eastwood, Pollok, Rutherglen, Hamilton South amongst the places where the poorest people received the largest Working Tax Credits

Imagine that Mr Cameron sticks to a vow. Imagine that he cuts 20% off tax credits. Here is the maths:

In Pollok in 2013-4 there were 6,100 families including 8,800 children, who were receiving either WTC or CTC. This represented a total of £36.6m for the Pollok economy. Imagine that Mr Cameron sticks to this new vow and cuts, say, 20% from that total. He would be taking £7,327,320 out of the Pollok economy. More than £7m from an economy that is already on its knees.

Now translate that figure into income for small businesses, shopkeepers especially. They will cut staff. How many staff? Around 700 full-time jobs in Pollok (basing the calculation on National Minimum Wage and a 35 hour week).

So rather than, say, put a penny on income tax for the people of Surrey and Hertfordshire, Mr Cameron will impoverish the in-work poor and, as a consequence, chuck a lot of people out onto the street. 

Donchalove him?

Alms Race

Today is Maundy Thursday, the day when the Queen offers Maundy money - alms - to a carefully selected group of "deserving poor" - a slightly odd twist of a phrase which might be taken to mean people who deserve to be poor.

This is the oldest form of philanthropy - royalty making gifts to the poor. Like all philanthropy its motivations and its impact are multiple, from reminding the monarch that she or he is human to reminding everyone else that there is a social order - in this case, with a Queen at the top, and religion at its heart. As Eliana Magnani showed [1], from the 4th-6th century AD "...almsgiving developed as the result of the creation of the social category of the poor." In other words, we needed people whom we called "poor" in order to have a philanthropy that gave to them.

Philanthropy is a constant across religions and time - it seems to be built in to people wherever they are [2]. Is poverty a constant too? Yes, as it is currently defined in Europe as living on less than 60% of the median income. As a society gets wealthier the threshold for poverty, in cash terms, rises. So there is no point in any politician claiming that he or she wants to eliminate poverty. Unless there is a titanic shift in the way that society is organised (for example, a move to Anarchy, or theoretical Marxism) we will always have poverty.

If we must always have poverty and thus always have wealth, let us propose that Maundy Thursday be the day on which those of wealth step into the shoes of those without. Let us propose that David Cameron, Rupert Murdoch and the Windsors spend Maundy Thursday living in poverty. David, you are invited to spend the day in a Job Centre, being sanctioned for not spending 35 hours last week looking for a job. Rupert, you will spend the day on a zero hours contract cleaning plates in your local McDonalds. Elizabeth, you can spend the day just down the road from Buckingham Palace with the cardboard community that lives in the underpasses at Waterloo.

That would be a Maundy Thursday true to the spirit of alms.


1.Magnani, Eliana. “Almsgiving, Donatio Pro Anima and Eucharistic Offering in the Early Middle Ages of Western Europe (4th-9th Century).” In Charity and Giving in Monotheistic Religions. Walter de Gruyter, 2009.
2 see for example Jordan, W. K. Philanthropy in England, 1480 - 1660: A Study of the Changing Patterns of English Social Aspirations. Routledge, 2013.

"Stark choice": no choice

David Cameron is reported in today's carefully balanced BBC news as saying that voters face a "stark choice" between him and Ed Miliband in the General Election on 7th May.

Last week I stayed with friends in London. I asked them which way they would vote: of the five people in the room at the time (three 19-22 year olds and two parents) only one had decided how to vote. For the others there was no choice, no discernible difference between the main parties in England. At other friends in Sussex a couple of months ago there was a palpable sense of frustration that there was no serious contender for voters offering anything other than a diet of further cuts and more neoliberalism.

Democracy in England is not well. It is sclerotic - full of the fatty acids of Eton and Oxbridge so that the only voices one hears are those of the well-to-do. It is geriatric - with a House of Lords that should long ago have been sent down to Bournemouth (pity Bournemouth) and a South Coast retirement home. It is pale and male - with far too few voices from the many communities that live in the British isles, and far too few women. Its main parties suffer from lockjaw - their mouths fixed around one word, one idea, that we must continue to cut, cut and cut Government spending. An idea now so widely refuted by economists that it is extraordinary that any party can continue to support it.

So no, Mr Cameron, voters in England do not face a "stark choice."  If only they did. Voters face no choice in a democracy that needs urgent care and repair. Care and repair that neither you nor Mr Miliband are able to offer.

  

Be Ready, Scotland

Be ready Scotland for the plea from the Queen to stay in the Union

Be ready Scotland, for Cameron’s love bombs

Be ready Scotland, for MI5 to pull down one of our leading politicians*

Be ready Scotland, for a “terrorist incident” designed to scare us into the arms of the Union

Be ready Scotland, for a sterling crisis that will be blamed on you

Be ready, Scotland. 

The next few days are going to be a bumpy ride.

Be ready, Scotland, to stand fast by Yes.


* Still not convinced? Read Jim Sillars' letter to the cybernats - "agent provocateurs, special branch and MI5"

Loves Bombs

David Cameron is coming to Scotland. Expect the normal love-bombs. At least, the love-bombs of the last three years.

Because before that, he barely mentioned Scotland at all.

Until the SNP's 2011 win, David Cameron did not talk about Scotland. In the nine years after he was elected MP for Witney in 2001, he used the word "Scotland" a total of 12 times in Parliamentary debates* - that's 1.3 times per year, or about a minute and a half on Scotland, in nine years of politics.

Talking about you

Then the SNP are elected and suddenly Mr Cameron loves Scotland.We learn that his dad was born at Blairmore House, near Huntly, Aberdeen, and his claim at the Olympic Park in London in January 2014 that "my surname goes back to the West Highlands."

Mr Cameron doesn't love Scotland. He'd rather talk about almost anything else, particularly about tax, defence, and London:

 

On defence he's silent on Scotland where it really matters. As CND has pointed out**, he signed a 10-year extension to the nuclear cooperation treaty with the USA, the Mutual Defence Agreement (MAD), without a debate in Parliament. The treaty is about the Trident A-bombs in Faslane, Scotland.

Mr Cameron loves bombs more than he loves Scotland.


*This excludes "Scotland Yard" and "Royal Bank of Scotland" unless the latter is connected in the debate with Scotland. Excludes "Scottish National Party" when Mr Cameron is simply taking  a question from the SNP (eg, on Syria).

Sources: http://www.theyworkforyou.com, http://www.parliament.uk,

**http://www.cnduk.org/cnd-media/item/1957-cameron-closes-nuclear-deal-behind-parliaments-back