It was the alleged Jesus of Nazareth who said “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her”, as a group of bumpkins prepared to stone an allegedly adulterous woman. In other words, don’t condemn someone else’s morals when yours are not exactly squeaky clean. Which is why I have tried to avoid be too holier-than-thou about David Cameron’s father’s ‘unusual’ tax arrangements and how the PM might have benefited from them.
I am of course completely without sin, having never paid any workman cash-in-hand or indeed worked cash-in-hand myself. In this department I am whiter than white, even though my nose which is very red and growing by the second. Although I have been purer than the driven snow, I have had an ISA before and regularly tick the box marked gift aid when giving money to charities. So this makes me a fully-fledged tax dodger because I have knowingly sought to avoid tax. The difference in this instance is that the HMRC website tells me that these types of tax dodging are not just legitimate but desirable.
Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell says Labour will not accept any money “from money that is used by any way in measures to avoid tax or evade tax, we will not allow that to happen and we’re not allowing that to happen.” Fair enough, but he has opened a massive can of worms here. If someone has invested in an ISA and later donates to the Labour Party, isn’t that money that has been gained from avoiding tax? Or is that a different part of that person’s bank account. Who on earth would want to give Labour any money at all under its current leadership, anyway?
I sense some jealousy here, too; the jealousy that David Cameron and most of the Tory cabinet are all fabulously rich and we aren’t. I’m not jealous about that: I just despair at how gross inequality in this country means we have very little social mobility. There is little by way of a meritocracy. You are still more likely to get on if your parents are rich. We need to draw some distinctions between tax avoidance and tax evasion.
In any event, tax evasion among the lower orders like me, is small beer. I have worked for respectable employers (if you can call the DWP a respectable employer: it is a moot point, I know) so I have little opportunity to evade or even avoid paying tax. I had no need for an accountant and no money to afford one anyway. That’s why many of us at the end of the food chain have little idea about avoidance and evasion and even less of an idea of the differences.
Cameron’s big sins are these: he has been slippery rather than downright dishonest and he has been guilty of throwing the first stones of hypocrisy at the comedian Jimmy Carr before finding them being lobbed back at him. Slippery, naive, arrogant but not, quite, a liar.
I suspect that come close of play in the House of Commons today, Cameron will have safely ridden out the storm, such as it was. There is, inevitably, some public fatigue about this story which has been running for a good while now. Unless Jeremy Corbyn today turns into a great orator and is armed with some previously unknown killer facts, the PM will survive, with his reputation tarnished but worse than that, the entire political establishment devalued in the eyes of a cynical electorate.
Apart from me, I’ll bet most of you have done something at sometime where the taxman has not received everything he should have done from you. Granted that Cameron’s avoidance is on an industrial scale compared to most folk, it is still important to acknowledge no smoking gun has yet been discovered and unless one is this story will soon fizzle out.
One thing for sure is that we now know that we are not all in this together. All the events of recent weeks – the attempted raid on the working poor, the attack on the sick and the disabled and the tax cuts to the better off and very rich prove that. That the rich can also utilise apparently legitimate tax dodging schemes when the rest of us are stuck with what we are given is another source of anger and bitterness but it’s not as if the system hasn’t been like that forever.
