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accountancy, accountant, Amazon, Arcadia, avoidance, Big 4, Conservative, Customs, debt, deficit, dodger, economy, evasion, George Osborne, government, hmrc, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, Moody's, politics, Revenue, Starbucks, tax, Tories, Tory, Vodafone, Vox Political
It is no surprise at all that the UK has lost its triple-A credit rating from make-it-up-as-you-go Moody’s.
The change has been expected since before Christmas, but that doesn’t make it any less significant. Gideon George Osborne spent the first years of this Parliament using it as a stick to beat Labour – that the UK’s credit rating was the best it could be, thanks to his policies, not theirs.
That was a lie, of course. Others who know more about such matters can better explain the reasons but they have more to do with the value of bonds and savings than anything he did to improve the economy.
Like all credit rating agencies, Moody’s is a group of people who meet every so often and decide on particular countries’ scores, based on nothing more concrete than their own personal opinions. They can’t predict the future; they can only react to the present. That’s why they’re dubbed “make-it-up-as-you-go” at the top of this article.
But you can work out what that means, at this moment in time: 0sborne can’t pay his debts.
That’s astonishing. This is the world’s sixth largest economy, according to the International Monetary Fund. We make staggering amounts of money every year, so the operative question now is: Why the blazes can’t he pay his debts?
The answer lies in another story that broke last week – HM Revenue and Customs’ list of tax dodgers.
This is the list compiled by HMRC in response to public outrage against the tax-dodging schemes of large corporations like Starbucks, Amazon, the water companies mentioned in this blog before Christmas, Vodafone, Arcadia group and so on.
Who do you think this list marks out as public enemy number one?
A hairdresser from Liverpool.
Apparently this person was scalped of £17,000 for deliberate default. Others include a knitwear firm, a wine firm and a pipe fitter.
Meanwhile the amount of cash seeded away in offshore tax havens by the UK’s super-rich is estimated at £21 trillion. That’s 21 TRILLION – more than enough to pay all of our debts and put us back into surplus.
0sborne continues to use the ‘Big 4’ accountancy firms – all of whom operate many tax avoidance schemes for clients – to write the law on tax avoidance; and he changed the law to allow large companies great opportunities to avoid paying tax in the UK.
0sborne himself, remember, was identified as having profited from tax avoidance himself, and in fact offered advice on tax avoidance in a TV interview, while David Cameron’s family made a fortune on tax avoidance schemes.
There is only one conclusion to be reached: The Chancellor is using the HMRC list to laugh at us. He’s mocking the poor, who have to pay tax no matter what. He’s not going to level the playing field because that would harm his own profits and those of his friends.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer is deliberately harming the UK economy.
