Cameron's Blunder or "Oops I am a tax dodger"

Artful Dodger

I am being unfair on David Cameron but hopefully, and this is an unashamed attempt at self promotion, the title will have caught your attention and you might read a little further.

I will have a little poke at the Conservatives at this point because that is my want. So from 2010 apparently we are all in this together. Only some of us are more in it than others. As far as David Cameron is concerned the issue is that he lied at the outset. That he felt compelled to only heightens the sense of injustice. 

The problem with this country at the moment is that the poorest of society just cannot catch a break. Zero hour contracts, minimum wage, rising energy costs, a government keen on victorian values and.. well the list goes on.

The latest campaign by the Government to implement Universal Credit is a race to the bottom. It's stated aim is to make sure you are always better off working, however I know plenty of people here in the Northeast who are what you might call the working poor. Working full time for minumum wage and no job security. 

An article in the Independant today showed how much tax avoidance and evasion is costing the UK. Now I know there is a difference between avoidance and evasion. The former being legal and the latter illegal. There are some good ideas behind avoidance, as a for instance - donation to charity. and some avoidance is due to the costs a business or person can incur just getting out of the door to face the world. But evasion costs £4.4 billion. Staggering. The article suggests that if all this money was recouped there would be no need for all this cost saving at the treasury. 

I am not going to delve too deep into this topic. It is huge and the reason a lot of the cash goes astray is that it is extraordinarily difficult to police. There were a few cases brought before the courts in the 1990's that collapsed because there was no way an ordinary member of the public could be expected to understand just how nefarious these villains had been, such was the complexity of thee high finance. How much the evasion level is due to work being done "For Cash" is not disclosed.

So there we have it, a government of the rich, run by the rich for rich. To paraphrase a certain US President.