Skip to content or view mobile version

Home | Mobile | Editorial | Mission | Privacy | About | Contact | Help | Security | Support

A network of individuals, independent and alternative media activists and organisations, offering grassroots, non-corporate, non-commercial coverage of important social and political issues.

Bash a Billionaire, Tuesday 7pm, Park Lane

burn a banker | 01.03.2009 11:30 | Other Press | Social Struggles

"On Tuesday night, 100 billionaires will gather at London's sumptuous Dorchester hotel, to watch Mr Ted Turner in conversation with Ms Carol Vorderman. Ms Joss Stone will sing, and some model or other will be in attendance."

Give to the rich to help the poor? An idea worthy of Bono

Satire? No - a genius really has concocted a tax proposal to put our aid budget in the hands of the super-rich

Marina Hyde
The Guardian, Saturday 28 February 2009

On Tuesday night, 100 billionaires will gather at London's sumptuous Dorchester hotel, to watch Mr Ted Turner in conversation with Ms Carol Vorderman. Ms Joss Stone will sing, and some model or other will be in attendance. Can you guess the aim of this evening, which I trust you would cross continents to avoid in the infinitely unlikely event that you had been invited? No? Then allow me to assist. The aim is to make the government give tax breaks to the super-rich, in order to tempt them to give the same percentage of income to charity as the poorest 20% of people in this country already do.

Feel free to be taken unwell.

Initially I assumed the Fortune Forum, for so it is named, was an elaborate living satire, designed to highlight practically everything that is wrong with contemporary life. Alas, The Fortune Forum is all too real. It was dreamt up by an heiress called Renu Mehta, as a kind of vaguely benevolent mini-Davos. It is now in its third year, and has made several donations to the world's neediest people, including paying one Bill Clinton a rumoured $450,000 to address it.

But it is the Fortune Forum's latest scheme that really impresses. As the Guardian reported yesterday, Mehta enlisted the Nobel prize winning economist Sir James Mirrlees to come up with a plan to address the shaming statistic that Britain's richest 20% donate 0.8% of their income to charity, while the poorest 20% give 3%. He duly concocted a tax proposal. To wit: 50% of money donated towards the UN's millennium development goals through this scheme would be deducted from an individual or corporation's tax liability (which is of course only 40% or 28% respectively), with the government making up the other 50% from its aid budget. Naturally, the super-rich donors would get to decide on what projects their money was spent.

Let's see that in action, shall we? The UK's total overseas aid budget was £4.9bn in 2007-2008. Mehta suggests her scheme could persuade the super-rich to part with an extra £5bn a year, but of course the government is required to backmatch that notional sum, meaning that the entire aid budget would be swallowed up. What this means, effectively, is that control over the UK's aid budget would pass from the Department for International Development to a bunch of private individuals.

As the tax campaigner Richard Murphy points out, this is fundamentally undemocratic. Depressingly, Mirrlees and Mehta have already been granted two meetings with the Treasury, at which they insisted the scheme should be extended to those whose tax affairs are offshore, in effect allowing the use of UK taxpayers' money to be directed by tax exiles - and giving them tax relief for the privilege.

Did you ever hear anything so defeatist? Rather than make a concerted attempt to close down these offshore havens, the Treasury is now considering further enabling them with a cashback scheme because they are too tight to give the same percentage of their wealth to charity as someone in the lowest income bracket. Allowing this would be a monumental scandal.

One suspects Mirrlees is a Nobel economics laureate much in the same way that Henry Kissinger is a Nobel peace laureate. Another of his brainwaves is replacing corporation tax with a higher rate of VAT, a move which would shift the tax burden from the rich to the poor. Yet he will inevitably be lauded for this latest plan by those puffed-up fauxlanthropists who monopolise the aid debate.

And so to our old friend Bono, who this week announced he is displeased at being called a hypocrite for moving his tax affairs to the Netherlands, all the while lobbying the Irish government to increase its aid budget. As you may recall, the Tax Justice Network estimates that if tax was paid on the money the world's rich have protected in tax havens, it would raise enough to finance those millennium development goals five times over.

"I can understand how people outside the country wouldn't understand how Ireland got to its prosperity," Bono bleated to the Irish Times in the course of promoting his new album, "but everybody in Ireland knows that there are some very clever people in the government and in the revenue who created a financial architecture that prospered the entire nation - it was a way of attracting people to this country who wouldn't normally do business here. And the financial services brought billions of dollars every year directly to the exchequer. What's actually hypocritical is the idea that then you couldn't use a financial services centre in Holland."

Now that Ireland's economy has gone belly up, you mean? He's not the brightest, is he? At least he's only parlayed himself into the role of Africa's messiah.

For Mehta's part, she keeps waffling that "we have to achieve philanthropic parity". As I wrote here last week, philanthropy begins with paying tax, and given the super-rich's notorious capacity for weaselling out of it, the very last thing we should be slinging their way are further tax breaks, let alone control of aid budgets.
-----------------------------------
 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/28/tax-avoidance-aid

burn a banker

Comments

Display the following comment

  1. thoughts — Incoming!
Upcoming Coverage
View and post events
Upcoming Events UK
24th October, London: 2015 London Anarchist Bookfair
2nd - 8th November: Wrexham, Wales, UK & Everywhere: Week of Action Against the North Wales Prison & the Prison Industrial Complex. Cymraeg: Wythnos o Weithredu yn Erbyn Carchar Gogledd Cymru

Ongoing UK
Every Tuesday 6pm-8pm, Yorkshire: Demo/vigil at NSA/NRO Menwith Hill US Spy Base More info: CAAB.

Every Tuesday, UK & worldwide: Counter Terror Tuesdays. Call the US Embassy nearest to you to protest Obama's Terror Tuesdays. More info here

Every day, London: Vigil for Julian Assange outside Ecuadorian Embassy

Parliament Sq Protest: see topic page
Ongoing Global
Rossport, Ireland: see topic page
Israel-Palestine: Israel Indymedia | Palestine Indymedia
Oaxaca: Chiapas Indymedia
Regions
All Regions
Birmingham
Cambridge
Liverpool
London
Oxford
Sheffield
South Coast
Wales
World
Other Local IMCs
Bristol/South West
Nottingham
Scotland
Social Media
You can follow @ukindymedia on indy.im and Twitter. We are working on a Twitter policy. We do not use Facebook, and advise you not to either.
Support Us
We need help paying the bills for hosting this site, please consider supporting us financially.
Other Media Projects
Schnews
Dissident Island Radio
Corporate Watch
Media Lens
VisionOnTV
Earth First! Action Update
Earth First! Action Reports
Topics
All Topics
Afghanistan
Analysis
Animal Liberation
Anti-Nuclear
Anti-militarism
Anti-racism
Bio-technology
Climate Chaos
Culture
Ecology
Education
Energy Crisis
Fracking
Free Spaces
Gender
Globalisation
Health
History
Indymedia
Iraq
Migration
Ocean Defence
Other Press
Palestine
Policing
Public sector cuts
Repression
Social Struggles
Technology
Terror War
Workers' Movements
Zapatista
Major Reports
NATO 2014
G8 2013
Workfare
2011 Census Resistance
Occupy Everywhere
August Riots
Dale Farm
J30 Strike
Flotilla to Gaza
Mayday 2010
Tar Sands
G20 London Summit
University Occupations for Gaza
Guantanamo
Indymedia Server Seizure
COP15 Climate Summit 2009
Carmel Agrexco
G8 Japan 2008
SHAC
Stop Sequani
Stop RWB
Climate Camp 2008
Oaxaca Uprising
Rossport Solidarity
Smash EDO
SOCPA
Past Major Reports
Encrypted Page
You are viewing this page using an encrypted connection. If you bookmark this page or send its address in an email you might want to use the un-encrypted address of this page.
If you recieved a warning about an untrusted root certificate please install the CAcert root certificate, for more information see the security page.

Global IMC Network


www.indymedia.org

Projects
print
radio
satellite tv
video

Africa

Europe
antwerpen
armenia
athens
austria
barcelona
belarus
belgium
belgrade
brussels
bulgaria
calabria
croatia
cyprus
emilia-romagna
estrecho / madiaq
galiza
germany
grenoble
hungary
ireland
istanbul
italy
la plana
liege
liguria
lille
linksunten
lombardia
madrid
malta
marseille
nantes
napoli
netherlands
northern england
nottingham imc
paris/île-de-france
patras
piemonte
poland
portugal
roma
romania
russia
sardegna
scotland
sverige
switzerland
torun
toscana
ukraine
united kingdom
valencia

Latin America
argentina
bolivia
chiapas
chile
chile sur
cmi brasil
cmi sucre
colombia
ecuador
mexico
peru
puerto rico
qollasuyu
rosario
santiago
tijuana
uruguay
valparaiso
venezuela

Oceania
aotearoa
brisbane
burma
darwin
jakarta
manila
melbourne
perth
qc
sydney

South Asia
india


United States
arizona
arkansas
asheville
atlanta
Austin
binghamton
boston
buffalo
chicago
cleveland
colorado
columbus
dc
hawaii
houston
hudson mohawk
kansas city
la
madison
maine
miami
michigan
milwaukee
minneapolis/st. paul
new hampshire
new jersey
new mexico
new orleans
north carolina
north texas
nyc
oklahoma
philadelphia
pittsburgh
portland
richmond
rochester
rogue valley
saint louis
san diego
san francisco
san francisco bay area
santa barbara
santa cruz, ca
sarasota
seattle
tampa bay
united states
urbana-champaign
vermont
western mass
worcester

West Asia
Armenia
Beirut
Israel
Palestine

Topics
biotech

Process
fbi/legal updates
mailing lists
process & imc docs
tech