20th February 2015

Tendring Topics…….on line

‘Immoral Earnings’

          Tax evasion (strictly illegal) and tax avoidance (legal but often distinctly dodgy) have been a recurring theme in this blog. I regard income tax as our annual subscription for the privilege of British citizenship. We should be proud to pay it, not reluctant. There is nowadays a thriving business in advising already-wealthy clients how to avoid paying anything like their fair share of income tax – in some instances how to avoid paying any income tax whatsoever.  This new ‘profession’ is surely parasitic and ’living on immoral earnings’, much the same as brothel keepers and the like; and deserving the same punishments as them if or when they are brought to justice.

             I was astonished when I learned that BBC investigative journalists had discovered that Britain’s largest Bank HSBC, was among  the foremost of these ‘financial pimps’ – and that one of their multi-millionaire clients had lived in luxury for years without ever paying a penny in income tax.  HMRC – the government department charged with the collection of taxes and customs duties believed that this particular client was living somewhere in Spain, but – surprise, surprise! – had been unable to contact him.

            There seems to have been a remarkably cosy relationship between HSBC, the HMRC and the government that employs the latter to collect money owed to them (our money in fact).   A former Chief Executive, later chairman of HSBC, on leaving the bank was ennobled (just like our own Lord Hanningfield!) and given a job in the government.  Nothing wrong with that perhaps – I have always thought that the Kray brothers would have made excellent Police and Crime Commissioners!    Rather more worrying is the fact that, on retirement, a former senior official of HMCR was given a senior position with HSBC.  Poacher becoming a Gamekeeper is one thing – but Gamekeeper becoming Poacher is something quite different.

           

            I wouldn’t pretend to understand exactly how multi-millionaires were advised on avoiding the taxation that the rest of us have to pay.  It seems though that at the centre of this operation was a Swiss ancillary of HSBC. We are told that that ancillary has now been thoroughly reorganised.  ‘Lessons have been learned’ from the mistakes.  They were made a few years ago and we must now draw a line under the past and move forward into the future.

            I bet that those ‘celebrity paedophiles’ who are serving prison snentences for incidents that occurred forty or fifty years ago, are wishing that they could have said the same thing – and got away with it!

The Prime Minister’s response

          David Cameron’s response to the revelations about HSBC and HMCR was as we have come to expect.  No government, he claimed, has done more than his has to stem aggressive tax avoidance and tax evasion.  That says no more than that no government has ever done very much in that field.   Understandable enough – start taking money from the super-rich and they’ll be less inclined to offer financial support to the party that they had relied upon to look after their interests.

            Probably though Mr Cameron, like me, doesn’t really understand how tax avoidance works, and how it can be prevented.   He swiftly moved on to a field in which he and his chancellor have become experts; penalising the poor and vulnerable to avoid inconveniencing the really wealthy.  They hadn’t previously noticed that some of those who receive benefit do so because they are suffering from obesity or alcohol or other addiction.  These are curable conditions.  Cut their benefit unless they are positively seeking a cure and you’ll not only improve their medical condition but you’ll encourage them to seek work and save a few quid to reduce that deficit.

            I’m reminded of a somewhat cynical story that was circulating in Germany in the early post-war years when every firm and every organisation was struggling to rid itself of the taint of Nazism.    One keen German gardener meets another:   ‘What have you been doing today Fritz?’ ‘I’ve been denazifying my carrot patch’. ‘Denazifying?’   ‘Yes, denazifying – you know; pulling out the little ones so that the big ones will thrive and get bigger’. 

Ukraine

           Three times I have started to put on paper my thoughts about the situation in Ukraine and three times I have failed.  The situation changes day by day, almost hour by hour.  Hope of a peaceful settlement almost dies – and then flickers into life again. One thing that is certain is that the outlook on both sides has hardened as a result of the conflict. Before the killing started I am quite sure that the rebels would have been satisfied with a limited autonomy within a loose Ukrainian Federation.  Now, I think, they’ll be striving for full independence.   Similarly, many on the government side would, I think, have been willing to grant that limited autonomy.  Now hard-liners will be satisfied with nothing less than the ethnic cleansing from Ukraine of all Russophiles (hundreds have already been killed and thousands driven into exile) and the obliteration of the Russian language and of Russian culture from the country.

In this conflict it is the rebels (always referred to in BBC news bulletins as  ‘Russian-backed rebels!) who are the victims.  They feared that the Kiev Government intended to destroy their language and culture.   At first they tried to prevent them by peaceful means – do you remember the tv pictures of unarmed civilians, men, women and little children trying to stop the progress into their country of Kiev government tanks and armoured cars?  Since the fighting started it is the rebels’ homes that have been flattened by shellfire.   The million people driven from their homes and seeking refuge in Russia are all from rebel held towns and villages.  I have little doubt that they comprise most of the 5,500 dead.

Angela Merkel and the French President are at least trying to keep the flame of peace alight.  Our government?   Well, we’ve supplied the Kiev Government with sixty second-hand armoured cars.  They’re unarmed at the moment but the Kiev government can soon mount some machine guns onto them and send them into the conflict.    Oh yes – and our Defence Secretary has announced that any armed Russian incursion into the Baltic States will be resisted by NATO.  Over a quarter of the population of two of those three Baltic states are ethnic Russians. The Defence Secretary (who clearly isn’t old enough to remember the true horror of a European War) would be better occupied urging the governments of those Baltic States not to treat the ethnic Russians as second-class citizens, and to give the Russian language the same status as the local tongue.  Switzerland, Belgium and Wales all have more than one ‘official language’.   So could Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.   

If the Baltic ethnic Russians have no grievances they’ll have no inclination to revolt and seek Russian help.

Some later thoughts

This morning (Friday 20^th February) I have just heard that an influential committee of the House of Lords has declared that, due to inept policies pursued by inexperienced foreign office officials, we have ‘sleep walked’ into the situation in Ukraine.  My own fear is that we may be sleep-walking into World War III.

 Nations, as well as individuals, should make a real effort to see the world through the eyes of their opponents.  Russia sees itself surrounded by a hostile NATO alliance extending from the Baltic, round the frontier of the Russian Federation to the Black Sea.

We may well think of that NATO alliance as being purely defensive – but how would we feel if the Irish Republic, the Netherlands, Belgium and France were to become part of a potentially hostile alliance?   How would the USA feel if Mexico and Canada did the same?

In the case of the USA we know what would happen.  In the 1962 the Soviet Union attempted to supply its ally Cuba with missiles to defend itself from the very real threat of invasion from the USA. President Kennedy – by no means the most bellicose of American presidents – was prepared to bring the world to nuclear war to prevent it.   Fortunately Nikita Khruschev, then President of the USSR, had more sense.  He withdrew the missiles – but there was no further attempt to invade Cuba from the USA.

Week 46 2013

Tendring Topics…….on line

Hitting the target – but how and at what cost?

          We can read about NHS scandals in London, Liverpool or Glasgow without feeling anything more than disapproval and perhaps a little relief and satisfaction with the thought that, ‘thank goodness, that sort of thing doesn’t happen down here!’  That, of course, makes it all the worse when that sort of thing definitely does happen here and makes the headlines in the press and in the radio and tv national news bulletins.

            Colchester Hospital, our local major hospital, where most of us find ourselves at some time or another, if not as ‘in-patients’ at least seeking specialist advice or diagnosis, has featured in the national newspapers on several occasions recently.  At first it was just that an above average number of deaths had occurred there.  Not, in itself, a cause for great concern – it is the nature of an ‘average’ that there will be as many above it as below it.  Just last week though the allegations were much more serious. They were about the quality of cancer care. Members of the staff had complained that they were being pressured or bullied by ‘management’ to record false figures for the records relating to the diagnosis and treatment of cancer.  The police had been informed!

            That was much more concerning.  During the past six years I had had three operations on my ears for cancer of the skin and cartilage. They were successful though I am still required to attend the hospital at six monthly intervals to make sure that my ears were still OK and that the cancer hasn’t spread to the glands of my neck. Much more serious, a very good friend of mine has had major surgery for cancer at Colchester Hospital followed by a month of out-patient radio-therapy at Colchester and Southend Hospitals, all  during the past six months,

I am not in the least worried about my own situation.  Although my ears were cancerous and I was told that the condition in one of them was ‘very aggressive’ prior to the operation, I have so far been treated as a ‘plastic surgery’ rather than a cancer patient.  At ninety-two my life is, in the nature of things, approaching its end. I think it very unlikely that the problem with my ears will get even a mention on my death certificate! The situation is very different for my friend who is many years younger than me, and for other folk who have been treated for cancer at Colchester Hospital during the past year. For all their sakes I can only hope that there will be a happy and expeditious conclusion to this present crisis and that very few, or not any, patients’ conditions have deteriorated as a result of it.

            The hospital is now ‘in special measures’, the cause of the present crisis is being investigated and steps will no doubt be taken to prevent a recurrence. My own knowledge of the situation is limited to what has been published in the local and national newspapers and announced on radio and tv.   I shall be very surprised though if at the root of the crisis has not been a determination on the part of senior members of the hospital’s professional and administrative staff to hit unrealistic ‘targets’, set at  a high level by people obsessed by statistics and quite ignorant of circumstances ‘on the front line’.

            It must surely be obvious that if an emergency department, and all hospital departments sometimes have to deal with unexpected emergencies, is staffed and equipped only to deal cost-effectively with ‘normal circumstances,’ it will not be capable of dealing with abnormal circumstances when they arise.  There must be sufficient slack to accommodate sickness, holiday absences, staff training, medical and surgical emergencies and so on.  It is ridiculous to expect a consultant to deal with a given number of patients in an hour, or a day. Nor can a midwife or obstetrics nurse deliver a given number of babies in a given time.  The minds of ‘human resources’ managers and time-and-motion experts may work like that, but nature doesn’t!

            Surprisingly Iain Duncan-Smith, the Government’s Work and Pensions Minister (whose knowledge of the conditions in Colchester’s Hospital is unlikely to have been much greater than mine) is reported as having said much the same thing while visiting Colchester on a totally different matter in the height of the crisis.  He too felt that determination to reach ‘targets’ was at the root of Colchester Hospital’s troubles.  Targets, he said, are useful but we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be controlled by them.  Perhaps he was prompted by his own signal failure to hit the targets that he had set himself in carrying out his sweeping welfare and benefit changes, notably the introduction of ‘universal credit’.

            Well, Mr Iain Duncan-Smith is a senior member of a government that has sometimes seemed target obsessed.  Perhaps he’ll pass the news on to his colleagues and persuade them that patients are more important than targets and the well-being of individual men and women more important than statistics.

Clacton’s Problems ……… Contrasting Attitudes

          Clacton-on-Sea is unique in many respects, most of them positive.  We are the only seaside resort in East Anglia still holding an annual Air Show attracting thousands of visitors. We are the holiday resort with the lowest average annual rainfall in the United Kingdom.  Our miles of safe, sandy beaches, cliff-top gardens and lively pier aren’t unique but are the equal of any in England, and much better than most!  We have a lot of which to be proud  - I have lived here for 57 years, well over half my lifetime, and I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else in the world.

            There is a downside though.  While every other district in Essex has a falling crime-rate, ours is rising!   Part of the cause of that is the scarcity of jobs for young people and older alike, made worse by the fact that former prosperous hotels have, thanks to nationally changing holiday habits, been converted into cheap bed-sits. At the same time in the Brooklands area of Jaywick, flimsy properties intended only for temporary summer holiday use, have been used for all-the-year-round living accommodation.  They are cheap to buy or to rent.  Coupled with our proximity to London, these factors have attracted people unable to afford the steadily increasing cost of living in the capital, down to Clacton where they may hope to find cheap accommodation – but can’t find work.

          

           Clacton’s MP, Europhobic climate-change-denying Douglas Carswell has a totally predictable solution to the problem.  ‘We do have a specific problem in the centre of Clacton – and it needs a different style of policing.  Part of that has got to mean police do more stop and searching (but what are they supposed to be searching for?) and be more aggressive with the bedsit guys’.  A nice thought as the ‘season of good will towards all men’ approaches!  I reckon Mr Carswell would have felt really at home in medieval times when migrant ‘sturdy beggars’ were flogged and then driven out of town and told to go back  to the village or town from which they came.

          

            A quite different attitude is that of a group of  unemployed  sixteen to  twenty-five year olds  (I’ve no idea whether or not they include any ‘bedsit guys) who have been helped by the Prince’s Trust to set up an empty store in the town’s Pier Avenue to distribute warm clothing, bedding and food to people in need throughout December.

            The Clacton Gazette quotes Ryan Kavanagh, one of their members, as saying, ‘The idea is to help people less fortunate than us.  If they are struggling through the winter months they can come in and we help them as best we can.  This is especially important in Clacton, where there aren’t many places for people to go if they’re unfortunate enough to living on the streets or need help’

The new ‘Winter Warmer’ shop opens on 2^nd December and the volunteers are busily painting the shop, putting up new shelves, creating a new sign and making everything spic and span for opening day.

They would welcome donations of clothing, shoes, blankets, toys or food.  Donations should be taken to the Citizens Advice Bureau base in Carnarvon Road.  I wonder if Mr Douglas Carswell MP, will be making his way there with donations from one – or both – of his comfortable homes.

Immoral Earnings?

Two long feature articles in a recent issue of Private Eye reveal in some detail the lengths to which two extremely wealthy men, Lord Rothermere owner of the Daily Mail and  Richard Branson, head of the Virgin Empire, go to avoid paying to the UK taxes that lesser mortals (like you and I) pay without question, if without enthusiasm.

Remembering that the Daily Mail recently declared Ed Miliband’s dad, who in World War II served on a destroyer in the Royal Navy, as ‘The man who hated Britain’, Private Eye  described Lord Rothermere as ‘The man who hates (paying any tax in) Britain’.   I find it incredible that some immensely wealthy men and women (Lord Rothermere and Richard Branson are clearly not alone) do not feel it their duty and their privilege to pay a sum that they will hardly miss for the privilege of British citizenship. This has made it possible for them to amass, keep and increase their great wealth while many of their fellow countrymen, men, women and children, rely on charity to feed and clothe themselves and to keep warm in the winter.  

It seems almost equally incredible that there is a small army of solicitors and accountants who derive their own inflated incomes from devising schemes to avoid the even wealthier having to hand over any of their wealth to the government!  It’s all above board and perfectly legal but it is surely ‘living on immoral earnings’.

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