Robert Peston on THAT Monbiot Tax Heist Article

I've seen your thread - it's very good - the link I posted was more in support of your point than anything else ;)

TCNY - I argue that the banks are paying the right amount of tax in my thread here:

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/politics/1154984-CinnabarReds-tax-thread

Come and take a look!

Jackstarb - I've tried very hard but I just can't follow Murphy's logic that the Oxford report supports his theory that the corporate tax gap is £12 billion. Either he's far too intelligent for me to follow his logic, or he's talking garbage.

CinnabarRed - Banks are probably paying about the right amount of tax

The French like London because it is ace

I read Murphy's blog religiously!

I wish he won't obscure his occasional excellent points with the meaningless guff he more usually spouts....

Case in point: he's arguing that the reason January's personal tax receipts were up on the prior year is because of the 50% income tax rate. Er, no, Richard. Because January's tax deadline was the last one before the 50% tax rate kicks in... Surely a man as well informed as you should know that?

Apart from anything else, he posts upwards of a dozen articles per day. How can he possibly read and digest so much information? It's taken me the best part of the morning to verify the points I've made above.

There was an article in The Economist about the growth in the French Diaspora in the UK and especially London. They seem to some here because of the finance industry, lower corporation tax, and fewer French people.

Some interesting statistics were published by the Oxford University Centre For Business Taxation (or the Centre For Business Non-Taxation, as Richard Murphy wittily calls them. But there's bad blood between them because Murphy calls them biased and they call him uninformed).

Anyway - here's some stuff from Oxford University, that was compiled from HMRC anonymised data. My comments are in square brackets.

1. In 2010 the UK had the lowest corporate tax rate in the G7 and the 7th lowest corporate tax rate in the G20.

1. For more than 25 years, the UK CT rate has been well below the G7 average.

1. However, UK CT revenue has consistently been above the G7 average. [This is because we have a wide tax base to which we apply a relatively low tax rate.]

1. The top 1 percent of all companies by size pay 81% of UK CT.

1. By far the largest share - 87% - of CT is paid by multinational groups (only 13% is paid by companies from purely domestic operations).

1. Financial services companies (i.e banks) paid £46 billion of CT in 2007/08, falling to £36 billion in 2009/10 [presumably due to tax losses incurred in 2008/09 - but £36 billion is still a BIG figure].

1. Around 14% of all companies making a book profit (i.e. that have positive Earnings Before Interest & Tax in their statutory accounts) do not show a charge for tax in their accounts [there can be several reasons for this: group relief from other group companies; tax deductions in excess of profit due to specific reliefs such as R&D credits; non-taxable income such as gains from the disposals of subsidiary companies. However, tax avoidance is another possibility].

1. There is evidence that the largest 100 companies in each sector pay less tax (as a percentage of EBIT) than the sectoral average [which does seem to add some weight to the argument from campaigners that the biggest companies participate in some form of tax avoidance.]

1. Real Estate and Mining companies pay the highest tax rates (that is, they pay the highest percentage of their trading profits over as tax) at 35.9% and 34.1% respectively. [That actually surprises me, given the heat from tax campaigners over extractive industries "stealing from the poor through tax avoidance". I would expect that some of this is due to sector specific taxaxtion rather than just CT, but does seem to show that mining is the last sector that needs country-by-country reporting].

Out of interest, the lowest is post and communications at 6.67% of trading profits paid to HMRC as tax. Utilities also look very low at 12.5%.

Banks are 6th highest (out of 30 sectors) with 21.9% of their trading profits paid to HMRC. [That quite surprises me too. I didn't expect the banks to be quite so tax paying, given that the sector is dominated by big players who have the resources to try to avoid tax if they want to.]

Yes and the Daily Mail-Guardian axis has further been strengthened by their convergent concerns re. the census.

Why don't they just formally merge and could cut down on renting of commercial space etc?

Oh dear, I hope not.

good point jackstarb. I do occasionally look at it, to see if the public is wide awake in the CIF comment section. Just checked Monbiot's Environment blog, and am pleased to see that the public is wide awake. They have most probably been well informed by Daily Mail articles. What would we do without the Daily Mail? It doesn't bear thinking about.

I think you can find Ludwig's column in the Guardian's weekend edition, but I am not sure, as I don't like throwing money away.

'There is no peer review in journalism. That's why we value academic papers more than The Daily Mail.'

Many of us have come to trust the Daily Mail, due to its outstanding record in presenting the truth and cutting through the tripe over many years.

The Daily Mail was one of the world's first sources to inform us of Climategate, when more "respected" news sources remained strangely silent.

It all really depends on who the scientists are and who the poor peer reviewers are. Professor Ludwig von Drake, Donald Duck's uncle from Austria, is a nice enough chap, but the Daily Mail would never employ him.

i usually can't stand Peston but it was a good article.

It's unfair to say other news outlets didn't follow up the story - actually many wrote about it when it was announced in December but it was a bit of a non-story really, as Peston shows.

Peston (and Monbiot) also failed to point out that the proposals were first made under Labour so it's not even a specifically Tory policy.

Yes, I agree word but as I said in my post these strict criteria are rarely applied with such ardour to hacks sucking up to or directly on the payroll of that system (ie the overriding majority).

I'll still read Monbiot even though I find his writing a tad contorted at times.

Niceguy2 - There is no peer review in journalism. That's why we value academic papers more than The Daily Mail.

Unless you are Claig.

Yes, Scandanavian countries do tax but not enormously so. We are at about 40% Denmark is at about 50, Sweden 49, Norway and Finland at about 43.

We are at 39.

So yes they do tax more than us but only at the max by the amount that we tax more than, say, the US. (28%).

Your actual LOW tax territories charge much less - Hong Kong for instance - charge 12%.

Compared to OECD countries we are solid mid-table performers when it comes to tax.

glasnost the first rule of any journo is that if you are going to say unpalatable things about the status quo...they had better be verifiable.

Otherwise you will be undermined.

Monbiot knows that perfectly well. He is not some sap who doesn;'t know the score.

Everyone makes mistakes, Monboit is only human after all. But where was the peer review? Where was the editor? Did anyone check the facts? Or did they just cut & paste his article into the paper?

To attempt to write off Monbiot due to this article is clutching at straws and isn't cricket.

He's one of the few courageously anti system media types left. If he got a few facts wrong or tripped over his own feet somewhat in a bid to prove his own preconceived theses does not an unreliable commentator make and his shortcomings on this occasion are ones tolerated all the time in journalists/commentators supporting the system status quo.

Good article.

Actually, I like Monbiot. I think he's a good writer and his climate work is always highly readable.

His tax heist piece was ill thought out and no one has run with it.

I hope it doesn't ruin his cred on climate, because he was making headway there, I think.

I think the Coalition is right- I'd say that in general the more senior you are, the less location matters. Also, if the decision is (e.g.) where to put a factory, then no-one has to move. You can just hire locally for the plant. A few people from HQ might have to go and live in (eg) Poland for a few years to oversee the build, but they could just weekly commute. The world is getting a lot smaller and places which seemed so far flung a couple of decades ago now seem like they're just next door. This is part of the problem we have at the moment because downward pressure on wages due to inequalities in global purchasing power is intensifying as it's never been easier to relocate some of your business overseas.

On the Ford issue, when Ford closed Dagenham, they lost about 3,500 jobs. However, they'd just axed another 4,000 in Germany/Belgium (in 1999/2000) so I'm not sure we can say that the higher European redundancy costs protected those jobs. There was some transfer of Dagenham production to Cologne, but that was because the plant was newer so they could switch between models more quickly (i.e. they needed to be able to do shorter production runs of more models) and because Cologne could make a Fiesta 6hrs faster than Dagenham. Therefore it was much a decision about which plant was most suitable for their future needs than which workforce