It’s the nuanced political analysis that you’ve, no doubt, come to expect from Liberal Vision…
But seriously! Why would anyone or any corporation pay more tax than the government tells them they legally are obliged to?
Bashing corporations for legally avoiding tax is like bashing celebrities for wearing fur because it’s easier than persuading a motorcycle gang to give up leather.
The right thing to do is to make the badly needed changes to tax code. And yet our public servants don’t. Why? Because that would just be too hard for the little darlings!
I know that doing the right thing is tough. Doing the job that you’re paid to do and that you campaigned hard to be able to do in the last election must be so hard for you.
If it’s not obvious in the tax code how much more tax a company is arbitrarily meant to be paying then what exactly are the accountants meant to do? Just pull a figure from the sweet blue sky and pay that? That’s what Starbuck’s did. It’s like ‘hush money’ – we’ll give you £20 Million and you kids leave us alone now. How on Earth is this a proper way for companies to function when it’s just not obvious how much tax corporations and wealthy individuals are meant to be paying?
And yet there are not truly meaningful efforts from the Lib Dems or the Tories to reform the tax code. So you can bash Google, Amazon and Starbucks all you want but they’re only following the law and the people who make our laws don’t seem to want to change them. This is a missed opportunity. Which is a shame; it’s needed now more than ever.