The banker loving, baby-eating Tory party thread (regenerated)

[chrisp65]

I'm beginning to feel real sympathy for this government. Poor bastards have only been in power 6 years how on earth can they influence anything.

Cameron had to cut his holiday short to deal with whining steelworkers. Poor Javid Sajid had to take three days to come all the way back from his planned little holiday in Australia to tie himself up in knots trying not to lie in person (anybody see or hear that ITN interview? squirmingly uncomfortable lying in half finished sentences at it best / worst).

But that's neither here nor there. Whilst George Osbourne has been chancellor, the nationalised RBS has lost a further £20,000,000,000 but during those same six years have stopped paying bonuses to branch staff, but luckily, have managed to continue paying bonuses to managers. Since 2010 RBS have paid out almost £2.000.000,000 in bonuses for it's highest earners. After 'donating' a cool million pound to charity in one year, the boss of RBS still had a further £2,380,000 of salary left over. Phew.

But, there's nothing the Prime Minister and Chancellor of six years could do about that. I understand.

Just as I understand that people that inherit million pound houses are unduly harmed by inheritance tax.

Just as I understand the poor and disabled must be seen to contribute most to austerity.

Just as I understand, if we want the Chinese to finance our nuclear power stations, we must accept their dumped steel.

There is nothing this government could do about any of this.

But I'm alright, I've got my xbox and my holiday. So everything is ok.

 

[HanoiVillan]

On 4/2/2016 at 18:21, tonyh29 said:

How many Steel workers have actually lost their jobs since the Tata announcement ? genuine question as I was under the impression the scotch land plant had been purchased and another one is currently under offer , port talbot i don't know about 

How many bankers lost their jobs ? RBS have lost 90,000 jobs since the 2008 bail out  and It was  reported that 100,000 banker in 2015 alone lost their jobs ( that's European wide to be fair but I'd imagine a big chunk of those would be Uk based )

so why are steel workers jobs sacred and bankers jobs not ?

I typed out a really long answer to this, but then deleted it because I'm not sure if the question is rhetorical?

[Mozzavfc]

I'm expecting some very worried conservatives today, including Cameron, over the leaked off shore bank accounts 

[OutByEaster?]

3 hours ago, Mozzavfc said:

I'm expecting some very worried conservatives today, including Cameron, over the leaked off shore bank accounts 

I doubt it, it doesn't look like the CIA the source of the leak revealed any documents about anyone from within the US trade circle.

 

[Amsterdam_Neil_D]

4 hours ago, Mozzavfc said:

I'm expecting some very worried conservatives today, including Cameron, over the leaked off shore bank accounts 

They are Tories so they don't need to worry about silly things like this,  that's why they are what they are to have no worries about money or getting caught.  You have to admire the sheer hypocrisy of Cameron and the fact that he can and will keep a straight face,  we are "all in it together remember".  They have many minions working the wheels at the moment to make it all go away I suspect.    

 

 

[Xann]

Anyone surprised?

This becomes more interesting if Putin uses the secret services at his disposal for a bit of tit for tat.

[tonyh29]

33 minutes ago, Xann said:

Anyone surprised?

only that it's in the Tory party thread when all the leaders caught so far are socialists

 

( yes , I know that they aren't all socialists)

[Xann]

1 minute ago, tonyh29 said:

only that it's in the Tory party thread when all the leaders caught so far are socialists

I agree, there's a better thread for this.

We can always bring it up later if some retaliatory mud sticks 

[tonyh29]

I'm sure it will be when rather than If

 

thinking about it wasn't lord Ashcroft in there already  and rumour is Cameron's dad is on the list

[chrisp65]

yeah, Cameron's dad is supposed to be on the list. Doubtless there will also be links to the Johnson* family and minor royals and the Millibands* and Jeremy Paxman* et al.

But will it really tell us anything we didn't 'know'? Rich people can spend money on lawyers and accountants to preserve the maximum of their money. I'm sure lots of the Blair's property empire is in 'trust' or in the name of other companies or run by management firms that turn out to actually be the Blair's kids etc..

I don't think the real story is how someone like Blair* hides his money. I think it's how he got it in the first place.

 

* insert name of choice to suit your own prejudices

 

 

 

[blandy]

15 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

I don't think the real story is how someone like Blair* hides his money. I think it's how he got it in the first place.

Partly, but also that the tax havens, financial shufflers and facilitators and so on exist in such high numbers, and just how many of them are British, or british dependent territory based. We basically invented and set up tax havens and all the various financial shenanigans.

That lots of rich people then avail themselves of them, including crooks like Putin, plus various other detestable scumbags, as well more normal-ish rich folk shouldn't be and isn't a surprise.

[Davkaus]

A Downing Street spokesperson had said that the claims against Cameron's father are a private matter, and they have no comment.

Jimmy Carr's weren't though, eh, Dave?

[tonyh29]

11 hours ago, Davkaus said:

A Downing Street spokesperson had said that the claims against Cameron's father are a private matter, and they have no comment.

Jimmy Carr's weren't though, eh, Dave?

it's what happens when you jump on bandwagon , things have a habit of coming back and biting you on the butt

 

But regarding this story , it's only the Company (Blairmore) that was * avoiding tax liabilities isn't it ? by not paying any UK tax on it's profits ....As I understood it Its individual investors are responsible for their personal tax affairs and liable to tax in their own country.

 

I say was because the company moved it residency  to Ireland in 2012 and has been running under EU regulation since then

[Xann]

We knew all this. Rich people haven't been paying tax for yonks. Even Ken bloody Livingstone set himself up offshore. The UK's dependencies are globally the worst offenders.

Why the fuss now? Who leaked this?

Quote

‘Hey, remember that pig?’ asks Cameron

DAVID Cameron would prefer if Britain went back to talking about his romantic liaison with a dead pig.

After it was revealed that most of the people he knows are directors of an investment consultancy in Guam, the prime minister has been trying to change the subject as effectively as possible.

Cameron refused to confirm whether he has any money still invested in offshore tax havens, but said that he did some ‘silly things at university’ which he would now be happy to discuss to the exclusion of all other subjects.

A Downing Street spokesman added said “The fact his father was a tax-dodger, his whole upbringing was paid for by tax-dodging, his sense of right and wrong was taught to him by a tax dodger and his refusal to confirm his current tax dodging status has no bearing on his ability to deal with tax dodging.

“Anyway, what about that pig, eh?”

Dailymash

 

 

Edited April 5, 2016 by Xann

[tonyh29]

yep it's nothing new , it's not even illegal  ... you can play the immoral card , but it's also immoral to do lots of other things that people aren't paying any attention to .

this will go the way of the Syrian refugees that everyone cared so much about  for about 5 minutes after the picture of a dead baby ,  of the 5 years or so it's been going on for.

 

Edited April 5, 2016 by tonyh29

[Xann]

Quote

About the Panama Papers

By Frederik Obermaier, Bastian Obermayer, Vanessa Wormer and Wolfgang Jaschensky

Clicky

[Davkaus]

1 hour ago, tonyh29 said:

yep it's nothing new , it's not even illegal  ... you can play the immoral card , but it's also immoral to do lots of other things that people aren't paying any attention to .

 

I'd agree with this. There are two reasons I don't think this should be a problem. Firstly, it's not illegal, and I have no real problem with not paying more tax than you have to, the second is that it was his father, and why should Cameron be judged for what his father did?

Unfortunately, by publicly condemning other people for legally avoiding tax, and specifically saying that taking legal steps to minimise tax payments are 'morally wrong', Cameron has made himself look like a bit of a dick by refusing to comment when it's his own family. As you  say, bandwagoning is never a good idea, but he was happy to look like the big man, who would take no nonsense when it was the likes of Jimmy Carr, rather than his dad.

In fairness to Cameron, he did publicly back Miliband when his father's Marxist views were being used to criticise Ed's suitability to be PM.

[blandy]

1 hour ago, tonyh29 said:

yep it's nothing new , it's not even illegal  ... you can play the immoral card , but it's also immoral to do lots of other things that people aren't paying any attention to .

this will go the way of the Syrian refugees that everyone cared so much about  for about 5 minutes after the picture of a dead baby ,  of the 5 years or so it's been going on for.

I dunno Tony. I suspect because there's so much evidence of wrong doing that the story will go on for a long time. it may quieten down then burst back into life, as other stuff happens, but there would seem to be huge evidence of criminality, money laundering, corruption and so on.

The morality thing matters, not as a one off, but because it's a pattern. There's been a trend over the recent years of anger and protest against companies and individuals that have been tax dodging - from UK uncut and those other ones who wear the masks, and did those sit ins in London and NY etc. I forgot their name. But Vodafone, Starbucks, Amazon, Google, Jimmy Carr and other individuals - it's an ongoing story and thing. It'll only go away if/when people at the bottom of the food chain stop being beasted and everyone starts being treated fairly.

Plus there's an eff-ton of illegality going on for the news to deed upon. Genie out of bottle this time, because there's cast iron evidence.

[Xann]

God bothering, climate change denying and conservative Daily Mail writer Peter Hitchens has an awakening.

Quote

PETER HITCHENS: Privatisation! Free trade! Shares for all! The great con that ruined Britain

By Peter Hitchens for The Mail on Sunday

I am so sorry now that I fell for the great Thatcher-Reagan promise. I can’t deny that I did. I believed all that stuff about privatisation and free trade and the unrestrained market. I think I may even have been taken in by the prophecies of a great share-owning democracy.

I thought – this now seems especially funny – that private British Telecom would be automatically better than crabby old Post Office Telephones. 

I think anyone who has ever tried to contact BT when things go wrong would now happily go back to the days of nationalisation. Soviet-style slowness was bad, but surely better than total indifference.

And it’s all very well being able to buy cheap goods from all over the world, as we fling our borders wide and abandon the protection of our own industries that everyone says is so wicked and will make us poor and backward.

How I miss the old names of trusted brands, and the knowledge that these things had been made for generations by my fellow countrymen.

But the new broom swept, and it swept pretty clean. In towns I know well, car assembly lines, railway workshops, glassworks engineering plants, chocolate factories vanished or shrank to nothing. 

A journey across the heart of England, once an exhilarating vista of muscular manufacturing, especially glorious by night, turned into archaeology. Now, if it looked like a factory, it was really a ruin.

Someone usually pops up at this stage and says that we still manufacture a lot. If you say so, but then why are the drug-dealers so busy in our new factory-free industrial areas, and why can I never buy anything that was made here, except from absurdly expensive luxury shops? 

Why are our warships made of foreign steel? Why are the few factories that do exist almost always foreign-owned, their fate decided far away by people who don’t much care about this country?

And why is our current-account deficit with the rest of the world the worst it’s ever been in peacetime, and nearly as bad as it was during the Great War that first bankrupted this country a century ago? 

If it’s all been so beneficial, why do so many of the containers that arrive in British ports, full of expensive imports, leave this country empty?

Sure, some things have got cheaper, and there are a lot more little treats and luxuries available. 

The coffee and the restaurants are better – but the essentials of life are harder to find than ever: a good life and an honest place; a solid, modest home big enough to house a small family in a peaceful, orderly landscape; good local schools open to all who need them; reasonably paid secure work for this generation and the next; competent government and wise laws. 

These have become luxuries, unattainable for millions who once took them for granted.

And now the remains of our steel industry are vanishing, not because nothing can be done (any determined government could save it if it really wanted to) but because we’re all still worshipping that free-market dogma that captivated us 30 years ago. 

I never thought I’d yearn for the National Coal Board or British Steel or, good heavens, British Leyland. But I do begin to feel I was fooled into thinking that what was coming next would be any better. At this rate it may soon be much, much worse.

Mail Online

 

Edited April 5, 2016 by Xann

[Davkaus]

I'm too young to remember the days of telephones from the Post Office, but weren't waiting lists literally years long? BT may be shite at times, but they're not that bad.

It has the whiff of an old bloke who insists "everything was better in the old days".