Team Brown-Stuff

The latest edition of Private Eye - the UK's fortnightly satirical magazine - contains an excellent reminder of the key roles played by Ed Miliband and Ed Balls in landing the country in the economic mess we find ourselves in today. 

While everyone is now agreed that the tax avoiding antics of various multi-national companies are a disgrace - the fact is that the rules were changed and relaxed by the last Labour Government. 

So it's a bit rich now to try and lay all the blame on big companies - who are of course an easy target, the new bankers, if you like - when the politicians in charge of the economy at the time were responsbile for the mood music and overall tax regime.

What I would like to see is a all-party approach to tax policy instead of the whole issue being turned into yet another political football - since it can't be too hard to get agreement that people and companies should pay their fair share of tax - and that very wealthy individuals should not be assigned a tax rate which is less than that of a low paid cleaner.       

HP Sauce

TEAM BROWN-STUFF

Labour's Ed Miliband and Ed Balls have finally woken up to corporate tax avoidance, the former taking the not very bold step of laying into Google and the latter setting out some tentative policies to deal with the problem. As with the financial crisis, what neither has addressed is their role in creating the mess in the first place.

Both were intimates of chancellor Gordon Brown from the early days of the New Labour government: Miliband as his special adviser until 2002; Balls as his chief economic adviser before he himself became an MP in 2005.

This was the period in which British tax avoidance opportunities were radically opened up - firstly in 1998 with the scrapping of corporation tax on company dividends which had ensured that companies paid at least some tax; but equally importantly through New Labour's "light touch" approach to tax administration and financial regulation.

Fast forward several years and these moves have brought protesters on to the streets and sparked parliamentary campaigns. Vodafone and Goldman Sachs won their infamous dodgy tax deals , while HM Revenue Customs conspicuously failed to extract the tax it could , even under flawed tax laws, from the likes of Starbucks, Google, Amazon and others in scandals that are as much "light touch" legacies as Northern Rock and RBS.

The Brown's crew neglect of the tax system extended beyond corporate tax to super-rich individuals too, as the "non-domiciled" tax break that allows some of the wealthiest to escape tax on offshore income was extended, despite promises to end it, and as private equity bosses were given tax rates famously lower than their cleaners."