#PandoraPapers cache includes 11.9m files from companies hired by the ultra rich to create offshore structures & trusts in tax havens, exposing the secret offshore affairs of 35 world leaders, including current & former presidents, PMs & heads of state.
The files include disclosures about major donors to the Conservative party, raising difficult questions for Boris Johnson as his party meets for its annual conference.
More than 100 billionaires feature in the leaked data, as well as celebrities, rock stars and business leaders.
The Blairs bought a £6.5m office in Marylebone by acquiring a British Virgin Islands (BVI) offshore company. While the move was not illegal, the deal highlights a loophole that has enabled wealthy property owners not to pay a tax that is commonplace for ordinary Britons.
“When you have world leaders, when you have politicians, when you have public officials, all using the secrecy and all using this world, then I don’t think we’re going to see an end to it.”
“The Panama papers on steroids."
At least $11.3 TRILLION in wealth is held offshore: “This is money that is being lost to treasuries around the world & money that could be used to recover from Covid. We’re losing out because some people are gaining. It’s as simple as that."
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In 1997, Jacob Rees-Mogg's dad, William Rees-Mogg wrote the 'The Sovereign Individual: The Coming Economic Revolution & How to Survive & Prosper' in which he shared his prophetic views on capitalism & chaos, that have fascinating links to his son’s enthusiasm for Brexit.
The Sovereign Individual opens with a quote from Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia: “The future is disorder.”
He wasn't wrong.
The book predicted that digital technology would make the world hugely more competitive, unequal & unstable. Societies would splinter. Taxes would be evaded.
Govt would gradually wither away, & welfare states “will simply become unfinanceable”.
In such a harsh world, only the most talented, self-reliant, technologically adept person – “the sovereign individual” – would thrive.
Libertarians across the world embraced this worldview.
Only THREE times since 1918, has a vote swing of over 9% been recorded: to a National Govt in 1931, & to Labour in 1945 & 2017.
*The UK's antiquated FPTP electoral system means seats are more important than either votes or vote share.
On three occasions, the party with the most votes did not win the most seats.
In 1929 and in February 1974, Labour polled fewer votes than the Conservatives but had more MPs. In 1951 the Conservatives won the most seats, but received fewer votes than Labour.
At #GE2019, Johnson's Tories got just 329,767 more votes than in 2017, but an 80 seat majority., despite fewer than 3 in 10 of the electorate voting Tory.
A typically measured, nuanced, balanced & not at all bitter, unhinged, provocative or resentful Nick Cohen, who has been on quite a journey since describing Zionism as "colonialism" in the early 2000s, to demonising the wrong sort of left-wingers in the pages of The Spectator.
Nick Cohen was for many years a critic of Tony Blair's foreign policy, but then began to modify his views after 2001, advocating the 2003 invasion of Iraq & becoming a critic of the Stop the War Coalition.
Curious.
In 2006, he was a leading signatory to the Euston Manifesto, which proposed what it termed "a new political alignment", in which the left would take a stronger stance in favour of military intervention & against so-called anti-American attitudes - also signed by Julie Burchill.
'Deregulation' has been the mantra of successive Govts. Its proponents claim it increases competition, drives down prices, & drives up consumer satisfaction.
With gas suppliers folding, prices rising, & satisfaction plummeting, the current debacle suggests the opposite is true.
Although deregulation is going VERY well for some...
In 2004, an IT contract for the tax credit system was awarded to Capgemini, Fujitsu & BT - one of the biggest ever IT outsourcing contracts, at a value of £2.6 billion, now risen to £8.5bn!
Where vaccine hesitancy continues, cynicism has bred the harsher view that the hesitant publics are anti-science and/or anti-expertise.
Yet research into science and the publics lends strong support to a different view, which it is very important to understand.
Public attitudes regarding scientific claims turn crucially on epistemic trust (an individual's willingness to consider new knowledge as trustworthy) rather than familiarity with science itself: it follows that it is poor trust in expert sources that engender vaccine hesitancy.
Remember back in 2014, when @unitetheunion released a list of 70 MPs with proven links to private healthcare providers, & ALL OF THEM voted in favour of the Health & Social Care Act, a bill that went a long way towards privatising swathes of the #NHS?
Some of the current & former MPs with proven links to healthcare providers:
Sajid Javid
Priti Patel
Kwarsi Kwateng
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Amber Rudd
Nadhim Zahawi
Oliver Letwin
IDS
David Cameron
David Davis
Michael Fallon
Liam Fox
Jeremy Hunt
Penny Mordaunt
John Redwood
Jo Swinson