Does the UK Prime Minister know what a conflict of interest is, even after it’s bitten him on the bum?
Two issues have been starring in recent headlines, the Prime Minister’s late father’s offshore unit trust arrangements and the 9m pounds’ worth of brochures explaining the government’s viewpoint on the EU. Although sounding like rather disparate issues, underlying both are crass examples of conflicts of interest.
Instead of using money allocated to both sides of the EU argument, the government’s excuse for spending extra public money on a brochure advocating the Prime Minister’s stance, is that the public need to know the ‘facts’. However, it would be highly unlikely that the Prime Minister, also leader of the staying- in campaign, would be able – with the best will in the world – to detach himself from his own viewpoint. But he’s gone further, abrogating any pretence at impartiality, by recommending staying in the EU in the brochure. If the Prime Minister was so keen on giving the public the facts, rather than propaganda, he should have stepped aside and given the £9m funds to a manifestly more independent organisation: one that was agreed to by both sides of the argument.
What makes this worse is that within the cabinet and the parliamentary party, there are a goodly number of Conservative MPs advocating an exit from the EU. Why these cabinet ministers couldn’t have taken a stand against such a blatant example of bias and disreputable use of public funds – particularly as their own viewpoint is undermined at public expense – is baffling. The shadow of the paedophile scandals darkening society has lingered long because of others deferentially standing idly by. It appears that such selective blindness in the face of wrongdoing isn’t just restricted to the paedophile scandals.
The leaking of a massive number of files from Mossack Fonseca, a Panama-based law firm, revealed that the PM’s late father, Ian Cameron, had an offshore-based unit trust fund. Despite the embarrassing number of attempts by the Prime Minister to clarify his and his late father’s position after initially saying it was a ‘private matter’, the most disturbing aspect lies in David Cameron’s personal intervention to prevent EU transparency rules affecting offshore tax trusts. In a letter to Herman van Rompuy, the then serving European Council president, the Prime Minister successfully urged that it was “clearly important we recognise the important differences between companies and trusts”. This was despite warnings that such a distinction could create a loophole for tax avoidance.
It would surely have been wise for the Prime Minister to have declared an interest that was subsequently revealed by the Panama papers. It also throws a completely different light on his attitude in 2012 to legal tax avoidance which ironically has been his main defence of his own and his late father’s offshore tax arrangements. In June 2012, from the Prime Minister’s own mouth had come the words ‘morally wrong’ when describing the tax arrangements of the comedian Jimmy Carr. It would be interesting to know where ‘morally wrong’ sits in relation to evasion (illegal) and avoidance (legal) of tax. It only highlights the shortcomings of the tax laws. To transform the rather hazy ‘morally wrong’ into the crystal clarity of ‘illegal’ only takes the merest tweaking of the tax laws. In terms of democracy, the public needs to be able to live within the law, and without being berated for being ‘morally wrong’, and it’s the government’s duty to make this possible. Tax law should be no different from any other law in this respect.
When rebuking Jimmy Carr, the Prime Minister, hypocritically as we know now, said this: “People work hard, they pay their taxes, they save up to go to one of his shows. They buy the tickets. He is taking the money from those tickets and he, as far as I can see, is putting all of that into some very dodgy tax avoiding schemes.”
Still, with some kind of karma, at least Jimmy Carr has lots of new material for his next stand-up tour. I trust he uses it recklessly.
It seems strange that the PM is able to publically criticise a celebrity comedian and his “very dodgy tax avoiding schemes” that were legal, and yet the honourable member for Bolsover, Dennis Skinner MP, isn’t allowed to call the PM “dodgy Dave” in Parliament for the same thing. Actually, it’s worse for David Cameron. He argued for, and received, dispensations from the EU for – as we now know – his and his father’s particular method of tax avoidance.
