As yet another firm gets into trouble in social media for obeying the law and only paying the tax they were required to, time to bang the tax avoidance drum again in the form of a little ditty – and just remember tax avoidance is bad.
On the first day of the tax year, my accountant sent to me, an ISA that is all tax free…
I know there are more important things going on, but I’ve already done most of the digging on this because it’s the sort of thing I enjoy and I’ve been accused of taking a deliberately contrary position just for the sake of it. the reason for this accusation was because I suggested that the whole Over weight haters incident could have been a hoax for publicity purposes. I wasn’t alone in thinking this and Rosa Mundi has a very good article on some of the reasons why it seems likely it’s a scam. Much of what I’m going to say I already said in comments on that article but, as I like that sort of thing, I want to go into it in a bit more detail.
The comment that got me into trouble was along these lines:
A few nasty cards – £5
Giving away clothes – £500 (less as that’s presumably retail cost)
A few nice cards – £25
People to hand out both – £200
A domain name and website – £20 (probably more as companies always pay more than they need to)
Loads of media coverage and positive publicity – priceless?
Yeah cynical, but read Rosa Mundi’s article. I’ll now present my own arguments which in the first case are mainly just a repetition of that. For all the noise about “passengers” being given those “cards” I can only find a single picture of a single card and it seems only two people have actually reported getting them. If this was some sort of haters campaign then if other people had received such cards you’d have expected at least a few more to have surfaced. So what it looks like is that we have one of two choices here:
1) It was some lone idiot being nasty and a retail firm with a really on the ball PR team
2) A cynical PR team of a retail firm staging the whole event to get a load of good publicity on the cheap.
Yesterday a man was deliberately pushed under a tube train at Kentish town station and thankfully a man has been arrested in relation to this. This was reported in the news, but if you look on twitter there’s no hashtag and outside of the news channels what you’ll find is largely:
The man who was pushed under the train suffered life threatening injuries and the crime is being treated as attempted murder, by comparison the day before someone got handed a card accusing them of being fat due to eating too much. This made them cry and left them a bit upset, but no worries twitter was there with a hashtag and they got offered hundreds of pounds worth of clothing to make them feel better. I’ve not found any hint of anyone offering to help the man in any way to deal with their life threatening injuries, I suspect they probably could do with a new set of clothes at the very least. Whilst i would never wish to dictate who or what people pay attention to, contrasting the two responses can’t help but make me suspect people’s priorities are really rather screwed up.
"a youngster trying to defend from a moral standpoint themselves living an immoral existence." - Harbringer
