Everyday tax avoidance

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So once more tax is in the news and the world and their dog seems to up in arms about people “avoiding” tax. Tax avoidance seems to currently be the fashionable thing to hate and who cares about the law or justice. Many people have said it before but it seems it’s worth repeating, tax evasion is illegal and naughty, tax avoidance is legal and is actually sometimes used by the state to encourage certain behaviors. The Government wanted more people to invest in film making so they gave tax relief to people that invested in films. So the government wanted people to avoid tax by investing in the films. The EU is designed so that companies only pay tax once in the EU, it is designed so that companies don’t pay tax everywhere they do business but only in the country of their choosing. This is deliberate. So if we want to stop people being tax efficient (as it used to be called) then we should be asking the Government to change the tax laws rather than attacking companies for obeying the law. It is also worth noting that the UK has the most complex tax system in the world, which isn’t exactly conducive to efficient tax collection. All of which brings me to the point I was stumbling towards, Mr. Fink recently got taken to task by the press for describing his arrangements as “vanilla tax avoidance”, which caused much amusement for some comedians. Apparently we should all be paying our bit (whatever that means), so if you agree with that and the general anti-tax avoidance zeitgeist then if you’ve ever done any of the following you better stump up to the treasury, because you’ve been avoiding tax:

  • Bought things on a buy one get one free offer
  • Joined a work place pension scheme
  • Taken advantage of a bike to work scheme
  • Bought an environmentally friendly car
  • Made home brew
  • Grown and smoked your own tobacco
  • Sold something on e-bay without declaring it
  • Paid or been paid cash in hand without declaring it
  • Collected wood to burn in a stove
  • Given to charity as part of a payroll giving scheme
  • Upcycled anything
  • Baked your own cakes, made sweets
  • Made your own clothes
  • Been on a booze cruise
  • Ordered anything from a country within the EU with a lower tax rate
  • Ordered goods from outside the EU without paying import and related taxes

That will do you for starters. Yes some of them are “normal” behaviors – but for example if you’d gone to a shop to buy that cake rather than make it yourself you’d have paid VAT. So by making your own cake – congratulations you’ve avoided paying tax. I’m sure I’ve missed loads of other ways we can all avoid paying “our fair share” – do please let me know any I’ve missed in the comments. Now I’m off to avoid more tax by cooking my own meal rather than eating out.

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When is a Muslim not a Muslim?

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He's not a Muslim! I’m quite sure that other people have covered this better than I will, or they will do shortly. I’m also quite sure this isn’t anything terribly new, however if I read one more comment saying:
“They’re not a Muslim”
I think I shall possibly have to at the very least have a very stiff Gin no matter what the time of day. I thought that in this day of identity politics we have to respect how people self identify, and an awful lot of people going round beheading people, burning people and doing other not very nice things seem to self identify as Muslim. Now you may argue that they don’t represent the majority of Muslims – fair enough. You might argue that they are a tiny minority – fair enough. You may even argue that they are utter maroons who use Islam as an excuse for the evil that they do – fine we can have that argument. However please could you stop saying they’re not Muslims. They think they’re Muslims, they claim they are carrying out their actions in the name of Islam – they self identify as Muslims. they are not dead parrots, they are not pining for the Fjords they are bloody Muslims! They may or may not be very good Muslims, they may not be very nice Muslims, they may not be following a version of Islam that you agree with – but they are most definitely Muslims. Unless of course you want to claim it’s all part of some huge false-flag operation, in which case we really probably don’t have much to talk about – although I do a nice line in tin foil hats you might be interested in.

Just because they’ve done something not very nice doesn’t instantly cause them to cease being Muslims. They may be a “very naughty boy” but they are also still a Muslim. Responding to every unpleasantness with the refrain “they’re not a Muslim” is ludicrous. It makes as much sense as claiming:

  • The IRA weren’t Irish
  • Westboro Baptists aren’t Christian
  • Child abusing priests aren’t Catholic
  • The Khmer Rouge weren’t Cambodian
  • The Nazi’s weren’t German

I could go on but I hope you get the idea. In all of these cases it may not be the majority, it may not have popular support but that doesn’t magically remove them from the groups they are members of. So could we stop declaring people to be “not Muslims” just because we’d rather they weren’t when they quite clearly think they are? Or you could of course just keep doing this:
Bury your head in the sand

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Technologically clueless

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Once more our glorious leaders have demonstrated to the world that they are what was once known as cluebait. Sadly this is an all to common occurrence, which is a problem given how much they bang on about wanting the UK to be a technological power house.

Just last month our glorious leader wanted to ban WhatsApp and SnapChat because it’s difficult for spooks to spy on them. Obviously no one had bothered to tell him that unless you also ban the technology that makes online banking, shopping, b2b and the entire internet secure it would take about 30 seconds for someone to work round this. Way back in the day the US also tried to ban encryption and that didn’t work so well for them, so trying to visit that again does make you look a bit thick, mind you that doesn’t stop the puritans hankering after prohibition. So assuming that you don’t ban encryption, vital for all of the actually useful and taxable bits of the internet, setting up a spook proof chat system merely requires some cheap server hosting, free software, a free security certificate and to turn off logging. Of course if the spooks hack your system then they can spy on you, but the same is true of things like WhatsApp and such. Alternatively if you ban encryption (really not going to happen) then you’ve killed all online commerce, so maybe you just need to license it and keep a list of all the sites that are allowed it and block any import of such naughty technology which can be in digital or printed form. If somehow you manage that people might have to revert to using pen and paper to set up the initial security and there are loads of historically proven ways of doing that. So really to suggest that you might want to ban such things merely serves to demonstrate that you are a clueless maroon of the first water.

That though was last month and even a week they tell me is a short time in politics. Not wanting to be left out of the clueless cabaret an all party group of MP’s want’s to ban internet trolls. The politicians do at least on this occasion note “that such policing will be tricky, both for law enforcement and the social media websites in question.”. This is as they say an understatement. Let us for the moment assume that the ability to block and ignore people isn’t enough and that some additional powers are needed beyond all of the existing laws against hate speech and the like. If that’s the case are we talking about actually tracking down the individual who’s trolling/doing nasty things? If so I believe we already have the laws needed and of course then you can monitor the person concerned, but if we’re talking about short circuiting that process what can we actually do?

Consider our hypothetical troll, someone has made a complaint about them and suitable people in authority have considered this report and found it valid; then what? Well tell the people who control the social media site (Twitter, Facebook, whatever) that they must block the person, and ban them for so many months obviously. Hold your horses though even assuming that the site is happy to cooperate – is the user subject to your jurisdiction, or are we now all subject to every jurisdiction in the world? If our troll has set up an account where they say they are in the right jurisdiction we can maybe do something, and the troll will go away and create a new account, only this time they may lie! They may say they’re in some other jurisdiction and carry on largely inconvenienced. Not a problem we can say to the site, is this person connecting from somewhere in our jurisdiction (the site might need a bit more persuasion to tell us this), if yes then hoorah we block our troll again. If not well then on they troll. So we’ve blocked our troll again, how many minutes do you think it will take them to create a new account? How much more complex do you think it would be for them to this time not only lie about their location but to also maybe hide where they connect from? None of this is rocket science, though our lazy troll may be quite happy to just go through numerous throw away accounts, it worked for Old Holborn. Ultimately we may block the most idle and uncommitted of trolls and haters, but for the ones that are a real problem we’ve just been a minor inconvenience. The price of causing this minor inconvenience could be that we’re all subject to the jurisdiction of every country in the world, or simply that we can all be taken off-line at the merest hint of a complaint as companies decide that blocking first and asking questions later (if at all) is a lot less risky than waiting to be told. Oh and it may just have the tiniest barely perceptible bit of a chilling effect on free speech and open debate – but hey who cares about that?

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