Immigrants, Capitalists and Tax

Remember this:

Labour's 'open door' policy on immigration costs every household £350 a year, it was claimed yesterday.

David Coleman, an Oxford University academic, puts the total annual bill to the taxpayer at almost £8.8billion.

In a submission to a House of Lords committee, he said there had been an 'absent-minded commitment' to increase the population by one million every five years.

Perhaps not that individual story, but something like it repeated ad nauseum in papers such as the Daily Mail and the Express. A quick search on either paper's website should find a plethora of stories such as this one (a staggering 41,630 articles on the Daily Mail alone using the search terms 'immigrants', 'cost' and 'tax'). Of course, this created the usual fuss about immigration. After all, £8.8billion does appear to be an awful lot of money lost in taxpayers money. There is, however, a section of society that costs us far more and you are unlikely to ever see them on the front page of the Daily Mail day after day. Yes, you guessed it, those pesky capitalists.

For around three years now, Private Eye has been trying to extract information about tax lost due to avoidance and evasion from HM Revenue and Customs. In typical fashion, the department tried everything they could to get out of revealing such information, perhaps aware of how damaging this might be. Then, as is the norm in these days of 'burying bad news', the figures were released on budget day amongst a raft of other paperwork sure to distract the public. The figures were shocking and underlines that the section of society most deserving of our scorn and hatred are not the immigrant communities, but the capitalists. The following is taken from Accountancy Age:

HM Revenue and Customs dramatically abandoned its attempts to keep details of the 'tax gap' secret just before the Budget.

HMRC estimates the sum lost to tax avoidance and evasion to be somewhere between £11bn and £41bn each year. Total government tax receipts for 2008 are expected to reach £575bn. The take from corporation tax alone is only £52bn.

That means up to £41bn is lost every year due to capitalists avoiding their obligations, that's five times as much as the cost to the taxpayer of the 'influx of immigration' (as the Mail puts it). So, presumably we will see a prolonged attack by the mainstream media on this section of society. Don't count on it. The interests of the capitalists will always take priority over those seeking to improve their lives or fleeing from persecution. The real criminals in our society are not the immigrants, they are the capitalists and whilst sections of society continue to attack 'foreigners', the rich and sitting in their expensive yachts laughing at our stupidity. It's time for the laughter to stop.