Originally Posted by
ragingpup
This is exactly how it works.
And as a result we are losing what is estimated to be somewhere between £100 - £130 BILLION pounds per year through aggressive tax avoidance. Approx £14 billion is lost to our economy through deliberate tax fraud.
This compares to approx £1.2 billion lost through benefits fraud.
Which one do we hear people getting most worked up about?
The reason why relates to why Corbyn gets so much stick. It is because the media focus endlessly on benefit cheats, making it seem to the people who aren't able to discern the difference between 'newspaper reality' and 'actual reality' that a serious hole is made within our finances that would be rectified if we were more rigorous on benefits cheats.
The same intensity is lacking from the media on tax evasion. One can speculate why this might be, but it is fact, not opinion or conspiracy to point out that many senior corporation heads, media owners and politicians are close acquaintances, even family friends whose kids went to the same (usually very expensive schools) together. It's a very tight knit community. Almost an...establishment.
Therefore, yes as Redshank says, politicians use accountant firms to create the horribly complicated tax laws, and then the very same people who created the laws are employed by the corporations to avoid paying tax for our schools, hospitals and services. But crucially, the media owners, themselves part of this 'upper cliche' deliberately and cynically avoid publishing stories that would initiate a public backlash as then the politicians would have to do something about it. Owen Jones, himself primarily a journalist goes into more specific details as to how this works with examples.
Exactly the same principles are at work with Corbyn. As people have said on this thread, it's extremely unlikely to use and I'd be the last to call him an outstanding politician. But look at the reporting of the Tory's new policy to limit energy hikes. When Miliband put this exact same policy out beforethe 2015 election it was "socialist madness" etc in the Mail, Express, Sun. Exactly the same policy is rolled by May, exactly the same: but the same newspapers are headlining this as "solid leadership", "sensible" etc! Google the headline difference - it'd be hilarious if it wasn't so sickening!
It