A comedy of errors?

The subject of tax avoidance has been in the news a great deal of late as the tax affairs of a whole slew of celebrities have come under the journalistic spotlight. What used to be almost solely a subject for so-called investigative reporting and pompous editorials now reaches even to the depths of celebrity tittle-tattle in the red-tops.

If the journalists on the broadsheets could rarely be expected to generate light rather than heat in their “examination” of this topic, the gutter press’s performance is even more lamentable. The Daily Mail’s “exposé” of the comedian Frankie Boyle’s daring raid on the treasury coffers by informally liquidating his company and distributing retained profits as capital gains rather than as income would be merely laughable were it not for the fact that what it really exposes is journalists’ quite incomprehensible ignorance and inability to conduct even the most basic of research. The fact that Frankie Boyle could not have used this “scheme” without his advisers first making a formal request in writing to his tax office might have been seen as relevant. One might reasonably suppose that the realisation that there is an extra-statutory concession which specifically permits such a series of transactions and, in effect, a clearance procedure which ensures that the tax office must be satisfied that the concession is not being used for tax avoidance purposes, might have scuppered the story. But maybe not – establishing the truth seems no longer to be a priority to journalists pandering to a celebrity-obsessed readership.

The story to which the Frankie Boyle episode was a mere sequel – David Cameron’s naming and shaming of Boyle’s fellow comedian Jimmy Carr and his tax arrangements and the latter’s admission of an “error of judgement” (in breaking the 11th commandment, one suspects) is itself instructive. The fact that a sitting Prime Minister thinks it appropriate to discuss an individual’s tax affairs in this way when by rights they should be a private matter between Carr and his tax inspector shows the depths to which Governments everywhere have sunk in spreading their propaganda. We would be very surprised if Cameron or his colleagues have not themselves been at some time in their privileged lives the beneficiaries of rather similar arrangements. So who are the hypocrites?