We get Mail

Well after yesterday's relaxing and non-political blog-post, I'm sorry to say that we have to return to bitter and impotent ranting, because everything's gone wrong.

Firstly over the pond our American cousins – or the Republican half – have decided that they don't need democracy any more. Instead they've shut down the government (except for the NSA spying, the drone strikes and Guantanamo: just the good bits like paying employees and opening the Statue of Liberty).

Why? Because the Republicans won't pass a budget unless Obama suspends his health insurance laws. You know, the laws that were passed four years ago by a democratically elected government, then upheld by the Supreme Court, then endorsed by the electorate when Obama was re-elected. That looks like the will of the people to me, but the Republican Party has decided that it would rather suspend an entire country's normal operations than allow people to have a weak and (from our perspective) rather poor mode of health provision. It's a matter of principle, that principle being your right as an American to sicken and die on the street without Big Guvmint interfering with their communist dialysis machines and defibrillators.

Meanwhile, the Daily Mail has finally gone off the deep end. It's always been evil, but now it's added wild and vicious idiocy to the mix. On Sunday, it published an article (The Man Who Hated Britain) about Ed Miliband's father, who died in 1994. Ralph Miliband was a Belgian who in 1940 at the age of 16 fled the Nazi invasion by the skin of his teeth, thus avoiding the fate of many of his Jewish family, murdered in the concentration camps. He ended up in London, working hard, pursuing an education and trying to come to terms with a world war and personal tragedy. The Mail has a single diary entry, four lines long, from when he was 17, in which he records a few caustic thoughts about British isolationism and imperialism.

'The Englishman is a rabid nationalist. They are perhaps the most nationalist people in the world . . . you sometimes want them almost to lose (the war) to show them how things are. They have the greatest contempt for the Continent . . . To lose their empire would be the worst possible humiliation.'

I don't know about you, but I go red and wish the ground would swallow me up whenever I think about anything I said or did at that age. And I don't have a body of beautifully-argued political science to form my adult oeuvre, as Ralph did.

What happened to Ralph Miliband? By the time he was 20, he'd decided that whatever Britain's faults were, it represented Europe's best hope for freedom and he joined the Royal Navy, serving with distinction. Afterwards, he became a leading socialist thinker (I strongly recommend his Parliamentary Socialism). Despite the Mail's best efforts to claim, Ralph utterly failed to convince his sons that the Labour Party was no longer a useful tool in the struggle for socialism. Ralph wasn't a communist, let alone the Stalinist monster the Mail claims: but he was a proper socialist, unlike David and Ed.

What was the Mail doing around the time Ralph Miliband arrived on these shores as one of the millions suffering at the hands of one of the world's most evil regimes?

Er… supporting the Nazis, both German and British. Here's it's owner proclaiming his support for Oswald Mosley's anti-semitic, pro-Nazi British Union of Fascists.

And here he is having a cozy chat with Adolf Hitler:

And here he is in another newspaper again calling for fascism in the UK. Had he succeeded, Ralph Miliband would no doubt have been gassed in a concentration camp on Salisbury Plain or the Yorkshire Moors and the camp guards would all have been Mail readers only to eager to help.

Today, the Mail grudgingly gave space to a rebuttal by Ed Miliband, and surrounded it by an editorial on Ralph's 'Evil Legacy' and a re-run of the original hatchet job, with the added detail that Ralph is buried only a few yards from Karl Marx, the traitorous bastard. Apparently the man lampooned last week as Wallace (of Gromit fame) is 'menacing' and determined to 'drive a hammer and sickle through the heart of the nation'. In Mail land, you're a traitor if your father is a) a foreigner and b) dreams of a different political philosophy. I detect a clear line of inheritance from the 30s Mail fascism to the smearing articles they're publishing today. Their problem with Ralph Miliband is that he was foreign and intellectual: terms repeatedly used to cover anti-semitism. The phrase used in the 30s was 'rootless cosmopolitans': men and women with no national allegiance and a set of ideas opposed to 

the values, traditions and institutions — including our great schools, the Church, the Army and even the Sunday papers — that made Britain the safe and free nation in which he and his family flourished

Except that – oops, easily done – that list of Great British Institutions is taken from today's attack on Milibands Senior and Junior. Personally, I too oppose the 'great' (i.e. fee-paying) schools, the Established Church, the army which tortures and bombs its way round Ireland, the Empire, Iraq and Afghanistan, and I especially despise the tabloid newspapers which spent the last decade bribing, bugging and stealing. Today's Mail is still, at heart, a nasty-minded, anti-semitic toad. 

But I can think of one foreigner at the heart of the Daily Mail, a man who has done more damage to this country than any forgotten and unregarded political scientist. A man who, rather than pay his taxes to keep this great country on the road, claims to be French… for tax purposes. That man is Viscount Rothermere. Yes, he has a British title and yes, his main residence is a massive mansion in Wiltshire, but for legal purposes, he's discovered that he's French. How very patriotic. 

And that's not all. You'd think that the Mail, which has always wrapped itself in the Union Flag, would be horrified by its owner avoiding his responsibilities. See, for example, this campaign from the 1920s:

Sadly, racism and consistency don't go together. Whisper it, but the Daily Mail isn't a British paper. It's owned by a series of tax-avoiding Bermudan and Jersey shell companies to ensure that while it robustly lobbies on a range of political perspectives, it's never going to be subject to the same laws as the rest of us - and yet it calls Ralph Miliband The Man Who Hated Britain. Very patriotic!

There is a positive side to this story. Ed Miliband, while not my kind of socialist (i.e. not a socialist) has repeatedly displayed considerable backbone in standing up to this kind of bile. He demanded rebuttal space in the rag to demonstrate that his father did in fact love the UK for which he fought with distinction, and goes on to identify the true poison in British politics: overmighty press barons and their vicious, ad hominem attacks. I'm of course disappointed that Ed feels the need to adopt the language of kneejerk patriotism, and most especially by the (not entirely surprising) assertion that:

I want to make capitalism work for working people, not destroy it.

but that's because I'd rather Ralph had led the country than most other people. But I'm impressed with Ed here, and rather less impressed with David Cameron, Jeremy Hunt and the other Tories who've been sniggered and quietly applauding the Mail's piece.

The other bright side is that this vile, unsubtle, bilious and incoherent attack, clearly carried out in connivance with the Conservative Party, shows that the right is genuinely scared of Ed Miliband and the Labour Party. They've dropped all pretence of principled opposition, fighting on the battleground of ideas, contrasting policies: they've gone right back to the days of the Zinoviev letter and the hysterical scaremongering of a class which knows things are falling apart at the seams. This is panic, but it's a panic which reveals the festering insecurities of a party and a newspaper which have happily hacked, bugged and burgled their way around Britain for too long and now spies Nemesis approaching in the form of a mild-mannered Miliband who has rather admirably decided that he's going to take them on. Once you've decided that the only line of attack is to assert that a dead man was once a) foreign and b) opposed jingoism, you've pretty much given up on any positive vision and turned back to spreading fear and lies.

What links the US government shutdown and the Mail? Simply that their political strategies are identical. Having failed ideologically, they have to invent boogeymen to scare the children. They have no ideas, only the power to spread fear and loathing. It's poisonous, and it will subvert even the lily-livered democracy we have left. What happens if the Tea Party and the Mail get their way? It won't be back to an imagined paradise of Mom'n'Pop niceness and Neighbourhood Watch: it'll be corporate terrorism, joblessness, mistrust and social decay. Have we learned nothing from the 80s Culture Wars?

Update: I gather that Peter Rhodes has used this blog as a source for snide comment in his awful little column in the local rag. Just to be clear Peter: I'm glad you're a reader, because you really, really need the education provided here, but I'm entirely unimpressed with this, and with everything you write. You are a hate-fuelled bigot with the emotional and cultural range of a slug. 

I just need to get this off my chest

Barclays Bank, which is negotiating with the government for the taxpayer to insure their insanely risky investments, is a serial tax evader. Worse than that, it has an arm which specialises in shifting money around the world with the sole purpose of making money out of the taxpayer - about £1 billion pounds a year. The Guardian, despite having some dubious links to certain financial bodies, has been uncovering Barclays' web of deceitful trades, which the Inland Revenue haven't got the resources to follow.

This is what one financier said of Barclays' scheme, in the Financial Times:

I will say it was absolutely breathtaking, extraordinary. The depth of deceit, connivance and deliberate, artificial avoidance stunned me. The intricacy and artificiality of the scheme deeply was absolutely evident, as was the fact that the knew exactly what they were doing and why: to get money from one point in London to another without paying tax, via about 10 offshore companies. Simple, deliberate outcome, clearly stated, with the exact names of who was doing this, and no other purpose.

Until now I have been a supporter of the finance industry - I work with people there regularly and respect many of them, and greatly enjoy the Financial Times and other financial papers.

However this has shone a light on something for me, and made me certain that these people belong in jail, and companies like Barclays deserve to be bankrupt. They have robbed everyone of us,every single person who pays tax or who will ever pay tax in this country (and other countries!), through both the bailouts and schemes such as this.

Barclays' response is to ban publication of, and linking to, the leaked internal documents which revealed how they steal from us while begging for our help. So let's give a big hand to Wikileaks, which makes sure that leaked documents are never lost for good. You don't have to read them, just understand that this kind of activity is the Web's version of public service. The Guardian, like many companies which pay tax without trying to cheat, has a big office in London and responsibilities to employees and readers: it can't publish and be damned if the courts (yet again, acting solely for the powerful against the public interest) issue an injunction. Wikileaks, ironically, is like the dubious corporations who hide offshore (Walkers Crisps: a Swiss company now), and can post information out of reach of local courts.

These people are thieves. The Department of Work and Pensions is currently running an Orwellian campaign against benefit cheats who 'rob' the rest of us by falsely claiming the dole, or whatever. Fair enough - though living on £50 per week isn't exactly the same as having a Bond-villain style hideout. How about we conduct a similar campaign of persecution against these financiers? They steal far more than all the benefit cheats put together.

Some of their activities are illegal, and rely on the connivance of offshore states (Britain, ironically, encourages this behaviour onshore and offshore), and the poverty of the Inland Revenue - which sold its office to an offshore company which thus avoided tax. I can't express how angry this stuff makes me. I know all my friends think that I'm a boring old wanker for getting wound up by this, but it's important. These bankers and lawyers like their Chelsea mansions and airports and golf courses and private schools and all the other trimmings that makes life in Britain fantastic for the rich, but they're engaged in a concerted plot to make live worse for the rest of us: tax pays for roads and schools and infrastructure and child benefit and the NHS and pensions and clean air and universities and street lights and the police and the ambulance services and the firemen and the coastguard and so many things, so these bastards are stealing the high life and leaving us naive morons to pay for everything.

I have an enjoyable job and I'm paid fairly well (for now - half my contract expires in September), but I'll never be rich. There are, however, small ways in which I could get some tax back, quite legally. I don't do it. I believe that governments (even these gimps) are a good way to improve the lives of the citizens as a whole and it's our duty to contribute (which doesn't mean we shouldn't scream blue murder when it's wasted, as with Trident and ID cards). We have responsibilities to each other: my taxes pay for a binman's heart operation and his children's education and his taxes pay my salary. Everyone's a winner in the long term, which is why these tax-avoiding scum are thieving from us in exactly the same way as the benefit cheat: rich men have their bins emptied by the council the same as the rest of us. Their cleaners claim child benefit and their heart attack will be treated by an NHS nurse.

How's this for an idea? Ban non-domiciled or tax-avoiding executives from using public services. No bins emptied. Turned away from A+E. No road travel. No TV or radio. No calling the police, fire brigade or ambulance. No calling the council when the neighbours have a noisy party… we could wreck their lives until they're shamed into paying up.

Let's start with Lord Rothermere. He owns the Daily Mail, which hates governments but also hates foreigners and tax cheats. He lives in a massive, tasteless, reactionary, £50m mansion in Wiltshire which wasn't big enough so he's added another couple of wings to the building you see here.

Apparently, however, Donhead St. Andrew in Wiltshire is a foreign country. It must be because Private Eye (discussed here) has discovered that Rothermere is, for tax purposes, 'non-domiciled' and therefore doesn't pay UK tax on his £800m (inherited) fortune because his father lived in Paris. The Inland Revenue decided that this blatant theft wasn't worth investigating.

I must go for a little lie-down now.