November 13, 2012–As you may have read or heard in the news in recent days, Britain is going through a political upheaval over the role of its state broadcaster, BBC, as one of the agencies that covered up the crimes of the ruling class’ most well-known court jester, charity philanthropist and sexual predator, Jimmy Savile.
Important as this is, more interesting is the uproar over the tax-free ride that the country’s corporations have been enjoying. Below is a report of a novel and provocative campaign that the anti-austerity group ‘UK Uncut’ is set to launch against the corporate freeloader Starbucks. The campaign was reported across Canada this evening on the hourly CBC Radio One news.
My recent article ‘Austerity and Counter-Austerity in Britain‘ reported on the financial and service debacles that are denting the reputations of the former state enterprises that were privatized during the Thatcher years of the 1980s-1990s, among them rail, telephone and electricity. The latest such enterprises to come under scrutiny are those providing drinking water and sewage disposal.
It turns out that they, too, are among the tax freeloaders, all the while paying handsome dividends to investors. Here are two articles on the subject from yesterday’s The Observer (Sunday Guardian):
* Water companies pay little or no tax on huge profits
Thames Water and Anglian among companies paying little or no corporation tax while executives pocket huge bonuses, The Observer, Nov 11, 2012
* Thames Water – a private equity plaything that takes us for fools
When the water company was privatised we were promised a utopia of private sector efficiency, By Will Hutton, The Observer, Nov 11, 2012.
Two days later came news of claims that Britain’s six largest electricity companies claims are engaged in price-fixing of the country’s $500 billion wholesale natural gas market:
Gas prices: FSA examines whistleblower’s claims of ‘Libor-like’ manipulation, The Guardian, November 13, 2012.
Among the revisiting of the Thatcher years taking place today in the UK today are reviews of police conduct during the 1984-85 miners strike. Many of the most infamous assaults on striking miners and frame-ups of leaders are back in the public spotlight. Chief among these is the attempted frame-up of 95 miners by South Yorkshire Police following the Battle of Orgreave–a pitched battle fought in 1984 when police attacked a mass picket line. The police case eventually collapsed but the circumstances of the attempted frame-up were never properly investigated. Now a criminal investigation of the police frame-up will be reopened.
It was the same South Yorkshire Police that presided over the 1989 disaster in Hillsborough, England when 96 Liverpool football fans died and 720 were injured during a panic that was sparked by excessive security and rough conduct by police. Families of the victims have tenaciously fought for more than two decades for the truth of police conduct to come out. Last month, they won a landmark ruling by an investigation panel that will reopen a coroner’s investigation of all 96 deaths, including the conduct of police and who, exactly, might have survived had authorities acted responsibly. The government says it will request that the supreme court (High Court) overturn a coroner’s inquest that ruled all 96 deaths as “accidental.” Criminal investigations of the conduct of police and other authorities will also be opened.
Sheila Coleman of the Hillsborough Justice Campaign gave an electrifying speech in the wake of the panel ruling to the ‘Defend The Right To Protest’ conference that I attended in London on October 14 and reported in my aforementioned article.
RA
Starbucks wakes up to the smell of coffee – and a stench of tax avoidance controversy
UK Uncut targets branches for creche and refuge use
By Simon Neville and Shiv Malik, The Guardian, Nov 12, 2012
On an average day its outlets are a hive of social activity, hosting everything from business meetings to reading groups looking for that all-important caffeine rush, approvingly overlooked by a branded community bulletin board. But Starbucks should be careful what it wishes for. The direct action group UK Uncut plans to turn dozens of the coffee empire’s UK branches into creches, refuges and homeless shelters to highlight the chain’s tax avoidance tactics.
The announcement of the action comes on the day a Starbucks executive faces questions from the House of Commons public accounts committee over why the company paid no corporation tax in the UK during the past three years, despite senior US management trumpeting the company’s profitable operations in Britain.
MPs will also question management representatives from Google and Amazon, both of which have faced criticism for basing their European operations in countries that have lower tax rates such as Ireland and Luxembourg.
In his appearance before the committee, Starbucks’s chief financial officer, Troy Alstead, will attempt to repair the company’s reputation, which, according to research by YouGov, continues to suffer because of the controversy. In a similar session last week, MPs accused HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) officials of having cosy relationships with big businesses. Speaking about the arrangements with Starbucks, the Conservative MP Richard Bacon said: “It smells – and it doesn’t smell of coffee. It smells bad.”
UK Uncut has said it will start targeting Starbucks on the Saturday following the autumn statement by the chancellor, George Osborne, on 8 December. The campaign group is attempting to draw a link between government cuts, in particular those that affect women, and tax avoidance by multinational businesses.
Sarah Greene, a UK Uncut activist, said funding for refuges and rape crisis centres faced cuts unless companies paid their fair share of tax. HMRC estimates around £32bn was lost to tax avoidance last year. Greene said the government could easily bring in billions that could fund vital services by clamping down on tax avoidance, but was instead “making cuts that are forcing women to choose between motherhood and work, and trapping them in abusive relationships”.
The group, which rose to prominence after staging a sit-in at Vodafone stores, Sir Philip Green’s Topshop and Fortnum & Mason, turned its attentions to Starbucks last month after an investigation by Reuters discovered the company had paid only £8.6m in corporation tax since launching in the UK 14 years ago, despite cumulative sales of £3bn. Long standing Uncut campaigner Anna Walker said the group wanted to “galvanise the anger” that women were feeling: “We’ve chosen to really highlight the impact of the cuts on women this time. So there is going to be a real focus on transforming Starbucks into those services that are being cut by the government … [such as] refuges and creches,” she said.
Walker said the campaign group had been in touch with women’s groups across the country in the lead-up to the direct action event and believed that, along with a pre-established network of activists, dozens of the company’s coffee shops were likely to be targeted. “Starbucks is a really great target because it is on every high street across the country and that’s what UK Uncut finds really important: people can take action in their local areas,” she said. “We’re really hoping that women who are impacted by the cuts, who are seeing their Sure Start centres where their kids go being reduced in services, and people who use refuges, [will] be involved.”
Several international organisations have faced criticism over their UK accounts, with eBay, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Ikea all paying little or no corporation tax despite large British operations. However, according to pollsters at YouGov’s BrandIndex, Starbucks has suffered the deepest damage to its image. The organisation, which records the strength of companies’ brand identities, revealed Starbucks’s cachet plummeted following the tax revelations and continues to languish at near-record lows. Its “buzz” score, which measures the number of negative and positive comments customers have heard, hit -16.7. That is only slightly higher than the lowest levels it hit during the most heated point of the controversy last month, at -28.6. A year ago its rating was at +3.1. By comparison, Google and Amazon – both due at the select committee – have seen their ratings seemingly unaffected.
UK BrandIndex director Sarah Murphy said: “A brand’s buzz score typically recovers quite quickly following a spate of bad press, but we aren’t seeing that with Starbucks, which is quite unusual. Its scores started to level out around the end of last month, but whatever modest recovery Starbucks has made could well be in jeopardy if this story flares up again.”
The coffee store chain insists it pays the correct level of taxes. The group chief executive, Howard Schultz, has said in a statement: “Starbucks has always paid taxes in the UK despite recent suggestions to the contrary. Over the last three years alone, our company has paid more than £160m in various taxes, including national insurance contributions, VAT and business rates.” However, MPs will no doubt point out that VAT is paid by the customers at point of sale and collected by Starbucks.
Margaret Hodge, who chairs the public accounts committee, told parliament last month that Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google and Starbucks had avoided nearly £900m of tax.
David Cameron responded to the claim by saying: “I’m not happy with the current situation. I think [HMRC] needs to look at it very carefully. We do need to make sure we are encouraging these businesses to invest in our country as they are but they should pay fair taxes as well.”
‘I was appalled at behaviour of police during the miners’ strike,’ reveals senior officer
Letter to MP adds to pressure for inquiry into bitter 1984-85 dispute
By Mark Townsend , The Observer, 16 Dec 2012
A senior police officer has broken ranks to describe how he and others were “appalled” at the behaviour of colleagues during the miners’ strike as calls mount for a fresh inquiry into the policing of the dispute. Photograph by Don McPhee for the Observer Police and pickets clash during the ‘Battle of Orgreave’, a pivotal moment in the dispute.
The former Cleveland Constabulary officer said he was so disillusioned with the behaviour of a number of police towards striking miners that he asked to be excused from attending picket lines during the 1984/85 dispute.
“I was appalled at the conduct of a number of officers, generally members of the Metropolitan police who we described as the Banana Squad – all bent and yellow,” said the officer in a letter to Labour MP Ian Lavery.
The author, who did not want to be named, said he had been moved to speak out by the Observer’s coverage of police tactics during the strike. He said he witnessed “verbal abuse by officers in police vehicles taunting pickets”, and that despite making a series of complaints to senior command, not a single internal investigation was launched.
His comments follow growing pressure for the criminal records of thousands of miners convicted during the dispute to be quashed. Last week calls for the issue to be re-examined surfaced in Wales and Scotland, where justice secretary Kenny MacAskill was asked to review each of the convictions made during the dispute. Lawyers and campaigners claim convictions may be “unsafe” and politically motivated, particularly for picket line offences where miners were threatened with prison sentences but offered less severe punishments if they accepted bail conditions that prohibited them from picketing.
Mick Antoniw, Assembly Member for Pontypridd, is also pushing for an inquiry, noting that in relation to Orgreave: “No action was taken against the police in respect of fabrication of evidence or the attempt to pervert the course of justice.”
Lavery, a former president of the National Union of Mineworkers and MP for Wansbeck in Northumberland, said: “Ordinary hard-working people were charged with crimes they didn’t commit. Somebody needs to be accountable.”
Campaigners want the Independent Police Complaints Commission to investigate police tactics during the entire strike and are urging the director of public prosecutions to examine evidence of misconduct. The IPCC is already investigating allegations of assault, perjury and misconduct in a public office in relation to the “Battle of Orgreave”, the pivotal 1984 clash at the British Steel coking plant in south Yorkshire.
Vera Baird, police and crime commissioner for the Northumbria area, said her experience as a barrister during the strike suggested that potentially there were hundreds of cases where police might have perverted the course of justice. She herself dealt with two or three cases a week during the strike, many involving “invented allegations, copied notebooks and allegations from officers that weren’t even at the scene”.
Baird, solicitor-general during the last Labour government, who represented a number of miners at Orgreave who were acquitted after police tampered with evidence, said: “It was scandalous. There were an awful lot of cases.”
Meanwhile, the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign, has been offered the full support of the Hillsborough Justice Campaign, with both intent on getting justice over the role of South Yorkshire police in the manipulation of evidence and “fitting up” innocent people.
Hillsborough campaign organiser Sheila Coleman said that any examination of the policing during the stadium disaster in 1989 would need to include policing tactics and attitude displayed during the miners’ strike.
Coleman said that officers consistently referred to the strike during the inquests into the deaths of 96 football supporters. She said: “Their experience of the miners’ strike was used as a positive indicator of their ability to police large crowds.”
