Pay stars’ tax, Beeb told
THE BBC should help foot the bills of presenters who were allegedly pressured into setting up firms to avoid tax, the head of the Commons’ culture committee has said.
As many as 200 workers are being investigated by HMRC after declaring themselves self-employed.
An industry source said that some workers may owe the taxman three years’ salary. By paying stars through personal service companies, the BBC allegedly saved vast sums in national insurance contributions and was not required to pay benefits such as maternity cover.
Damian Collins, chairman of the digital, culture, media and sport committee, said it was a question of ‘doing the right thing’ and the BBC ‘should help people sort this mess out’. The BBC, which denies pressuring workers into the arrangements, said it would bring in ‘external expertise’ to look at the tax issues.
FOR the vast majority of Britons, I suspect, our greatest concerns following the Russian military-grade nerve agent attack in Salisbury are, first, the wellbeing of the three victims, and second, how to deter President Putin from doing the same thing again — or worse.
There is, however, a small but energetic minority much more exercised by an aspect you could be forgiven for not noticing. These are the Corbynistas, who are most concerned about . . . an image of their beloved leader displayed last Thursday on BBC2’s Newsnight.
It was the graphic display shown as a backdrop to a debate on the Labour leader’s handling of the crisis with Russia. This showed Corbyn in a sort of Leninstyle cap against an image of Moscow’s Red Square, bathed, appropriately enough, in a red tint.
The following night on the same programme, Owen Jones, Corbyn’s most ardent supporter in what used to be called Fleet Street, launched an attack on the BBC, to the obvious bemusement of Newsnight’s studiously fair presenter Evan Davis. The BBC, Jones raged, had made Corbyn look like ‘a Soviet stooge’ and, he told Davis: ‘You even photoshopped his hat to look more Russian.’
Enraged
Davis immediately pointed out that the hat ‘was not photoshopped. It was a real picture of him’. Too late: a surge of enraged Corbynistas immediately engulfed the BBC, just as Jones had encouraged them to do on air: ‘ People should complain to the BBC about this.’
The programme’s acting editor, Jess Brammar, was forced to take to Twitter herself: ‘ OK, it’s Saturday & I’m in the hairdresser but my phone is having a meltdown.’ She went on to confirm that the Lenin- style hat had not been photoshopped onto Corbyn’s head — it was a genuine picture — and pointed out that the same tinted image of Red Square had recently been used by the programme with an image of the Tory Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson imposed on it.
True, Mr Williamson was not pictured wearing a peaked black cap. Maybe that’s because, unlike Mr Corbyn, the Defence Secretary is not given to wearing that line of headgear.
Anyway, the row — inevitably called ‘ hat- gate’ — thunders on, to the amazement, I imagine, of those outside Westminster and the broadcasting media. But Corbyn supporters are right to worry and, for their own purposes, to try to intimidate the BBC into never again using such an image of their beloved leader.
One reason can be glimpsed in the few opinion polls on this issue which have been published in recent days.
They show approval of Theresa May’s handling of the Russian crisis running at about 50 percentage points ahead of support for Corbyn’s line (that we should co-operate more with Moscow over the investigation of the incident, including giving them access to collected samples of the nerve agent, since the Kremlin might be innocent of involvement).
Perhaps this lies behind the decision yesterday by the Labour shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, to break with Corbyn’s ambivalence and pin the blame directly on Putin.
McDonnell — a much more intelligent man than his leader — realises that this episode might be fatal to Labour’s hopes of winning the next general election.
During the 2017 election, Labour did far better than almost anyone expected: one reason was that Conservative attacks on Corbyn’s past as a sympathiser with such enemies of Britain as the IRA, the proscribed Islamic organisation Hezbollah, and the Soviet Union, had much less impact than might have been expected.
Murderous
Younger voters in particular, who could remember neither the Cold War nor even the IRA’s bombing campaign on the mainland, perhaps felt this was all ancient history, of no relevance today. But when the Kremlin, under command of the murderous Vladimir Putin, is trying to bump people off on the streets of Salisbury in 2018 — that is relevant to voters young as well as old.
It will also bring much sharper public scrutiny to bear on Jeremy Corbyn’s visceral opposition to Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent, Trident. Perhaps his most uncomfortable moment during the 2017 election was when a member of a BBC studio audience tore into Corbyn for refusing to say whether he would, as Prime Minister, retaliate if the country were to come under nuclear attack.
‘I find it incredibly concerning,’ this voter said, ‘that you wouldn’t ever commit to doing that. It’s our safety that you have to look out for first and foremost.’
Again, this may not have seemed a relevant matter to many voters at that time, however uncomfortable the Labour leader seemed under such questioning.
But Putin has made Russia’s military capacity to strike the West hard, with new forms of nuclear missiles, central to his presidential campaign for the general election which took place yesterday. Earlier this month, he even showed graphics of such missiles hitting Western targets as part of his annual address to the Russian federal assembly.
And, by the way, the assault in Salisbury with a weapons-grade nerve agent may well have been planned as part of the same election strategy, grotesque as that might seem to us.
Threat
Of course, Russia is not the Soviet Union. But although Owen Jones accused the BBC of painting Corbyn as ‘a Soviet stooge’, it would not amount to a falsification of history if Newsnight had created such an impression.
When what Ronald Reagan called ‘the Evil Empire’ fell apart, Corbyn openly regretted ‘the break-up of the Soviet Union and the leadership it gave’. He declared that ‘I do not believe that the former Soviet Union presented a threat, any more than I believe that the remains of the Soviet Union, or Russia, present an external threat now’.
Admittedly that was in 1993, long before Vladimir Putin took control of the country. Fair enough to say that about Russia back then. But even after Putin launched military action in Ukraine (with thousands of casualties) to reclaim some of the territory lost when the USSR broke up, Corbyn’s sympathies lay more with the Russian aggressor: he denounced the West’s sanctions as ‘disproportionate’.
And as far as I know, this campaigner against British nuclear weaponry has never uttered a word about the use of polonium from a Russian state nuclear facility to murder Alexander Litvinenko, a British subject, in the heart of our capital city.
So I do understand the concern of the Labour leader’s acolytes that his record on Russia is now coming under greater scrutiny. But as for that BBC image of Corbyn: if the cap fits, wear it.