How to avoid tax and get away with it — just like the big boys
Taxes, as american businesswoman and self- styled ‘Queen of Mean’ Leona Helmsley liked to say, are only for the little people. There’s a certain satisfaction in knowing that Leona went to jail for tax-dodging. However cynical and criminal she was, though, her words contain a bitter kernel of truth.
Comedian Heydon Prowse didn’t raise many laughs in The Town That
Took On The Taxman (BBC2) when he pointed out that global behemoth Facebook pays less tax in Britain than the average shopkeeper, and amazon’s tax rate in the UK works out at 0.002 per cent.
Meanwhile, eight trillion euros flow in and out of the Netherlands every year via a Dutch loophole that enables big firms to avoid almost all their taxes.
This loophole doesn’t exist by accident. amsterdam accountants love it. ‘Paying taxes is an individual choice,’ said Dennis, a Dutch tax consultant. ‘Moral responsibility is make believe, it’s like santa Claus.’
This documentary followed the efforts of small businesses in one Welsh town, Crickhowell, to copy the mega- corps and shame Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs by unravelling those loopholes.
The beauty of the programme was how Prowse, playing the part of a dim innocent with a camera, goaded the townsfolk into finding out how the financial sleight- of-hand was performed. He knew the Crickhowellians, like the viewers, would start off sceptical. Taxes, after all, pay for our schools and hospitals. It’s
ROYAL PET OF THE WEEK: Lucy Worsley’s fascinating account of the Russian Revolution in Empire Of The Tsars (BBC4) included footage of Nicholas II riding on parade in 1913, with his little dog trotting at his horse’s heels. Imagine if the Queen took a corgi to Trooping the Colour.
unpatriotic to evade them, not to mention illegal.
But the realisation of how the multinational brands play us for mugs soon had everyone’s blood at boiling point. If starbucks doesn’t pay fair taxes, it isn’t merely able to boost profits — it also undercuts the little man and put him out of business.
It was no coincidence that the fieriest Crickhowell campaigner was also the bloke who ran the town’s independent coffee bar: steve, a former special forces soldier.
steve was so angry that, when he and his neighbours visited the weaselly money- men of Old amsterdam, he found the canalside building where Irish rock band U2 have their financial headquarters and banged on the door, demanding that Bono show himself.
Programmes about tax law are hardly appealing. Millions of potential viewers must have shied away from this one- off show, just because of the word ‘taxman’ in the title.
Prowse did well to focus on the personalities of the aggrieved tradesfolk, such as Irena the Russian optometrist, who also owned the local ice- cream deli, or Jeff, who sold wet weather gear — surely the closest you could get to printing money in the Brecon Beacons. But the show’s big drawback was its failure to explain how the rest of us can sign up. If the Fair Tax campaign means paying just 0.002 per cent, you can count me in and call me Bono.
audiences who had been watching Celebrity Big Brother were not likely to be seduced by the title of 10,000 BC: Two Tribes (C5). It sounds like a history programme, and Channel 5 viewers are not noted for their intellectual leanings. But a warning at the start did the trick: ‘ The following programme features highly offensive language from the start and constantly throughout, as well as nudity.’
This is history in a grubby loincloth: 12 ordinary people — a student, a policeman, a builder and so on — are driven to a remote hilltop in Bulgaria, handed an assortment of stone knives and animal skin clothes, and left to get on with it.
When the series launched last year, it fell apart almost immediately. The neolithic campers couldn’t cope. Two cracked up within 24 hours, and the rest were unable even to light a fire or keep the flies from swarming over their food. again and again, the producers were forced to step in.
This year the challenges are easier — almost too easy. Food, shelter and a map were provided. But the arrival tonight of 12 more people, a rival tribe, might make things more awkward.
It’s stage - managed and manipulated, of course, but Big Brother fans will be used to that.