Dungcan Smith

The dark arts are essential skills for a modern politician.

Divide and rule has been the practice of the despotic through the ages. Our current shower of self-serving job-seekers are continuing the practice. To this end they set up false problems. The government’s own figures identify benefit fraud as a tiny proportion of the amount spent helping the needy, the elderly and the vulnerable

The myth

Benefit scroungers are bringing down the economy

And who says this? Well if it isn’t Iain ‘beware the quiet man’ Dungcan Smith! Just in case people with short memories are reading this, here is a synopsis of some of his ‘previous.’ 

“Dung-can Smith. The man with the invented CV.

Just because Iain Duncan Smith said in his biography on the Conservative Party website, his entry in Who's Who, and in his entry in Wikipedia that he went to the Universita di Perugia in Italy and got a degree there, and it turned out to be all bullshit doesn't mean that he is a liar and a cheat.

It was probably just a simple typo, that's all.

Mr Duncan Smith's office admitted to Newsnight that he didn't get any qualifications in Perugia or even finish his exams, and all references to this unfortunate incident have been erased completely from Wikipedia.

His claims that he was educated at prestigious-sounding Dunchurch College of Management is only a little bit untrue. Dunchurch was the GEC Marconi staff training college and I am sure Iain probably attended a training course there when he worked for them.

This too has been erased from his now sanitised Wikipedia entry.

He is a very nice man. The Guardian's editor thinks so, anyway.

A Guardian editorial said in April (last) year The welfare secretary has emerged as the last man in cabinet standing up for the poor.

I expect the people about to be thrown into poverty by him will be very pleased to hear that, Mr Rusbridger”  

‘Gowvah’  writing in the Guardian Comment is Free section 3/1/13

The reality

“Those at the sharp end are being hit hardest: from cuts to disability and housing benefits, tax credits and the educational maintenance allowance and now increases in council tax while NHS waiting lists are lengthening, food banks are mushrooming across the country and charities report sharp increases in the number of children going hungry. All this to pay for the collapse in corporate investment and tax revenues triggered by the greatest crash since the 30s.

At the other end of the spectrum though, things are going swimmingly. The richest 1,000 people in Britain have seen their wealth increase by £155bn since the crisis began – more than enough to pay off the whole government deficit of £119bn at a stroke. Anyone earning over £1m a year can look forward to a £42,000 tax cut in the spring, while firms have been rewarded with a 2% cut in corporation tax to 24%.

Not that many of them pay anything like that, even now. The scale of tax avoidance by high-street brand multinationals has now become clear, in no small part thanks to campaigning groups such as UK Uncut. Asda, Google, Apple, eBay, Ikea, Starbucks, Vodafone: all pay minimal tax on massive UK revenues, mostly by diverting profits earned in Britain to their parent companies, or lower tax jurisdictions via royalty and service payments or transfer pricing.

Four US companies – Amazon, Facebook, Google and Starbucks – have paid just £30m tax on sales of £3.1bn over the last four years, according to a Guardian analysis. Apple is estimated to have avoided over £550m in tax on more than £2bn worth of underlying profits in Britain by channelling business through Ireland, according to a Sunday Times analysis, while Starbucks has paid no corporation tax in Britain for the last three years.

The Tory MP and tax lawyer Charlie Elphicke estimates 19 US-owned multinationals are paying an effective tax rate of 3% on British profits, instead of the standard rate of 26%. It's all entirely legal, of course. But taken together with the multiple individual tax scams of the elite, this roll call of corporate infamy has become an intolerable scandal, when taxes are rising and jobs, benefits and pay being cut for the majority.

Not only that, but collecting the taxes that these companies have wriggled out of would go a long way to shrinking the deficit for which working- and middle-class Britain's living standards are being sacrificed. The total tax gap between what's owed and collected has been estimated by Richard Murphy of Tax Research UK at £120bn a year: £25bn in legal tax avoidance, £70bn in fraudulent tax evasion and £25bn in late payments. (my emphasis)

Seumas Milne Guardian October 2012

Every time Dungcan speaks, remember his ‘creativity’ and that he is a Tory with many friends in the city. Judge them by their deeds not their words. The Tories, with the supine assistance of their sad accomplices, the Illiberal Democlots, have actually reduced the number of tax inspectors.

“..ministers are absurdly slashing the tax inspection workforce, and even introducing a new incentive for British multinationals to move their operations in business to overseas tax havens. The scheme would, accountants KPMG have been advising clients, offer an "effective UK tax rate of 5.5%" from 2014 (and cut British tax revenues into the bargain)” ibid