Has she organised a demo at tax avoiders The Guardian yet? No? Then she’s still a bl**dy hypocrite.

I don’t always agree with Mr F but I find I agree even less with Ms P.

I see that once again Guido has been well and truly fawked.

£110k is small beer compared to some: Littlejohn gets close to a million for two columns of turgid and minimally researched churnalism par week. His legendarily foul mouthed editor was on a remuneration package last year of a whopping £2.8 million including bonus.

But the cowardly Staines won’t say a dickybird about that, because if he did, all that lucrative business he does with the Daily Mail would stop. You don’t diss Dacre and get away with it.

He did respond: http://twitter.com/#!/GuidoFawkes/status/109280385493504000

Good retort. Shame that (like many others) she can’t spell Gandhi (and mistakes his decency and political aptitudes for some kind of other-worldly sainthood).

3.

The lameness of that response by Staines reflects the intellectual walloping he got.

@GLO #1:

Has she organised a demo at tax avoiders The Guardian yet?

Is “The Guardian” a tax avoider? I know this comes up regularly here, but the arrangements detailed by The (we have no axe to grind here) Times suggest otherwise. GMG (the paper’s owner) pays full taxes; EMAP, the subsidiary of Eden Bidco (GMG’s joint venture with APAX), pays full UK taxes; the only bodies that don’t are Eden Bidco (but tax has already been paid on its UK-derived profits) and APAX itself, so far as I can see.

Anyone know what Staines earns?

Robin, yes. GMG and related entities pay full taxes as required by law. If they wouldn’t, they’d be prosecuted for tax evasion.

Just like so many other companies and corporations, who are making legal arrangements to avoid tax, and who are accused of tax avoidance.

You know: tax evasion is a crime; if you get caught, you’ll be prosecuted.
Tax avoidance is about legal arrangements that reduce the amount of tax that is legally due. GMG has been up to such arrangements. They pay full tax as the law says they should. Just like so many other companies and corporations.

“Is “The Guardian” a tax avoider?”

Yes

http://www.cashandburn.com/2011/05/anger-and-hypocrisy-guardian.html

“Anyone know what Staines earns?”

Nothing.

This seems like wishful thinking. She IS a hypocrite. Lets take private schooling for just one area. She would would like to remove this option for other people but sent her children to Westminster School – one of the poshest, most expensive public schools in the country – a bastion of class advantage.

There are plenty of other areas. She would like to constrain people’s lives in ways she is not prepared to accept for her own life.

Hypocrite. And no amount of wishing this away at Liberal Conspiracy is going to work.

@11

Why does this comment read as if it had been written by Staines’ tame gofer Henry Cole?

Just askin’.

How did she square her own opposition to other people’s children enjoying the privilege of a private education with sending her own daughter to Westminster School?

Stalin had the gulags, but capitalism has a much subtler way of neutralizing its critics: those who don’t make money are accused of the politics of envy, those who do make money while criticising the system are automatically open to the charge of hypocrisy.

It’s quite possible to be critical of a system you personally benefit from but wish to change without being a hypocrite.

In any case, accelerating inequality doesn’t seem to be working.

@pjt and Another Tom:

I’m aware of the definition of tax-avoidance; in context, I understood the reference to “paying full UK tax” as implying that financial jiggery-pokery (to use a term of art) had not reduced that tax bill.

You are though going to have to go alittle deeper into the argument on this. Firstly, the link given by [Another Tom] refers to the Trader Media sale. This is a separate transaction from that referred to in the 2009 Times article, which was in relation to Eden Bidco, another GMG/APAX joint venture.

Humour me, please; what precisely was the mechanism by which APAX’s financing of its purchase of 49.9% of Trader Media by loans reduced the UK tax payable by either Trader Media or GMG?

Generally, since you’re stuck in the system you wish to change there is nothing hypocritical in working within the system while decrying the inequalities and injustices inherent to it. Just because you recognise the hurdles in life doesn’t mean you should crash through them because you believe they simply shouldn’t be there.

Polly is bang on the money! No pun intended.

If comment 13 is correct and Polly Toynbee sent any of her children to Westminster …………she’s a hypocrite.

Simples

(That is also why I can’t listen to Dianne Abbot without laughing)

Old lefie joke:

Khrushchev and Chou En Lai

Nikita Khrushchev was very proud of his working class origins. Although from a poor family, he had risen to be Premier of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

On a visit to China, Khruschev started teasing Chou En Lai, because Chou En Lai’s family had been wealthy merchants. Khruschev went on and on about Chou En Lai being of the capitalist class, whereas he Khrushchev was truly working class.

Eventually Chou En Lai got irritated . He said

“There is something we have in common”

“What?”

“We are both traitors to our class!”

That was a smack down? Anyone who talks of the inequalities in the system but refuses to do anything about it, bar make a lot of money by making as much noise about it, is a hypocrite.

I heard her on Radio 4 this morning talking about poor working class children not being able to work hard at school and thought to myself, what a condescending cow.

My family were dead poor. Didn’t stop me picking up a book at school or thinking.

My favourite bit was when she decried a school stopping “poor” children from taking home books because they often didn’t come back or come back in pieces. That has NOTHING to do with being poor, unless the pages were ripped from the spine to throw on the fire to keep the house warm.

Excuses, excuses

interesting stuff.

I’ve heard the response ‘if you’re so concerned about not being taxed enough, give your money away’ an awful lot, in relation to lots of rich people asking to be taxed more.

this entirely misses the point.

People who feel they can afford it – and want to – giving their money to charitable services does /absolutely nothing/ to alter the existing, bizarrely unfair system

and it’s the system that’s faulty, not people for earning lots of money
[notwithstanding grotty executives who pay themselves atrocious bonuses while their businesses are tanking]

and GLO.. if everyone who disagreed with laws arranged and attended demos against them, no-one would ever do anything else. Your argument is stupid and irrelevant.

Anyone who talks of the inequalities in the system but refuses to do anything about it

Erm – she does.

“Hypocrisy” is a stupid, pointless term, and the people who use it are almost invariably trolly idiots.

Nobody acts fully in line with their abstract beliefs in their personal life; if someone did (say, treating the well-being of random strangers as equally important as the well-being of their own kids), we’d believe them to be psychotic.

If you think there is anything wrong with advocating higher taxes and a universal education system, while also doing the best for your family within the confines of the current system, then you are either a troll or a psycho.

@23 “Hypocrisy” is a stupid, pointless term, and the people who use it are almost invariably trolly idiots.

Why is using a valid English word stupid or pointless ? You may not like the word or its connotation because it doesn’t fit with you view but it hardly makes it pointless or stupid.

“If you think there is anything wrong with advocating higher taxes and a universal education system, while also doing the best for your family within the confines of the current system, then you are either a troll or a psycho.”

Seems to be hypocrisy to me – as below from the dictionary

“a person who acts in contradiction to his or her stated beliefs or feelings”

Seems to sum up Polly.

“Staines got intellectually pulverised.”

No, you just happen to disagree with him.

The reason Staines doesn’t go after Littlejohn etc is that they’re not socialists calling for wealth redistribution or the repression of private education.

@15 Substantial Shareholdings Exemption

Re the hypocrisy angle. I think what makes the Guardian so hysterically bad is that they write big “expose” stories about events and actions which they themselves do. The furore about Barclays not paying tax earlier this year was no more or less bad than what the Guardian itself did with Trader Media (and the special dividend deal they did recently is even more “tax efficent”).

But one story attracts the newspaper’s ire and full weight of moralising while the other gets buried away in the back of the website with mealy-mouthed explanations from the editor.

Some commenters here might think it’s OK to say one thing and do another but to most people it stinks.

Tax avoidance and tax evasion.

If I am looking for a new car, I can choose between a big gas guzzler, which pumps out CO2 or I can buy a zero emissions vehicle. – If I choose the latter, I have done something to avoid paying Vehicle Excise Duty – by choosing a smaller car. If I bought the gas guzzler and then didn’t get a tax disc – That would be tax evasion – not paying a tax which I should pay.

Now, regarding income, there are loopholes which allow rich people to re-define their income as shares/dividends etc etc. If you want these people to pay a proper amount of tax – Close the loopholes, raise CGT. But please grasp the difference between avoidance and evasion.

@26 AnotherTom:

The reason the Guardian avoids tax is because if it didn’t it would be toast. It would cost more than the Indy, no-one would buy it, it would go bankrupt. Simple.

The reason Polly Toynbee sends her children to private school is because under our current system, if you do not do so (and live in the vast majority of urban areas) it means exposing your kids to our failing state school system, riddled by terrible teaching and gang activity. That state system would probably be an awful lot better if it didn’t automatically lose every pupil whose parents had the financial ability/inclination to get them out.

If the Guardian and Polly Toynbee are hypocrites, so is any libertarian who’s ever used any NHS service while calling for its abolition. So is every right winger who accepts child benefit while insisting that benefits cause moral decay. The fact is that where a system dominates you have to use it. Even where it’s not technically compulsory, if it’s a dominant system, there’s great social pressure to do so.

If that’s hypocrisy, then systemic change of any sort is pretty much impossible without it…

@ 13 Flowerpower

“How did she square her own opposition to other people’s children enjoying the privilege of a private education with sending her own daughter to Westminster School?”

Objecting to the system doesn’t mean you have to deliberately pick the worst option while the system is running. People who object to animal testing aren’t hypocrites for using drugs that have already been treated on animals, for examples. I despise the bipartite school system we use, but I have no problem for parents who send their children to private schools.

Unless you’re saying she has a specific policy of “only my family should be allowed to go to private school”, which I doubt.

@28

“That state system would probably be an awful lot better if it didn’t automatically lose every pupil whose parents had the financial ability/inclination to get them out.”

What a despicable communist comment.The state doesn’t own everyone’s children.

Giudo Fawkes The self styled peoples champion who famously appeared on a newsnight debate in disguise and got ripped to peices lol

Stupid prick.

@ 30 Trooper “arrgh the reds are coming run for the hills” Thompson

Gosh, somebody’s pretty desperate to find commies to be scared of.

Nothing drives brownshirts more crazy that wealthy lefties. And female, wealthy lefties sends them bat shit insane. Long may it contunue.

“Giudo Fawkes The self styled peoples champion who famously appeared on a newsnight debate in disguise and got ripped to peices lol”

I saw that show. Staines looking like an IRA terrorist. Priceless!

This comment thread seems to have more than its fair share of left wing useful idiots who seem prepared to suspend their usual loud sense of morality when it comes to justifying the actions of one of their own.

The point is NOT that in an imperfect system you shouldn’t expect people to live ideologically pure lives. The point is directly linked to the ideology concerned and boils down to choice. If you have a political ideology, like La Toynbee, that is predicated on removing people’s freedom to choose actions you disapprove of – you have a weightier burden of expectation not to behave in the same way you disapprove of in others. If however, you are a genuine Liberal (not a liberal) and believe in people’s rights to behave in ways you would not behave yourself, then it is less important what your own behaviour is.

In other words, don’t propose policies that would restrict certain behaviours in others(often on spurious “moral” grounds) if you exempt yourself from the same strictures.

That some on the left can’t even understand why “hypocrisy” is a meaningful charge, is a big part of the Left’s problem and a big reason why it has remained out of power for so long.

Dear Biffy Dunderdale

I do seem to recall someone saying Guido was making an aweful fool of himselve on Newsnight. Horrors!

I trust that Guido’s fans will recall that same incident and, well, cringe.

I know I did.

Making a bit of a fool of yourself over the airwaves is perhaps not the best of way to capture the electorate.

Indeed I am beginning to doubt Guido’s ability to turn us back to the happy days of the idiocy of the well born Englishman. For I am sure he is not a well born Englishman and that was just a bit of a tit;.

@35

The point is directly linked to the ideology concerned and boils down to choice.

A choice which is of course only available to those with the money to afford it and provides immediate advantages for choosing it. For those at the bottom of the heap there is usually no choice whatsoever*, so please, take your ‘Liberal’ pretensions and shove em.

* Except like it or lump it of course.

@32,

It’s nothing to do with fear of communists. The remark (and the sentiment behind it) annoyed me, that’s all.

In other words, don’t propose policies that would restrict certain behaviours in others(often on spurious “moral” grounds) if you exempt yourself from the same strictures.

What a pile a right wing clap trap. Every conservative who uses the NHS is a morally, pathetic hypocrite. Every Conservative who sends their sprogs to state schools is a hypocrite. Every tory who puts granny into care , and wants the govt to pick up the tab is a hypocritical piece of dog shit.

Brownshirt trolls are very good at political purity tests, but they never apply to themselves and their other fellow wankers.

The real reason Brownshirts hate wealthy lefties is they can give voice, and financial backing to people who the brown shirts prefer to ignore.

Another old Samisdat joke I can remember circulating in the late 1960s:

Brezhnev was showing his aged mother around his official country dacha outside Moscow.

This mother was suitably impressed but asked: What if the Bolsheviks come back, Leonid?”

Hell of a lot of stereotypes you’re throwing around there Sally – apparently in your little world, anyone who is “right wing” adheres to a fixed set of values.

Sorry, but it doesn’t work like that.

Yes it does, but right wingers don’t like it when they get called on it.

When you hear a tory talk of hypocrisy …..laugh in their face.

@ 38 Trooper Thompson

“It’s nothing to do with fear of communists. The remark (and the sentiment behind it) annoyed me, that’s all.”

Okay. fair enough. But the point being made was that state schools tend to suffer because the richest are able to remove their kids from the state system and send them to private schools. That’s pretty much a statement of fact – you don’t have to be a communist to see that removing money and power from a system will weaken that system.

What I’d like to know is whether Lloyd George, Britain’s last Liberal PM, was right-wing or left-wing when he returned from meeting Herr Hitler at Bertesgarten in August 1936 and wrote a piece for the Daily Express saying what a great leader Hitler was? I freely admit to being confused about this.

@ 39 Sally

“What a pile a right wing clap trap. Every conservative who uses the NHS is a morally, pathetic hypocrite. Every Conservative who sends their sprogs to state schools is a hypocrite. Every tory who puts granny into care , and wants the govt to pick up the tab is a hypocritical piece of dog shit.”

The difference between your fantasy parody view of “right wing”, “Tory” hypocrisy and those attacking La Toynbee is plain to see. Name a single Tory who wants to stop other people sending their kids to a State school? Name a single Tory who wants to close down nursing homes? You can’t can you? So, for a Tory to use those services is not hypocritical. Its just in your mind.

On the other hand, Toynbee is from the authoritarian Left who knows that her political Utopia will never stand a chance of occurring unless she can FORCE the electorate to behave in the ways that she sees as ideologically acceptable. After all, she believes she has morality on her side.

She has explicitly condemned private schools (amongst other things) in a way that no Tory has ever done about state schools, the NHS, care homes and so on.

So, your hysterical shrieking is shown up for the placard sloganeering that it really is. Get a grip woman.

@ 45

“On the other hand, Toynbee is from the authoritarian Left who knows that her political Utopia will never stand a chance of occurring unless she can FORCE the electorate to behave in the ways that she sees as ideologically acceptable”

Um, that’s pretty much what laws and governments do, regardless of where they sit on the left/right scale. Making it illegal for employers to discriminate on the grounds of sex, race, or sexuality is a clear case of forcing the electorate to behave in ways deemed ideologically acceptable. So is outlawing theft, rape and murder, come to that. It’s a bit silly to define “authoritarian” in such a way that it includes every existing and conceivable legal system. The word loses all meaning.

@43 Mr Couch,

Yes, taking the more privileged out of the state school system does lower the average of achievement in them,..just like taking all the best players out out division one and putting them in the premier league does for division one.

However, the state have more money per child in the system as the people who pay for private schools still get taxed while not having to provide for them. This shows the only thing the state is denied is the use of the child…which wasn’t theirs to use anyway.

In reference to your @46 about authoritarianism..
There is a huge difference in legislating against foul acts committed against other unwilling participants and legislating simply because, all though it doesn’t hurt anyone in anyway, the government thinks it should be done a certain way.

One is protecting the freedom from aggression of others, the other is just getting rid of freedom because you may choose to live your own life wrong.

@ 47

“Mr Couch”

Heh. It’s good to see someone get the reference once in awhile. Normally people just think I can’t spell “Che”.

“However, the state have more money per child in the system as the people who pay for private schools still get taxed while not having to provide for them. This shows the only thing the state is denied is the use of the child…which wasn’t theirs to use anyway.”

Not necessarily true. If the government has already set its schools budget for the year, then people deciding to put their kids through private school instead will mean there’s more money in the state system. Over the long term, however, the amount of money given to schools is what the electorate is prepared to pay… and the more people not using the state system, the less people inclined to pay for it. Its similar to the rationale for paying child benefits to rich people, although the implications are different.

“There is a huge difference in legislating against foul acts committed against other unwilling participants and legislating simply because, all though it doesn’t hurt anyone in anyway, the government thinks it should be done a certain way.

One is protecting the freedom from aggression of others, the other is just getting rid of freedom because you may choose to live your own life wrong.”

I only raised murder to make a point about people suddenly deciding that laws are authoritarian when they happen to disagree with them. It’s not analogous to the issue under discussion. However, employers discriminating based on race etc manifestly is – in this case, we have a system in which schools are allowed to discriminate against children based on the wealth of their parents.

Both cases DO harm others. It’s just not the direct sort of harm, like punching someone… it’s the indirect sort, like taking all of a vital resource for yourself so that other people go wanting. If rich people are allowed to pay for their children to get special treatment in education, this just worsens the disadvantages faced by those with poor backgrounds.

It’s not about whether you live your life wrong – adults have the right to make their own decisions when nobody else’s wellbeing is at stake (for example, you won’t find me arguing that it’s right to ban people from using narcotics for their own good). It’s about how much freedom you get to push weaker people down to benefit yourself and your kin. Why should our society punish people for being born into non-affluent families?

@28

“The reason the Guardian avoids tax is because if it didn’t it would be toast. It would cost more than the Indy, no-one would buy it, it would go bankrupt. Simple.”

That might be true but that doesn’t actually justify the newspaper condemning others for actions it itself takes.

Maybe it should do a little more to make itself a commercially viable product and focus on proper journalism rather than churnalism and laughably awful comment pieces. At the moment I could count the number of proper journalists on that paper with the fingers of one hand (and at least a couple of those are freelance).

I think when we say hurting people we mean different things.
I mean causing someone to be worse than they were. I believe you are using it in a sense where someone is hurt if they are not advanced as much as someone else.

An example would be two people where one reads a book and the other doesn’t. In my mind, the person that hasn’t read a book is not hurt …whereas I believe your way of thinking would say that they were because they are now less educated in the books subject.

I think thatcher knocked the nail on the head when she replied to someone who was complaining that even though the living conditions of both the poor and wealthy had improved, that the wealthy’s had improved more by saying that what the complaint was really about was the belief that the successful should be brought down to make the less successful appear better by comparison than the goal of improving the poorest peoples lives.

Sending your child to a school where they will get a good education doesn’t mean the state school attendees can’t excel. Yes, there may be a gulf between how people end up, but that is due to how dire the state school system is.

We should be making it so there isn’t a need to send people to private schools, but any attempt at that I.e. streaming or grammar schools is instantly stamped out by those that seem to want to crush aspiration.

Those who decided to not go down with the ship didn’t sink it, in fact by abandoning it they made it less likely to sink

@43 Chaise

“But the point being made was that state schools tend to suffer because the richest are able to remove their kids from the state system and send them to private schools.”

I don’t care if the state schools suffer, I’m more interested in the welfare of the actual human beings.

If you believe that children must be fed into the state system to benefit that system, then your point has validity. If, however, you believe that schools are supposed to be a benefit to the children, then it doesn’t.

Chaise Cuevara @ 29

Objecting to the system doesn’t mean you have to deliberately pick the worst option while the system is running. People who object to animal testing aren’t hypocrites for using drugs that have already been treated on animals….

Fair point…. but the point I was making was specifically about Westminster School, which, along with Eton and a few others confers certain social as well as academic advantages.

Polly could surely have obtained for her daughter a good academic education nearer her South London home (Alleyns, for example) without plumping for the social cachet of Westminster?

@ 50

“I think when we say hurting people we mean different things [...] I believe your way of thinking would say that they were because they are now less educated in the books subject. ”

Well, not LESS educated, failing to read a book doesn’t remove your existing knowledge. But yes, this is why I made the distinction between direct and indirect harm. For the book analogy to fit here, you’d have to assume that the book gave you very useful knowledge that was hard to find elsewhere, the sort of knowledge that would help you find a good job in later life, and that poor people didn’t get to read the book (either because it was expensive or because the elite conspired to keep all the copies for themselves).

“I think thatcher knocked the nail on the head when she replied to someone who was complaining that even though the living conditions of both the poor and wealthy had improved, that the wealthy’s had improved more by saying that what the complaint was really about was the belief that the successful should be brought down to make the less successful appear better by comparison than the goal of improving the poorest peoples lives.”

Trying to solve the rich/poor divide simply by making the rich poorer falls into the category of “bloody stupid”. It’s a different deal with private schools. By getting unfair advantages in early life, private-school pupils grow up to be more likely to do well in life than state-school pupils. And they may be in direct competition for jobs, so elite education does harm state pupils.

If you dope a racehorse, you haven’t made any of the other horses slower. But your doped racehorse will still win the race unfairly.

“Sending your child to a school where they will get a good education doesn’t mean the state school attendees can’t excel. Yes, there may be a gulf between how people end up, but that is due to how dire the state school system is.”

It doesn’t mean they can’t excel. It does make it harder for them to excel, because of increased competition. If you were as likely to excel at a state school, private schools would have no reason to exist (apart from sentimentality and so on).

“We should be making it so there isn’t a need to send people to private schools, but any attempt at that I.e. streaming or grammar schools is instantly stamped out by those that seem to want to crush aspiration. ”

With you on this.

“Those who decided to not go down with the ship didn’t sink it, in fact by abandoning it they made it less likely to sink”

As I said above, this is true in the short term but probably false in the long term. I will say, however, that I have no beef with parents (including my own) who decide to send their kids to private school. It’s not their fault that the system is unfair, and it’s hard to blame them for wanting the best for their children.

@ 51 Trooper Thompson

“I don’t care if the state schools suffer, I’m more interested in the welfare of the actual human beings.”

What exactly do you expect to achieve by deliberately misinterpreting me? No, obviously I’m not concerned about the welfare of the buildings or whatever it is you’re on about.

“If you believe that children must be fed into the state system to benefit that system, then your point has validity. If, however, you believe that schools are supposed to be a benefit to the children, then it doesn’t.”

Riiiggghhttt… I’m suggesting a method to make schools more beneficial to children and you say that’s not valid if I want schools to benefit children. I think you might need to rephrase this point so that it actually makes sense.

@ 52 Flowerpower

“lly could surely have obtained for her daughter a good academic education nearer her South London home (Alleyns, for example) without plumping for the social cachet of Westminster?”

Good point well made.

@51: “I don’t care if the state schools suffer, I’m more interested in the welfare of the actual human beings.”

You are aware that state pupils are human, yes?

@56 – Don’t assume…

After all, the POOR use state schools, and…

@56/57 its actually my experience that the poor don’t tend to go to state school much after 13 anyway

Terrible reply from Toynbee. She should know that it is “Gandhi”, not “Ghandi”

I have to wonder, if I had my way, (and had the money) would I send my hypothetical children to a private school, believing that private schools shouldn’t exist? Or should I give my children a lower start in life purely based on my own principles?

The other question is, would me sending my children to a state school make any difference to the system? Would the system be more likely to change based upon where I send my children?

If I had my way I’d completely abolish private schools and force the investment into state schools to make sure every child has an ideal start. Since I can’t, I have two choices, sacrifice the start of my children’s life for my principles, or be branded a hypocrite by those who are happy with the status quo or think that only suffering breeds the right to want change.

You could say the same thing about the banking system. We’re all forced to use banks in some form or other, we can choose not to but we’d also be choosing to make life much harder on ourselves, and in the process, have less influence over the banking system which we all agree is flawed in many ways. Does that mean we’re also hypocrites for using a system which is inherently wrong?

Ultimately I don’t think I would send my children to a private school (at the moment at least), I don’t want over-privileged children with no experience of the real world. But I wouldn’t judge those who did because I know that it’s easier to change the system from inside it than from without. As the tropers page says though, your milage may vary.