Get serious. That is what David Cameron could have said in his interview with Robert Peston last night.
There is nothing more ridiculous than Britain in a fit of self-righteousness. Afflicted with inherited wealth, Cameron had behaved sensibly. Before entering office, he sold any of his father’s legacy that might be controversial, even if legal, and told the taxman. That this included money invested free of tax because traded offshore was hardly his fault. Labour’s Margaret Hodge had similar trouble.
If all of us sold any of our savings traded offshore we would need to sit up all night scanning our pension funds. As the financial pundit James Quarmby told the BBC this morning, millions benefit from offshore funds – and if they do not know, they cannot complain.
Most manage their money in order to minimise tax, often with the active assistance of revenue staff. One man’s squalid profit is another’s tax efficiency.
At this point the political hullabaloo resorts to poor handling. Cameron was a rich guy. He did not “tell it all, tell it fast and tell it yourself”. He seemed dodgy and on the defensive. His earlier antics in defence of overseas trusts now seem hypocritical. But since Cameron did nothing illegal, nor was guilty of that weasel word of the age “wrongdoing”, he seems in the clear.
What is surely plain is that flows of surplus cash around the world are wholly distorted by a necklace of puny havens cheating national taxpayers out of vast sums of money. An astonishing fifth of these flows pass through British territories that were originally allowed to set their own taxes to save the British empire from subsidising them.
Those days are emphatically over. If Britain’s government wishes to confer tax advantages on anyone’s savings – including those of pension owners – it should find straightforward ways of doing so. Tax havens may survive somewhere, but surely not under the protection and citizenship of the western world, let alone of the EU, which Cameron is so desperate to defend. The thief’s defence, “If I hadn’t stolen the money, someone else would,” is no defence at all.
People are bound to guard their wealth as best they can within the law. But this law is an ass. Cameron may be innocent as a taxpayer. He is guilty as a legislator.
