WAVE THE FLAG AND POCKET THE CASH

20/06/2012 - 17:10:46

British Prime Minister David Cameron today branded comedian Jimmy Carr “morally wrong” for seeking to avoid taxes.

To describe Mr Cameron as being guilty of hypocrisy, his own family hardly being strangers to tax avoidance, barely seems strong enough, so I consulted Mr Roget. He gives:-

Hypocrisy: affectation, bad faith, bigotry, cant, casuistry, deceit, deception, dishonesty, display, dissembling, dissimulation, double-dealing, duplicity, false profession, falsity, fraud, glibness, imposture, insincerity, irreverence, lie, lip service, mockery, pharisaicalness, pharisaism, phoniness, pietism, quackery, sanctimoniousness, sanctimony, speciousness, unctuousness

Well that will do for a start, we might also add some more colloquial terms, bullshit, horse-shit, bollocks, crap, for good measure.

 I was extremely amused to read that the recently honoured Gary Barlow, he who organised the patriotic love fest that was the Queens Diamond Jubilee concert, is also involved in similar legal tax scams. Happy to blow his patriotic kazoo and wave the flag his patriotism does not run so deep as to actually contribute to the upkeep of the armed forces and the other services of which he makes use, in his case literally tax free. Proof if proof were needed that behind many a flag waving patriot there lurks a scoundrel.

There is something particularly nauseating about these morally bankrupt individuals, like Lord Ashcroft, who in his case uses the libel courts to conceal his chicanery, boasting of their love for this country.

So Carr is of course a hypocrite and a fraud but my guess is he is not alone. Many a left leaning public figure who does not suffer the indignity of being forced to pay tax through the PAYE scheme must have felt queasy when Mr Carr was exposed. Tax is, as Oliver Wendell Holmes declared ‘the price one pays for living in a civilised country.’ Thatcherism, the shadow of which we still live under, called into question this maxim, tax evasion and avoidance are the logical consequences of that ideology. Finally it is worth observing that hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, though that is scant consolation to those having their home help cancelled and their libraries closed.


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