“Lovers lost in the forest of Arden
The leaky watering can
at the end of the garden
From whom and for what shall
I be granted a pardon?”
From The Jig-Jig Saw by Bachchoo

I have written the lyrics for a Christmas pantomime and have now seen it performed a few times. It’s called Dick Whittington goes Bollywood and in the tradition of panto has parodies of songs including Kolaveri and Gangnam Style, which I hadn’t accessed or heard of before I was hustled into the commission. Pantomime also makes contemporary allusions and this one has political jokes.
A phrase that inevitably fetches laughs is “we are all in it together”. It’s what the Chancellor of the Exchequer said to Parliament when announcing cuts to government spending budgets. It became a slogan of the Tory-LibDem coalition government and meant that this administration was asking the population to share the burdens of servicing the national debt and of reducing its deficit.
The slogan could not have meant that the poor will pay the same amount in tax as the rich. That would be absurd. Progressive taxation has been the criterion for some readjustment of wealth in capitalist societies for a very long time.
The reason the phrase raises a laugh when used by the characters on our stage is that the nation now knows that the phrase is empty propaganda if not a downright cruel lie.
The preoccupation of the Indian public with the country’s politics is largely corruption. India seems to accept that Indian politicians of all parties, the capitalist sector, their lobbyist and parts of India’s free press are indeed all in corruption together. One vested interest dare not expose the other because it would only be casting the first stone which would fly back with equal force.
The preoccupation of Europe and of the UK has, by contrast, been the central task of tackling the huge fiscal crisis that hit mainly the US and the Western world in 2008. It wasn’t caused by politicians, but by the ungoverned behaviour of banks. Opinions still differ on how the crisis came about. That banks had to be bailed out; that entire countries such as Spain, Ireland and Greece were in debt to the tune of billions which couldn’t be whistled away and that the fiscal structures and dealings of rampant contemporary capitalism and money-markets had done the damage are all beyond doubt.
The coalition in the UK came to power partly on the unpopularity of Labour leader Gordon Brown, but mostly because it was under Labour that the fiscal tsunami hit the country and the Tories said they’d sort it out.
There were two plans. Labour, now in Opposition, said the government ought to borrow, spend and stimulate the economy through growth. The government said cut back on state spending and we’re all in this together — an ornate piece of hypocrisy which has been exposed in several ways which amount to a different and legalised method of “corruption” from the licensing and black-economy scams of India. Or maybe not so different even though the scams in the UK are not illegal. The existence of black money means a parallel economy progresses without being taxed. This is precisely what international firms and banks do in Britain, only it’s legal. Tax avoidance and tax-dodging are seen to have the same effect but the first is legal and the government refuses to legislate to change it.
Examples: Starbucks, the multinational coffee chain has operated for 20 years in Britain and paid a fraction of the money it owes through tax-avoidance schemes operated by world-renowned accountancy firms. It is estimated that Starbucks owes £8 billion in taxes to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) and made a deal with the firm to collect a fraction of it. Vodafone, with millions of UK subscriptions, is registered in the tax-avoidance haven of Luxembourg. This year alone the company owes the UK exchequer £500 million, which has been written off by HMRC under a deal they did in 2010 about future taxation of the company.
Another major offender has no compunction about adding insult to fiscal injury. The chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt, has been taken on by British Prime Minister David Cameron as a member of his council of business advisers. Google is at present being investigated in the US for corporate tax avoidance. Mr Schmidt has shamelessly boasted that he is very proud of his tax-avoidance schemes and won’t modify the company’s behaviour and pay what he ought to under British law just because “he felt sort for those British people”. The perfect sort of fellow to be an adviser to the British Prime Minister.
Perhaps the choice of Mr Schmidt as adviser was on the principle of “set a thief to catch a thief”. There is no reverse proverb which, to continue the catching of thieves analogy, renders a lenient ex-policeman most employable by a gang of thieves.
If there was it would, only as an analogy mind you, apply to one Mr Hector Sants who has been the chief executive of the Financial Services Authority of the government since 2007.
The FSA governs the behaviour of banks and when he was in the job during the banking crisis of 2008 he promised severe action against them.
It was a bark with no bite. Under his watch at the FSA the banks seemed to be free to undertake literally hundreds of “mis-selling” cases and to indulge in money laundering with impunity.
Under his regime there were just four cases of bankers being punished for such breaches of the law and the fines imposed on the banks were marginal to the profits they gained from their irregularities and even criminal activity.
Barclays bank, for example, got away with Barclaycard selling unenforceable, crooked payment protection insurance.
Mr Sants reward? He has just resigned from the FSA and joined Barclays at a salary and perks vastly larger than what he earned at the FSA.