The Panama Papers and being good

When you’re filling out your income tax, do you hunt through and bite your pen as you try to find new ways in which you can pay more tax? Mmm – I thought not. Same as myself.  We may approve of income tax and tax generally as Good Things, but we take as much care as possible to declare as little as possible to the tax man/woman.

Given that we all loathe tax and even employ an accountant to see to it that we get charged as little as possible, why are we so upset about the revelations from the Panama Papers?

What do the Panama Papers tell us?  That financial and political elites conceal their assets and pay as little as possible (or in the case of David Cameron’s father, nothing) in taxes. That can’t have come as a shock to many of us. And while off-shore assets can be used by criminals to launder money, the majority of those using the system do so legitimately.

That probably strikes you as legal but unfair. You betcha.  F Scott Fitzerald says in his short story ‘The Rich Boy’ : “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me”.  Ernest Hemingway is reputed to have replied “Yes, they have more money”. And one of the ways they keep on having more money is to move their money to off-shore accounts like those in Panama.  Not paying taxes, or paying at a very low rate, does tend to make you pretty rich.

So if the system is legal, what’s our gripe? Well, hypocrisy for a start. Three years ago, David Cameron told the World Economic Forum (WEF) that Britain would spearhead a global effort to end aggressive tax avoidance in the UK and in poor countries. A year ago he spoke in Singapore about “the corrupt criminals and money launderers using the system”. Fine talk, superb lack of action from a man whose father benefitted handsomely from the system.

Then there’s the way that the world is divided. According to Oxfam, the richest 1% in the world own more than the remaining 99% put together. Britain’s Office for National Statistics shows that  UK’s top 1% own more in property, pensions and financial assets than the poorest 55%. While in the south of Ireland, 10% of the population own over 50% of the wealth.

So how do you respond? Do you make a point of being scrupulously honest? If by some weird and wonderful chance, the ATM were to spew out, say, an extra free-of-charge £100, would you go in and tell the nice bank people? Or would you insert your card again, praying that you’d get another £100?

When I lived in England, I had a friend who liked to split his morality in these matters. If it was a corner shop that’d given him too much in change, he was scrupulous in returning the extra to the owner. On the other hand, any opportunity he got to have something for nothing from the big boys – the banks, the supermarkets, the multinationals – he had no hesitation about hanging onto stuff. Not to put too fine a point on it, he  would steal stuff from time to time. Small stuff.   It was, he said, his personal mini- gesture towards redistributing wealth in an unfair society.

And it’s an unfair world. Some 795 million people go to bed hungry each night, while the rest of us watch endless TV shows about how to tickle our palate with yet another uummm-yummmy dish.  It’s hard not to think that future generations will marvel at how hard-hearted we were, comfortable in our surplus while those with less or nothing were kept at arm’s-length with razor wire and tear-gas when necessary.

Seen in those global terms, our pride in being scrupulously honest seems like peeing into a gale.

As the old rhyme so rightly put it: “It’s  the rich wot gets the pleasure/And the poor wot gets the blame/It’s the same the whole world over/Ain’t it a blooming shame.”