A letter a day to number 10. No 1,007
Saturday 21 February 2015.
Dear Mr Cameron,
In true form Osborne evades or avoids, not sure which, the HSBC corruption scandal by claiming it was a “cardinal rule as chancellor not to get involved in or know the details of any individual’s or any individual company’s tax affairs”.
Allow me to rephrase Osborne’s meddling in the affairs of those on benefits in his speech at the 2012 Conservative conference – “Where is the fairness, we ask, for the shift-worker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of their next door neighbour sleeping off a life on the ill gotten gains of tax evasion?”
Your government is never shy about attacking people on benefits and the lives of ordinary people, as the Spectator reported – there has only been one prosecution resulting from detailed information passed to HMRC in 2010 in which 1,100 British citizens were thought to have been involved in the Swiss arm of HSBC holding undeclared accounts from the domestic authorities. ” Contrast that with the 1,046,398 sanctions, or financial penalties, imposed on Jobseeker’s Allowance claimants in 2013, or the nearly 200,000 prosecutions of people who failed to buy a television licence. As the tax campaigner Richard Murphy put it: “To the wealthiest criminals and their assistants within the financial system go the rewards and the plaudits. To everyone else goes intimidation and persecution.”
In short, it is your, and Osborne’s, policy to protect the rich and attack the poor.
Margaret Hodge observed regarding the HSBC scandal, “If this had been benefits scroungers, they would have been queuing around the courtrooms.”
Thousands of people have been summonsed to court over council tax and bedroom tax arrears with queues around the court houses. One victim of the bedroom tax yelled, “I’m sick of all this shit” before cutting his throat in front of horrified staff at a benefits office.
Stephen Green, ex-head of HSBC, however, was made a life peer and you appointed him as trade minister in 2011. You really are the most corrupt party in UK history for which poor people pay with their lives.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/council-tax-huge-queues-outside-2033516
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/bedroom-tax-man-yells-im-2092056
Fear and Loathing in Great Britain 