GARY BARLOW and the Tax Dodgers may sound like the name of a pop
group from the 1960s, but the phenomenon is altogether more
contemporary. The singer-songwriter from Take That is having to
repay about £20 million to HM Revenue, after the courts ruled that
his legal tax-avoidance scheme was in fact an illegal tax-evasion
one. Yet an opinion poll suggests that the public feel that Mr
Barlow should not be required to hand back his OBE along with the
lost lucre.
There is an intriguing ambivalence here. Only six out of ten of
those questioned in the same poll consider that rich people have a
moral duty to pay their fair share of tax and not to use artificial
avoidance schemes. Quite what the other 40 per cent think is
unclear - perhaps Take This rather than Take That.
Even the Prime Minister - who did at least think that Mr Barlow
should pay back the missing millions - insisted that the singer
need not hand his medal back to the Queen. The PM argued that his
gong was for something unrelated, Children in Need, which is a
peculiarly divisible idea of what honour constitutes. One would
hope that a fair chunk of the £20 million would have been spent by
the Government on preventing children from getting in need in the
first place.
It also stood in stark contrast to what Mr Cameron said when
another celebrity, the comedian Jimmy Carr, was found in 2012 to be
involved in a similar fiddle, albeit to the tune of a mere half
million. The PM called that "morally wrong". But then Mr Carr is an
edgy, cynical character, where Mr Barlow is much more cuddly - the
Cliff Richard of the 21st century, as one reviewer called him. He
also masterminded the Queen's Diamond Jubilee concert, and,
coincidentally, campaigned for the Conservatives at the last
General Election.
But ambivalence about tax goes deeper with this Government than
concern with celebrity dodgers. It has done little to curb the
activities of big transnational corporations such as Starbucks,
Google, and Amazon - all of whom go to great lengths to pay as
little tax as possible on their huge profits. Amazon had
£4.3 billion of sales online, Parliament heard in 2012, and paid
tax of just 0.1 per cent on this.
Tax is at the heart of the bid by the US drug firm Pfizer to
swallow up the British pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca (AZ). The
takeover will not evidently enhance innovation by AZ. It will bring
no new life-saving compounds to the market. It will not improve
competition in the sector. But it will allow Pfizer to avoid $2
billion in taxes, which would otherwise fall due to the United
States government.
All this - and there at least 90 other foreign companies also
considering "shifting their tax domicile" to the UK - comes about
because of changes to tax law made by Mr Cameron and his Chancellor
George Osborne. Their efforts to make Britain's tax regime the most
attractive of any large industrialised country have turned the UK
into the world's "biggest, most developed tax haven", the boss of
one big global bank recently told Robert Peston from the BBC.
No wonder Mr Barlow is considered a "national treasure" in such
a place.
Paul Vallely is Visiting Professor in Public Ethics and
Media at the University of Chester.