Not many people know this.
I've recently been doing some research for an article on tax. It is part of the grand project to create nby's political wing, and thus turn the Media Ink empire from a flightless kiwi into something which can at least vaguely hop about, preferably onto the toes and/or heads of those in authority. Here is a little set of statistics you will not have been anywhere near sad enough to work out....so just be thankful that I have. (As an aside, government figures relating to numbers of taxpayers were described as 'correct to the nearest person'. You have to laugh)
The general drift of the piece is that most of us (over 90%) are paying far too much tax for all the wrong reasons. It is the exceptions that are fascinating.
What Gormless and Salvador don't like you to work out is that financial services represent 62% of our GDP. The thing they like even more don't want you to work out, right, is that the purveyors of all this crookery employ just 440,000 people - or 1.7% of the total workforce innit? (Telecoms, by contrast, at 4.3% of UK turnover, employ nearly ten times more).
Among that 440,000 are non-doms estimated to avoid some 7% of all tax paid to the Exchequer. Payroll taxes on the other 95% will still amount to diddly-squat in relative terms.
So in return for lucrative access to the world's biggest financial centre, a licence to print money and a £900 billion bailout when they fucked up through self-centred greed, the banks paid almost nothing in taxes.
The bailout we paid for came to just over two million pounds for each and every UK banking employee. And during that time, the banking system continued to pay out billions in bonuses.
Last year, out of the top 1000 companies, no organisation paid over £10 million in tax. Thirty per cent use tax avoidance schemes to pay nothing at all. Of the FTSE 100 companies asked by the Grauniad to give details of their tax returns, 97 declined. As large employers, they are exempt from that requirement.
Big Business generates 48.7% of Britain's GDP, and foots just 10.3% of the tax bill. We the mugs cough up 73% in income tax, NIC and VAT. The SME (small business sector) pitches in with 18%. And they are right now being starved of funds by.....yes, the bankers - and Big Business witholding invoice payment.
As Lou Reed wrote, 'Somewhere there's a guy laughin' 'til he wets his pants'. There is also a very old racist joke that ends with the line 'fight fair you black bastard'. Both lines apply perfectly to this situation.
So there we are then: Gordon's doing whatever it takes, and his mates at the top are taking everything with jam on it. Plus ca change.....but in the meantime, think on what's really left of our economy now the world has sussed that, far from being a prudent financial centre, the Lottery winners have been running our banking system.