Layer 440 . . . Policing the Protests, Egypt, Tax Laws, The City, Funding the Tories, and Treasure Islands

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It's been pointed out to me that yesterday's posting was somewhat angry in tone. And here's me thinking how calm and moderate I'm remaining in the face of diabolical goings-on in the world!

On the radio this morning there have been reports of warnings by police spokesmen about the readiness of the police to respond to protests and demonstrations. Well, we all saw how the police responded in Egypt. Not very helpful, was it?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12400690

Warning over policing of protests

Police have been urged to adapt more quickly to the changing nature of protests in the UK.

"The service has a clear commitment to ensure peaceful protest can take place and balance the rights of everyone involved whether taking part in protest or going about their daily business."

On the other hand the response of the Egyptian army has been a model of how an army ought to respond to civil uprising. They're a presence on the streets, overseeing the peaceful demonstrations but not interfering with people's right to peacefully demonstrate. They are ready to respond to violence and destruction, but they are clearly neutral and not instigating or provoking any violence and fighting. They're certainly not seen to be taking sides with Mubarak and his cronies.

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In response to yesterday's blog question about why people can't see what's happened to our materialistic, spiritually impoverished and corrupt society, I had this feedback -

"Why doesn't everyone get it?"

"Because there have been decades of indoctrination and many, including myself, have been brainwashed into believing there was only ONE way."

Ah yes - Thatcher's famous dictum - There Is No Alternative.

The issue of indoctrination and brainwashing brings me back to Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine", and the fact that this book really MUST be read by everyone who wishes to call themselves educated, enlightened and aware. It's a work of pure genius for giving a comprehensive and comprehensible overview of the past decades of brainwashing and neo-imperialist indoctrination, privatisation, globalisation and colonisation.

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Yesterday George Monbiot published another of his excellent columns in the Guardian:

To us, it's an obscure shift of tax law. To the City, it's the heist of the century

In David Cameron we have a leader whose job is to quietly legitimise a semi-criminal, money-laundering economy

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/07/tax-city-heist-of-century

'I would love to see tax reductions," David Cameron told the Sunday Telegraph at the weekend, "but when you're borrowing 11% of your GDP, it's not possible to make significant net tax cuts. It just isn't." Oh no? Then how come he's planning the biggest and crudest corporate tax cut in living memory?

If you've heard nothing of it, you're in good company. The obscure adjustments the government is planning to the tax acts of 1988 and 2009 have been missed by almost everyone – and are, anyway, almost impossible to understand without expert help. But as soon as you grasp the implications, you realise that a kind of corporate coup d'etat is taking place.

Like the dismantling of the NHS and the sale of public forests, no one voted for this measure, as it wasn't in the manifestos. While Cameron insists that he occupies the centre ground of British politics, that he shares our burdens and feels our pain, he has quietly been plotting with banks and businesses to engineer the greatest transfer of wealth from the poor and middle to the ultra-rich that this country has seen in a century.

Here's how it works.

At the moment tax law ensures that companies based here, with branches in other countries, don't get taxed twice on the same money. They have to pay only the difference between our rate and that of the other country.

 If, for example, Dirty Oil plc pays 10% corporation tax on its profits in Oblivia, then shifts the money over here, it should pay a further 18% in the UK, to match our rate of 28%.

But under the new proposals, companies will pay nothing at all in this country on money made by their foreign branches.

Foreign means anywhere. If these proposals go ahead, the UK will be only the second country in the world to allow money that has passed through tax havens to remain untaxed when it gets here. The other is Switzerland. The exemption applies solely to "large and medium companies": it is not available for smaller firms. The government says it expects "large financial services companies to make the greatest use of the exemption regime". The main beneficiaries, in other words, will be the banks.

But that's not the end of it. While big business will be exempt from tax on its foreign branch earnings, it will, amazingly, still be able to claim the expense of funding its foreign branches against tax it pays in the UK. No other country does this. The new measures will, as we already know, accompany a rapid reduction in the official rate of corporation tax: from 28% to 24% by 2014. This, a Treasury minister has boasted, will be the lowest rate "of any major western economy". By the time this government is done, we'll be lucky if the banks and corporations pay anything at all. In the Sunday Telegraph, David Cameron said: "What I want is tax revenue from the banks into the exchequer, so we can help rebuild this economy." He's doing just the opposite.

These measures will drain not only wealth but also jobs from the UK. The new legislation will create a powerful incentive to shift business out of this country and into nations with lower corporate tax rates. Any UK business that doesn't outsource its staff or funnel its earnings through a tax haven will find itself with an extra competitive disadvantage. The new rules also threaten to degrade the tax base everywhere, as companies with headquarters in other countries will demand similar measures from their own governments.

So how did this happen? You don't have to look far to find out. Almost all the members of the seven committees the government set up "to provide strategic oversight of the development of corporate tax policy" are corporate executives. Among them are representatives of Vodafone, Tesco, BP, British American Tobacco and several of the major banks: HSBC, Santander, Standard Chartered, Citigroup, Schroders, RBS and Barclays.

I used to think of such processes as regulatory capture: government agencies being taken over by the companies they were supposed to restrain. But I've just read Nicholas Shaxson's Treasure Islands – perhaps the most important book published in the UK so far this year – and now I'm not so sure. Shaxson shows how the world's tax havens have not, as the OECD claims, been eliminated, but legitimised; how the City of London is itself a giant tax haven, which passes much of its business through its subsidiary havens in British dependencies, overseas territories and former colonies; how its operations mesh with and are often indistinguishable from the laundering of the proceeds of crime; and how the Corporation of the City of London in effect dictates to the government, while remaining exempt from democratic control. If Hosni Mubarak has passed his alleged $70bn through British banks, the Egyptians won't see a piastre of it.

Reading Treasure Islands, I have realised that injustice of the kind described in this column is no perversion of the system; it is the system. Tony Blair came to power after assuring the City of his benign intentions. He then deregulated it and cut its taxes. Cameron didn't have to assure it of anything: his party exists to turn its demands into public policy. Our ministers are not public servants. They work for the people who fund their parties, run the banks and own the newspapers, shielding them from their obligations to society, insulating them from democratic challenge.

Our political system protects and enriches a fantastically wealthy elite, much of whose money is, as a result of their interesting tax and transfer arrangements, in effect stolen from poorer countries, and poorer citizens of their own countries. Ours is a semi-criminal money-laundering economy, legitimised by the pomp of the lord mayor's show and multiple layers of defence in government. Politically irrelevant, economically invisible, the rest of us inhabit the margins of the system. Governments ensure that we are thrown enough scraps to keep us quiet, while the ultra-rich get on with the serious business of looting the global economy and crushing attempts to hold them to account.

And this government? It has learned the lesson that Thatcher never grasped. If you want to turn this country into another Mexico, where the ruling elite wallows in unimaginable, state-facilitated wealth while the rest can go to hell, you don't declare war on society, you don't lambast single mothers or refuse to apologise for Bloody Sunday. You assuage, reassure, conciliate, emote. Then you shaft us.

• A fully referenced version of this article can be found on George Monbiot's website

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Treasure Islands

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Treasure-Islands-Havens-Stole-World/dp/1847921108

Reviews

"A brilliant expose of tax havens and tax avoidance.Quite topical with all these tory types not paying their fair share but be warned this book is bad for your blood pressure if you are one of the unfortunates who do pay your fair share in taxes. Its frightening how little the rich contribute to the countries they make their money from.Murdoch's companies pay about 6% tax in Britain,which shows what a parasite he is.Every honest tax payer should read this book."

"Shaxson has done everyone a huge favour by blowing away the fog that conceals the structures of our current financial system. Brilliant. - it won't be long before the opposition mobilises as this book is a devastating, relentless and compelling assault on self-interest. At last though we will have a worthy debate and hopefully some practical change."

"Shaxson's book unpicks a sinister entanglement of abuse and advantage over centuries spread throughout the globe and not just in the islands we vaguely understand to be "offshore" I will never visit the City of London again without the nauseated feeling that systems operate beyond the law, democracy and common decency to humiliate every britsh tax-payer but worse to take constant advantage of developing nations. The breadth of his research and interviewing is impressive. However the fear of libel emasculates the name-and-shame opportunities that would give this book the shock horror value, in personality terms, that it really should score from the systemic and metastatic cancer that he tries to excise. "

'Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesars and unto God the things that are Gods' (Matthew 22:21) In the developed world, citizens are required to pay tax so that governments can provide hospitals, schools, roads, railways, police, social services, etc; etc. I believe that in a civilised country, income tax is the fairest way of re-distributing wealth, with the wealthiest paying the most tax and the poorest, the least. Society / Government has a moral duty to care for its' weakest members and spend money for the 'common good' Of course in America, with its' "frontier / survival of the fittest / winner takes all / free for all" mentality one can't expect civilised behaviour, and unfortunately, as this book reveals, they have spread their amoral ideas of how society should function, far and wide. Worldwide, the number of people using tax havens to hide and increase their wealth must be miniscule as a proportion of the global population, yet as this book demonstrates their malign influence affects us all - to our detriment.

"Nicholas Shaxon has written an excellent, well referenced , substantive book on how the money system works. Governments collude with financiers, and business interests, to make and take easy options for the benefit of the wealthy. The book is truly a revelation, and does much to explain how the sub prime crisis in the US morphed inexorably as institutions wrapped their packages in ever more complex instruments, built on an avalanche of cheap money. Shocking, un-putdownable, a brilliant piece of writing. Every Economics student should read this book. It should be mandatory for all Bankers and Financial Investment people to read and understand the immorality of their profession. "

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Revealed: 50% of Tory funds come from City

Donations from the financial sector have risen steeply since David Cameron became leader of the Conservative party

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/feb/08/tory-funds-half-city-banks-financial-sector

Financiers in the City of London provided more than 50% of the funding for the Tories last year, new research revealed last night, prompting claims that the party is in thrall to the banks.

A study by the Bureau for Investigative Journalism has found that the City accounted for £11.4m of Tory funding – 50.79% of its total haul – in 2010, a general election year. This compared with £2.7m, or 25% of its funding, in 2005, when David Cameron became party leader.

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Bloggers

http://www.chezchiara.com/2011/02/egyptian-blogger-arrested-and-his.html

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/02/ghonim-release-reports/

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William Hague reveals fears for Middle East peace process

Foreign secretary says uncertainty in Arab world could derail peace and urges Israel to tone down its 'belligerent' language

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/feb/09/middle-east-peace-process-william-hague

The foreign secretary, William Hague, has warned Israel against allowing the Middle East peace process to become a casualty of turmoil in the region, urging it to tone down "belligerent language" over protests in Egypt and other neighbouring states.

Speaking on a visit to the region, Hague told the BBC: "Amidst the opportunity for countries like Tunisia and Egypt, there is a legitimate fear that the Middle East peace process will lose further momentum and be put to one side, and will be a casualty of uncertainty in the region."

The foreign secretary implicitly criticised recent statements by the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, in which he warned the country to prepare for "any outcome" and pledged to "reinforce the might of the state of Israel."

Hague told the Times: "This should not be a time for belligerent language. It's a time to inject greater urgency into the Middle East peace process."

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Layer 398 . . . Dumb Old Gits, Veils of Secrecy, Nailing the Messenger, Tax Dodging, Brilliant Protests and a Civilised Society

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Following yesterday's comments about the positive levels of emotional intelligence among our young cricketers, today we heard news of a couple of ex-cricketers behaving badly. Ian Botham and Ian Chappell; looking to have a fight in a car park.

According to a 'source' : "They went for each other all right and it could have got very nasty if there hadn't been people on hand to keep them apart.

"They reacted quickly because we all know the history between these two. They might be aged 55 and 67, but neither of them are the type of people to give an inch in the face of conflict."

  http://uk.eurosport.yahoo.com/07122010/58/ashes-botham-chappell-clash-car-park.html 

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Julian Assange, he of Wikileaks fame, was today remanded in custody in the UK.

Julian Assange denied bail

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/07/julian-assange-denied-bail

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11937110

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Live with the WikiLeakable world or shut down the net. It's your choice

Western political elites obfuscate, lie and bluster – and when the veil of secrecy is lifted, they try to kill the messenger

by John Naughton

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/dec/06/western-democracies-must-live-with-leaks

'Never waste a good crisis" used to be the catchphrase of the Obama team in the runup to the presidential election. In that spirit, let us see what we can learn from official reactions to the WikiLeaks revelations.

The most obvious lesson is that it represents the first really sustained confrontation between the established order and the culture of the internet. There have been skirmishes before, but this is the real thing.

The response has been vicious, co-ordinated and potentially comprehensive, and it contains hard lessons for everyone who cares about democracy and about the future of the net.

There is a delicious irony in the fact that it is now the so-called liberal democracies that are clamouring to shut WikiLeaks down.

Consider, for instance, how the views of the US administration have changed in just a year. On 21 January, secretary of state Hillary Clinton made a landmark speech about internet freedom, in Washington DC, which many people welcomed and most interpreted as a rebuke to China for its alleged cyberattack on Google. "Information has never been so free," declared Clinton. "Even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable."

She went on to relate how, during his visit to China in November 2009, Barack Obama had "defended the right of people to freely access information, and said that the more freely information flows the stronger societies become. He spoke about how access to information helps citizens to hold their governments accountable, generates new ideas, and encourages creativity." Given what we now know, that Clinton speech reads like a satirical masterpiece.

One thing that might explain the official hysteria about the revelations is the way they expose how political elites in western democracies have been deceiving their electorates.

What WikiLeaks is really exposing is the extent to which the western democratic system has been hollowed out. In the last decade its political elites have been shown to be incompetent (Ireland, the US and UK in not regulating banks); corrupt (all governments in relation to the arms trade); or recklessly militaristic (the US and UK in Iraq). And yet nowhere have they been called to account in any effective way. Instead they have obfuscated, lied or blustered their way through. And when, finally, the veil of secrecy is lifted, their reflex reaction is to kill the messenger.

As Simon Jenkins put it recently in the Guardian, "Disclosure is messy and tests moral and legal boundaries. It is often irresponsible and usually embarrassing. But it is all that is left when regulation does nothing, politicians are cowed, lawyers fall silent and audit is polluted. Accountability can only default to disclosure." What we are hearing from the enraged officialdom of our democracies is mostly the petulant screaming of emperors whose clothes have been shredded by the net.

Our rulers have a choice to make: either they learn to live in a WikiLeakable world, with all that implies in terms of their future behaviour; or they shut down the internet. Over to them.

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These brilliant protests on tax-dodging can unite us all

by Polly Toynbee

  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/06/tax-dodging-billionaires-protest

What a clever, well-targeted protest. When the whistle blew and the protesters emerged from among milling shoppers perusing handbags and hats, it took just a few hundred people to shut down Philip Green's flagship branch of Topshop, in London's Oxford Street – and 22 other stores in his empire around the country. Summoned by Twitter, the UK Uncut movement brings together an instant army, peaceful, good-natured and witty in its songs and chants. For a while they stopped Green's tills ringing on the year's busiest shopping Saturday.

Though some shoppers were irritated, many were supportive and a few joined in. No surprise there: tax-dodging by the rich angers most people, more so if the law allows it while everyone else pays their PAYE. That is what makes this campaign brilliant. It is not a special interest protest – though there will be plenty of those. Everyone has an interest when corporations employ accountants like KPMG or PwC to manufacture fiendish plans for (legally) avoiding tax that could pay for the universities or Sure Starts now being savaged.

It is no coincidence that the government today hurried out a "clampdown" on tax avoidance. Would that have happened if the UK Uncut protests that have shut down Vodafone stores over the last month hadn't prodded the Lib Dems into remembering that "tackling avoidance" was written into their coalition agreement?

Philip Green, quite legally, put the ownership of his Arcadia empire into his wife's name in Monaco and paid her £1.2bn, tax free. (If only some gigolo would sweep Lady Green off her feet and so make off with all her husband's untaxed billions). Arcadia is not some flighty finance company, easy to base anywhere: its money is earned in UK high streets from British pockets and the law could make it pay British tax – as it should Cadbury, whose profits Kraft is moving to tax haven Switzerland.

As the Guardian's 14-part Tax Gap investigation revealed last year, respectable FTSE 100 companies and great British brands are fleecing taxpayers of billions. Even in the boom years when profits swelled, the proportion of tax paid by big companies fell: a third on the FTSE 100 paid no tax in 2005-6, with the help of byzantine avoidance practices. A great destructive industry wasting the nation's best legal and accountancy brains is pitted against HMRC.

How do you create culture change? How do you shame companies out of such practices when governments are frightened of their power? Polling evidence suggests that Vodafone has already taken a reputational hit as a result of these protests. Crashing and banging saucepan lids, whistle-blowing and rude chants against companies works where years of pamphlets, meetings and earnest debates cut no ice.

This week there are daily protests: women were outside the high court today against a budget that cuts 72% from women; tomorrow schools and sports celebrities protest against the axing of the school sports budget; Wednesday and Thursday see two days of student protest. This has hardly begun. Wait for the rest in next year's great post-April shock. The knack is for protesters to stand on principle and on the side of the public: students are protesting against cuts that hit their successors, not themselves. Everyone is affected by tax dodgers whose lost funds could cover the deficit.

Labour has a history to live down. Until last year, prodded by German action on Lichtenstein, it was pusillanimous on avoidance. Peter Mandelson's famously laconic line about being "intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich" had a rider – "as long as people pay their taxes".

But Labour didn't chase the filthy rich avoiders either: Britain is responsible for 10 tax havens that should be shut down. No official opposition can support direct action, but those close to Ed Miliband challenged the CBI view: "Tackling avoidance is not incompatible with a business friendly environment if done in the right way." Most people who ever voted Labour or Lib Dem are likely to support a crackdown: there is nothing scarily leftwing about fair tax collection. It is the price for a civilised society.

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Layer 385 . . . Ireland, Tax Piracy, IMF, Shock Doctrine, Terrible Neighbours, the PFI Racket, Nick Clegg, Social Mobility and New Fangled Progressives

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Royal wedding date set for 29 April

Prince William and Kate Middleton's wedding will take place on Friday 29 April at Westminster Abbey

Exciting. Not.

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Things are hotting up again on the economics and financial front. Shit hitting the fan big time in Ireland. Polly Toynbee's column gives an excellent overview:

 Ireland shouldn't get a penny until it gives up its tax piracy

Cameron says he is being 'good neighbours' with the Irish. Why, when they have been such terrible neighbours to us?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/nov/22/no-bailout-for-ireland

Yet again the western world teeters on the edge of calamity caused by the bank-lending extravaganza that fuelled the great property bubble. Europe holds its breath. Will the market predators be halted at Ireland, or might the rating agencies knock down all the dominoes one by one, first the weak countries, then the strong? Meanwhile a Europe-wide fiscal tightening panic may yet bring about the very thing it seeks to prevent, as democracy once again falls under the wheels of finance.

What lesson has George Osborne learned since he penned a paean of praise in the Times in 2006, "Look and Learn Across the Irish Sea"? He wrote: "Ireland stands as a shining example of the art of the possible in long-term economic policymaking ... Capital will go wherever investment is most attractive. Ireland's business tax rates are only 12.5%, while Britain's are becoming among the highest in the world." Low taxes are the answer, he said.

He claims he is being "good neighbours" with our cousins across the Irish sea. What he does not say – perhaps embarrassed by all that previous praise – is that the Irish have been exceptionally bad neighbours to everyone else.

Ireland's corporation tax is 12.5%, the UK's is 28%, dropping to 24% in 2013, and the US rate is 35%. Ireland has played the beggar my neighbour, race-to-the-bottom tax game for many years. Quite why the EU tolerated this is a mystery when a fortune was poured from Brussels to Dublin to pay for a spectacular modernising infrastructure over the years. A few other large companies recently decamped to Dublin from London, advertising giant WPP for one: these are mainly virtual moves for tax purposes only, since virtually no staff go over – and certainly not the board.

But, in the view of Richard Murphy of Tax Research UK, the corporation tax rate is only a fraction of the true story, a flag to signal to global companies that they will get a phenomenal deal with an Irish relocation. Ireland's real shame is not that, like the UK, it mistook its property boom for a never-ending cash machine. What is unforgivable is its shameless status as Europe's greatest tax haven, helping to cheat tax from the world's treasuries for decades.

Ireland allows Google, Facebook, Microsoft Corp and many others to shunt profits around subsidiaries so that they escape even Ireland's own low tax rate.

Ireland allows them, quite legally, to pass the profits on to other tax havens that levy no corporation tax at all, paying only tiny sums in passing: Google put 92% of its billions of worldwide non-US profits through Dublin, and it paid Ireland just £18m.

This is a pure tax haven, with the laxest tax regime in the EU, with no controlled foreign companies rules (to limit deferral of tax).

So why is Ireland not required to put its tax affairs in order and stop cheating all those neighbours now coming to its rescue? IMF doctrine demands countries squeeze the breath out of their people with punitive cuts – and they like low or, even better, no taxes.

The IMF's purgative is an ideological brew; it learns no lessons. When its patients get worse and near death, as Ireland has done after its first terrible dose of cuts, the fund calls for more leeches, mercury and arsenic. That is, of course, the same pre-Keynesian medicine Cameron and Osborne prescribe for us. There is a week before a final settlement: will the rest of Europe really hand over their money without demanding Ireland abandons tax piracy and joins the civilised world?

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Yes - classic IMF 'Shock Doctrine' prescriptions and demands. For more on the IMF and the shock doctrine outrage, just type 'shock doctrine', IMF, Naomi Klein, disaster capitalism, etc into the Oxzen search box at the top of this page.

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The bill for PFI contracts is an outrage. Let us refuse to pay this odious debt

The great racket that was private finance now robs the taxpayer of billions that should be spent on nurses and teachers

by George Monbiot

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/nov/22/pfi-private-finance-refuse-debt

You've been told that nothing is sacred; that no state spending is safe from being cut or eroded through inflation. You've been misled. As the new public spending data released by the government shows, a £267bn bill has been both ringfenced and index-linked. This sum, spread over the next 50 years or so, guarantees the welfare not of state pensioners or children or the unemployed, but of a different class of customer. To make way, everything else must be cut, further and faster than it would otherwise have been.

This is the money the state owes to private corporations: the banks, construction and service companies that built infrastructure under the private finance initiative. In September 1997 the Labour government gave companies a legal guarantee that their payments would never be cut. Whenever there was a conflict between the needs of patients or pupils and private finance initiative (PFI) payments, it would thenceforth be resolved in favour of the consortia. The NHS owes private companies £50bn for infrastructure that cost only £11bn to build, plus £15bn for maintenance charges.

In 1997 the British Medical Association warned: "The NHS could find itself with a facility which is obsolete in 10 or 20 years' time, but for which it will still have to pay for 30 years or more." No one's celebrating being proved right.

If a hospital no longer requires the services it contracted to buy, tough.

The cost and inflexibility of PFI is an outrage, a racket, the legacy of 13 years of New Labour appeasement, triangulation and false accounting. At first sight, it looks as if nothing can be done: contracts are contracts. What I'm about to propose is a wild shot, but I hope it deserves, at least, to be discussed. I contend the money we owe to the PFI consortia should be considered odious debt.

Odious debt is a legal term usually applied to the endowments of dictators in the developing world. It means debt incurred without the consent of the people and against the national interest.

PFI was a Tory invention but became a Labour doctrine.

There was no democratic mandate for this policy, which appears to have arisen from secret talks with companies.

Secrecy surrounded the whole scheme. To this day, PFI contracts remain commercially confidential. You can't read them; MPs can't read them. We don't know what we are being stung for or whether the costs are justified. But there are some powerful clues.

In Coventry, for example, NHS bosses originally sought £30m of public money to refurbish the city's two hospitals. When the government told them it was "PFI or bust", the refurbishment plan was dropped in favour of a scheme to knock down both hospitals and build a new one – with fewer beds and doctors and nurses – at an eventual, corporate-friendly cost of £410m. A report commissioned by the local health authority found that the scheme had been "progressively tailored to fit the needs of private investors".

To get their new buildings or services, public bodies had to show that PFI was cheaper than public procurement. The system was rigged to make this easy.

Desperate public bodies were gulled and outmanoeuvred with the blessing of central government, which sought only to keep the corporations off its back and the liabilities off its balance sheets. Was this a legitimate means of loading our schools and hospitals with debt? I don't think so.

But where else do we go with this? I've been warning about inflexible PFI contracts since 1998. I've wasted months on this mission, trying to understand and explain the most complex issue in public life. For all the good it's done, I might as well have gone fishing.

Now I see corporations squatting like great cuckoos on our public services, while officials pour the money that should have been spent on nurses and teachers into their widening bills. Yes, I'm bitter. Yes, I'm clutching at straws. Have you got a better idea?

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If anyone's interested in reading more evidence that Nick Clegg's just a Tony Blair clone, then just read this column he wrote for the Guardian yesterday:

For old-fashioned progressives, achieving income equality was the ultimate goal. For us, it is increasing social mobility

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/nov/22/inequality-injustice-nick-clegg

Nick thinks he's a new-fangled 'progressive', when in reality all this guff about social mobility and equality of opportunity is the same old New Labour bollocks.
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