Tory U-Turn on Tax Affairs Disclosures Most Welcome

George Osborne recently, and belatedly, discovered that some wealthy individuals and corporations are using off-shore companies and the diversion of income through companies generally to escape UK tax liabilities. Welcome aboard at last, George!

Now the Coalition Tories are supporting moves for those who take decisions that affect the rest of us - e.g. senior politicians or senior persons working for quangoes or state institutions - should reveal their tax affairs to show that their public earnings are taxed for public benefit like everyone else's.

Good. And there's even a hint that this will also mean closer scrutiny of large businesses who benefit from the large UK marketplace. They also benefit from the good governance, effective administration, physical and social infrastructures, protection of persons and property and the rule of law that we maintain in our country at considerable public expense. Without all those things that we take for granted, doing business here would be more difficult, more uncertain and less profitable.

Therefore those that benefit from our well-ordered society should pay for its expensive maintenance. The Tories even seem to be coming round to this idea too. Good.

However it wasn't always so. I've just found a newspaper cutting from 20/03/2010 which highlights the dropping of a Panorama programme which investigated Lord Ashcroft's tax status, residency status, overseas companies and involvement in politics in Belize and the "tax haven" of the Turks & Caicos Islands.

Why all this attention to poor Lord Ashcroft? Well, Michael, Baron Ashcroft of Chichester is a major donor, one time Treasurer and later Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party. He also financed and set up a series of campaigns in specific marginal constituencies. Controversy dogged him in the form of persistent rumours that when he was enobled in 2000 he undertook to William Hague (the then Leader of the Conservative Party) that he would become a British resident and pay a greater amount of UK tax. But on 1st March 2010 he had to admit he was not domiciled in UK for tax puposes.

What happened next? Well, BBC's Panorama had a well-researched and documented programme ready to go out. But they came under intense pressure from Conservative officials (according to the Guardian) backed by letters and personal interventions from senior Conservatives to drop the programme. Senior party figures also wrote to the BBC Director-General to protest.

And so the programme was dropped - and the public were able to carry on, blissfully ignorant of the complex business dealings of Baron Ashcroft, the "off-shore Lord", and the murky world of Tory Party finances.

So it's good that the Conservatives have now finally realised the value of transparency and fair-dealing in corporate and top-end personal tax.