Ah, UKUncut.  The most dishonest, scumbaggy set of shabby protestors the country has ever known.

They set up their ramshackle campaign off the back of Vodafone settling with HMRC over its tax liabilities in Luxembourg.  Without getting too technical, HMRC was keen to avoid the case being referred to the European Court of Appeal, so it was worth its while to settle.  For Vodafone, it removed the overhanging fear of another long, expensive round of litigation.  But UKUncut got it in their heads that, rather than the £2bn originally provided, or the £1bn eventually paid, Vodafone owed £6bn.  And that if only we could get Vodafone to pay £6bn more tax this year, and indeed every year, this would reduce the deficit without having to cut £6bn of services.  UKUncut was born.

Then they turned their attention to Sir Philip Green, the genius who turned Top Shop around from a hopeless, failing set of retail stores into a thriving UK high street chain. He made a lot of money in the process too, and UKUncut think that he didn't pay his taxes along the way.  But the company has paid its taxes. And then it decided to pay up a giant dividend to its ultimate beneficial shareholder, Sir Philip's wife, who happens to live in another country.  As our tax system isn't generally in the business of taxing foreigners who don't live here, there was no further tax to pay.

So, despite having a modest amount of public support, UKUncut were still rather scrabbling around looking for some facts to support them.  They tried Boots.  Boots was taken private a few years ago and loaded up with debt.  Debt interest, unlike dividends on ordinary shares, is tax deductible. So Boots has gone from paying rather a lot of tax to, er, not so much.  Queue inevitable outrage from UKUncut. Yet, one company's interest expense is another company's interest income. So there's still just as much profitability (if not more), it's just not all in the same place.

That's three big campaigns and three enormous failures to make the charges stick.  So I'm delighted to read that UKUncut will now be targeting banks.  This is virtually an explicit declaration that they have categorically failed to identify even one company that is avoiding tax in a material way. So they're confessing that their campaign has no factual basis but is instead a cynical greedy ideology-fuelled attempt to steal other people's money to fund their own political objectives.  Like many others, I will be seeking to factcheck the statements they make in case they're tempted to resort to telling lies for political impact.

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Filed under: Current issues, Politics with tags banks, boots, lies, sir philip green, topshop, ukuncut, vodafone