The front page of yesterday’s Metro made me laugh.
“The richest pay how much tax?” screamed their headline. “Multi millionaires hand over less than cleaners.”
Their outrage at the relatively low rates of tax paid by the super rich continued for three columns on the front page and a continuation on page 5.
I guess it’s good that they’re finally getting the message. But, might we have heard their millionaire and cleaner example somewhere before?
Let’s go back to January 2010 when I reported Nick Clegg’s appearance on the Andrew Marr show.
Also on tax, he talked about taking 4 million people out of tax altogether by raising the tax threshold to £10,000 while closing down loopholes for the rich. He mentioned the case of the city banker who pays a lower rate of tax on his enormous capital gains than his cleaner pays on her wage, and, let’s face it, it’s probably the minimum wage.
That pre-election statement of intent from the Liberal Democrat leader has since, as we know, turned into 3 successive rises in the tax threshold from around £6500 to £9200 alongside measures to increase the tax paid by the rich, raising Capital Gains Tax and closing tax loopholes.
Did the Metro story mention this successful and popular Liberal Democrat policy? Not a word. Funny, that.
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings
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3 Comments
As far as the public are concerned they have been ‘informed’ by the MSM that this is all Osborne’s doing.
So if more & more people get the gist of what is trying to be done, Osborne will also get the credit.
Journo’s eh?
Don’t ya just love ’em.
time we stopped messing around with a media that refuse to report us fairly, lets start our own newspaper.. oh I nearly forgot, its called LibDem News… time to get it out to all members funded by advertising (just as the ever growing Metro is funded).. then at least our own members will know our side of the story.
and secondly, is Leveson going to do anything about the constant misrepresentation of the facts, and newspapers having their own agendas? Surely to be ‘licensed’ as a newspaper it should be encumbent to report the news.. unvarnished..!?
For some real analysis of the HMRC release that forms the basis of the Metro’s leader see:
http://www.taxjournal.com/tj/articles/treasury-figures-show-9-%E2%80%98super-wealthy%E2%80%99-paying-less-basic-rate-tax-44561
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/04/16/now-its-hm-treasury-spouting-nonsense-about-tax-avoidance/
http://paullewismoney.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/treasury-income-tax-figures.html
From these you will see that Metro have misunderstood and misrepresented the information in the table released by HMRC…