In February 2009 Guido’s co-conspirators held a tax justice demo outside the Guardian’s spanking new HQ. Shouting “Scott Was a Tax Evader” and “GMG Fat Cats Pay No Tax”. We didn’t manage to get any support from multi-millionaire, three home-owning, anti-poverty campaigner Polly Toynbee. We would have dragged her out if we could…

The Guardian Media Group is one of the shrewdest corporate avoiders of tax in Britain, in 2008 it made a £300 million profit and yet managed to pay no corporation tax, the following year in 2009 it still paid no corporation tax, it uses the offshore Caymans tax haven to own assets, it uses tax efficient trusts and deploys all manner of perfectly legal tax shelter strategies to avoid paying tax. Polly seems silent about this tax dodging…

See also: Guardian’s Tax Hypocrisy is Ridiculous, Tax Justice Protest Against Guardian Tax Dodging

As the Blairites retire to their non-executive directorships and their former SpAds run herd-like to become leader of the Labour Party by tacking to the voter-repelling left, it is fair to say that Labour’s once marginalised looney left is back.  Even David Miliband, formerly Blair’s tea-boy, now supports a 50% tax rate, has become a born-again peacenik, personally nominated Diane Abbott and is, all in all, beginning to sound like a student union leftie.

So Guido intends to regularly highlight examples of left-wing lunacy going mainstream – today it is the ever reliable Bob Crow describing the spending freeze as “fiscal fascism”. The sophistication of his political and economic analysis would have Karl Marx revolting – fascism did not seek to reduce the size and role of the state.

Bob’s policy of choice? A general strike. Just what a weak economy needs to boost jobs and growth.  Crazy? Well Bob reckons “hundreds of thousands of workers will take to the streets.”

It is as if Tony Blair never existed…

Comrade Hundal says…

“Class War remains an electorally viable strategy because … it highlights wedge issues Labour needs to advance to narrow their defeat…”

Sunny Hundal says the Left needs to

“…get dirty and partisan – I’d say that is exactly where we need to be.”

Mehdi Hasan is the New Statesman’s ‘Senior Politics Editor’. He gets a lot of flack from the Islamophobic Jihadis-Under-the-Bed crowd for being soft on Islamo-Fascism.  They variously accuse him of wanting to sublimate the West to a new Caliphate and kill all non-believers or suchlike.  Frankly Guido has lost track of the detail and suspects they might be slightly misrepresenting Mehdi’s actual beliefs.

Nevertheless Mehdi does hold some strange beliefs which he reveals to us in the Statesman, for example he claims the BBC has an institutionally right-wing bias.  Have you noticed?

Today he writes of the Farage v Bercow election challenge that it is “a shame they can’t both lose.” It should hardly fall to Guido to educate the ‘Senior Politics Editor’ of Britain’s leading left-wing political publication.  Nevertheless it is Guido’s understanding of the current system of British parliamentary democracy that there is in fact a way they could indeed “both lose”.  If another candidate stands and gets “more votes” they would “both lose”.  Hope that helps Mehdi…

Tax Justice campaigners had a small demonstration outside the Guardian’s offices today to protest at the hypocrisy of the Guardian campaigning for FTSE 100 companies to pay more corporation tax when, despite GMG making £300 million in profits last year, it paid none itself. GMG took advantage of a perfectly legal loophole to avoid paying taxes on the capital gains made on the sale of Auto Trader. Without exploiting the law they would have had to pay more than £50 million in tax!

Sweet.

Via : Tory Bear