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.
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 
Today he writes of the Farage v Bercow election challenge that it is “
