Caitlin Moran: Left, right and centre, it’s nothing but anger

WE are living through a very emotional age. On the Left, the Right and the Centre, people are constantly angry, writes Caitlin Moran.

THE more I look at politics and political discourse, the more I think it’s not about politics at all, but emotions. We are living through a very emotional age. On the Left, the Right and the Centre, people are constantly angry.

Anger is, of course, fear brought to the boil, and so we may conclude that nearly everyone is secretly scared. What are we afraid of? Losing control of our country? Being taken advantage of by enemies? Small, secretive groups hijacking institutions?

Whether you fear Momentum taking over Labour, Muslims radicalising against the West, Jews smearing Corbyn, Corbyn smearing Jews, or pro-Brexit voices infiltrating the BBC, the gut feeling is that the society we have carefully, arduously built is under attack, and that soon – possibly even now, depending on how long you’ve recently had to wait in A&E – there won’t be enough resources for everyone.

There are those who are eroding civilisation from within. They are parasites. And they must be stopped. People are feeling this very strongly.

And, in a way, everyone’s emotions are correct. There really is a group of people within our society that is eroding it. This group is in open view and reported on regularly. We are told every time they conspire against us.

I’m wary of using hyperbolic language unless it’s describing something done by Kate Bush in a leotard, but I can’t think of any more accurate way to describe the latest slew of weary reports on the continuing “tax-bill shame” of dozens of the biggest companies in the world. Two weeks ago, The Times detailed how Amazon’s UK Services subsidiary paid
$3 million in UK tax last year on revenues of $3.5 billion.

This comes after last year’s incident, where Apple finally handed over an extra $240 million in tax to the UK – but only after an “extensive audit” by HMRC.

In short, to get that legally due money, we, as taxpayers, had to pay for HMRC to prise it out of the world’s first trillion-dollar company.

However much one might feel threatened by women in burkas, or Seumas Milne advising Jeremy Corbyn on foreign policy, it seems amazing that so little fury is directed at unfathomably wealthy companies that use every device at their accountants’ disposal to “minimise” their tax bills. Some go offshore.

Others go further: taking on massive, complex loans to minimise corporation tax, or even posting losses because of byzantine payments to branches in other countries. (In 2017, Vodafone made $11.7 billion in sales yet claimed an $850 million loss. It paid not a penny in corporation tax.)

To quote the immortal Danny Dyer, it freaks my nut out that these swaggering corporate disrupters – with their $350 shares and CEOs in $210 million private yachts – can also claim that they aren’t making enough profit to pay their taxes in full.

The cognitive dissonance is off the charts: to present yourselves as both the definitive global titans of the age but also to don the robes of financial victimhood is a pretty nifty trick.

And I guess it’s necessary, because if they weren’t spinning themselves as both corporate giants and temporarily broke, the public might come to perceive them as something else: massive, parasitic dicks.

A loose, international confederation of what are, basically, corporate barbarians; setting up glass-and-steel offices in cities to which they gloatingly refuse to contribute; so careless of our carefully built societies that the moral aspect of their accounting never seems to occur to them.

And yet it seems not to occur to us. With all our anger and fear about Muslims, Momentum, refugees and the BBC, we seem not to have metabolised the fact that all of those factions combined are dwarfed by huge companies putting themselves outside our taxation system: in the UK, according to an HMRC estimation for 2017, business withholds $10.1 billion in tax.

People’s emotions don’t come out of nowhere. Why would we not become fearful, distressed and angry when we as a nation are being held in such obvious contempt? When cuckoo businesses set up in our nest and then brazenly minimise their tax, they put their hands on the throat of civilisation and slowly choke it: schools, hospitals, infrastructure, welfare, defence.

In the long-term, tax avoidance weakens and demoralises us as much as a Russian cyberattack, or an Islamic extremist’s bomb. More, because these businesses are supposed to be the good guys! They are capitalism at its most successful!

But when capitalism doesn’t play by the rules, it feels as if you’re being taken advantage of. It feels as if you’re losing control of your country. It feels as if there’s an enemy within. It makes you angry. ●

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