As the Guardian reports this morning:

Thailand’s election body has said it will seek the dissolution of a pro-reform party that won the most votes in last year’s election, saying there is evidence the party “undermines the democratic system with the king as the head of state”.

I can just imagine Michael Gove rubbing his hands in glee at the idea of doing something similar here. After all, voting anything but Tory has to be wrong by undermining the democratic system, doesn't it?

Rishi Sunak spoke yesterday of the need for the government, police and others to stand up against those who oppose British values. But, just what are those values? Based upon careful consideration of his governments, comments, conduct and legislation, it would seem that they include:

• Racism
• Discrimination, of all sorts
• A tolerance of :
  • Misogyny
  • Increasing inequality
  • Climate change denial
  • Wealth built upon slavery and colonial exploitation
  • English nationalism to the exclusion of the Welsh, Scottish and people of Northern Ireland
  • Economic exploitation
  • Corruption
  • Genocide
  • Tax havens
  • Hunting with dogs
• Undermining of the rule of law
• Vilification of public servants
• Vote rigging and gerrymandering
• A refusal to honour legal obligations
• A dislike of:
  • Those who work for a living
  • Social housing
  • The young
  • Those on low incomes
  • Those with disabilities
  • Single parents
  • Any type of non-heterosexual orientation
• Intolerance of
  • The SNP
  • Plaid Cymru
  • The Green Party
  • Scotland
  • Wales
  • Northern Ireland
  • Ireland
  • The EU and all its member states
  • State schools
  • Libraries
  • Theatre
  • The arts
  • The NHS
  • Anyone claiming a benefit, including the state pension, unless they also have a significant private pension as well, when doing so is just fine
• Those who are members of:
  • The National Trust
  • RSPB
  • Oxfam
  • XR
  • A Wildlife Trust
  • Any faith but Christianity and Judaism, but with an honourable pass being given for Hindus right now

In contrast, it would seem that supporting the following are all clear indications of holding an opinion contrary to British values:

• Free and fair elections
• Proportional representation
• An end to discrimination in the right to vote
• An end to discrimination, full stop
• Respect for human rights
• Respect for the rule of law
• Justice
• A right to economic and social equality
• Free speech
• The right to protest
• Action to tackle climate change
• Support for the Green New Deal
• Religious tolerance
• Social tolerance
• National self-determination
• The right to have enough to eat
• The right to a roof over your head
• Speed limits
• Peace

Not long after I first began to work on tax haven reform more than twenty years ago I realised that the problem that these places created was much bigger than most people appreciated.

The focus of most tax authorities was on the scale of the tax losses that they might generate, but in terms of their political economic impact, their consequence was much bigger. John Christensen and I suggested, right from the beginning of the time that we worked together in 2003, that the real function of tax havens  was to act as the launchpad for an assault on democracy.

The underlying logic of this claim has always been quite straightforward. Those who hate representative government subscribe to the simple logic that if only they can starve democracies of the revenue that they require to fulfil their mandates then they can  undermine the whole social contract that is the foundation of the democratic promise created by the universal electoral suffrage that has only really been commonplace from the 1930s onwards. Tax havens are a way to deny them that revenue.

I wrote the following piece on this issue in 2009, but nothing much has changed since, and so I will share it again. The need for vigilance with regard to this coordinated attack on democracy from the financial services industry, and most particularly from the big four firms of accountants who are the most important coordinators of this assault on our freedoms because of their commonplace presence as enablers in all the world’s major tax havens, can never be ignored:

Tax havens undermine democracy. They do this through their promotion of a process called tax competition. As one of the proponents of tax competition, Richard Teather, a lecturer at Bournemouth University has said:

Tax competition acts as a check on governments’ ability to raise taxes; it ensures that governments have more limited
funds and thus provides incentives for governments to spend more wisely.

By preventing taxes becoming too high, tax competition boosts economic welfare, productive investment and
employment. Low-tax jurisdictions also make global capital markets more efficient.

There are many more quotes of this sort put out by those who support tax havens. There are a number of assumptions implicit in such statements:

1. That it is appropriate for one government to deliberately set out to interfere in another government's ability to raise taxes.
2. That because a government does have a reduced capacity to raise taxation it is necessarily more efficient.
3. That taxation reduces economic welfare and well-being.
4. That flows of unregulated capital through tax havens without cost being incurred result in efficient financial markets.

Each of these has extremely dubious foundation. No group has protested more strongly that another state does not have the right to interfere in the setting of tax rates than the tax haven jurisdictions. By definition this undermines their argument that they can be used to influence tax rates in other nations.

If, as a matter of fact, low tax rates in tax havens are intended to reduce the capacity of other governments to tax then they are hopelessly inefficient at the task. Over the last decade or so average rates of government spending in OECD states have risen. Tax competition is a miserable failure on that score.

It is also widely known that the countries with the highest level of recognised well-being in the world are the Nordics states, where levels of taxation are high. At the same time, the countries with the lowest rates of overall taxation are to be found in Africa. It would be a brave person who argued that they have the highest levels of well-being.

As for the argument that the flows of hot money through tax havens in unregulated fashion have produced economic well-being - the current world financial crisis proves just how untrue this is, and that they contributed to that outcome.

And yet, each of these arguments ignores an even more fundamental issue. That is that tax rates, levels of spending and the allocation of reward within a society should be determined by the people of each state in free and democratic elections. If the people of a state wish to have a high rate of tax, and resulting high levels of public service, or even of income redistribution, then that is their choice. No one, especially a small group of financiers who have taken effective possession and control of the legislature of a small jurisdiction should be allowed to try to undermine that democratic process being undertaken elsewhere. Those who demand that these financiers have such power through such locations are in effect saying that the democratic process is one to which they do not subscribe.

The message is simple: tax havens are being used to undermine democracy. They are a threat to a fundamental part of our way of life.

A number of related themes are apparent in commentary on the economy this morning.

One is poverty. As the Guardian notes:

Millions of people – including one in five families with children – have gone hungry or skipped meals in recent weeks because they could not regularly afford to buy groceries, according to new food insecurity data.

According to the Food Foundation tracker, 15% of UK households – equivalent to approximately 8 million adults and 3 million children – experienced food insecurity in January, as high food prices continued to hit the pockets of low-income families.

This is a tale of destiution and misery in the UK.

They add this graph:

We have a health crisis not just caused by Covid (although that is still very real) but by the existence of poverty thanks to George Osborne and successive subsequent Tory Chancellors, soon the be perpetuated by Rachel Reeves. That crisis is not just personal; it is collective in its cost.

Then there is this in the FT:

A lack of available loans from traditional UK lenders is pushing vulnerable consumers towards unregulated credit products as they struggle financially in the cost of living crisis, according to a study.

The UK nonprime lending market — which offers loans to riskier customers with average to low credit scores — has shrunk by more than a third since 2019.

In contrast, unsecured loans from unregulated lenders, such as those offering buy now, pay later (BNPL) products, have jumped in recent years, according to research from credit-checking platform ClearScore and consultancy EY.

The result is that the most vulnerable people in the UK who need to borrow to meet unexpected costs because they have little, or usually no, savings are being forced into the highest cost, most abusive, arrangements. It was this concern that motivated a post I made yesterday: you would never have known it from the comments of the right-wing trolls who poured in during the day to offer abuse, and who got deleted for their efforts.

And finally, there is this, also in the FT but reported in a remarkably similar style in the Guardian:

Jeremy Hunt’s financial planning is “dubious” and “lacks credibility” and the chancellor should not announce tax cuts in next week’s budget if he cannot lay out how he will fund them, an economic thinktank has said.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) calculates that Hunt would need to find £35bn of cuts from already threadbare public services if he plans to use a Whitehall spending freeze to pay for pre-election giveaways.

A fresh round of austerity in unprotected departments would boost the chancellor’s war chest for tax cuts, the independent tax and spending watchdog said, but an increase from an expected £15bn of headroom to about £50bn over the next five years would come at a high cost.

That cost will, in very large part, be seen in the perpetuation of poverty. The lowest paid will suffer tax rises. They will have the services that they need cut. The NHS, social care and housing will not be properly funded. Education, that was the route out of this, is unable to meet need. And benefit increases have not met inflation-hiked prices for basic commodities.  And Hunt wants to make all of this worse.

A government unable to admit that there is Islamophobia in its rank hopes that rows on that issue will distract attention from another pressing concern, which is that its deliberate policy of prejudicing the poorest in our society is imposing destitution on millions and relative poverty on us all because of the opportunities lost to the communities in which we all live.