Guido Fawked - Non Dom Spin Unravels

As if to once more confirm what Peter Jukes said about them - (“like a disownable branch of Conservative HQ”) -  the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his rabble at the Guido Fawkes blog have today done the Tories’ bidding in trying to rubbish Mil The Younger’s announcement that a future Labour Government would look to end “non-dom” tax status, and therefore have one rule for all UK residents.

Fart in lift Inquiry sounds bum note

Having a situation where the obscenely overmonied get away with not necessarily paying their full tax whack might look like something that the sane should not be attempting to defend. But as Labour have seized the high ground, either the Tories and their followers lose face by admitting that Miliband was right all along, or they must take an adverse stance and somehow spin it as economically sensible.

This they did: meanwhile, CCHQ found a video of “Auguste” Balls giving an interview back in January, selectively edited it to change the meaning of his remarks, and span that Labour was now split, because Balls had said abolishing non-dom status would end up costing more money than it saved. “Balls In Jan: Non Dom Reform ‘Will End Up Costing Britain Money’” announced the Fawkes folks.

There was, though, as Captain Blackadder might have observed, only one thing wrong with this idea - it was bollocks. Balls said “might”, not “will”, and CCHQ edited out him saying “But I think we can be tougher and we should be and we will”. CCHQ then lied about the edit. The Fawkes rabble span this as “Watch Balls Undo Labour’s Big Non-Dom Policy”. This was most obedient of them. But it was still bollocks.

And, as ITV man Tom Bradby was by now pointing out, the Tories defending non-dom status was looking like a bad move. But at the Fawkes blog, cometh the hour, cometh the purveyor of iffy reasoning and shonky grammar, in this case Staines himself, to urge his loyal readers to “look over there”. “Labour’s Tax Expert Admits Error” he asserted, telling “This morning on the Today Programme Ed Balls namechecked the blog of Jolyon Maugham a tax specialist QC, he [think that should be ‘who’, Paul] estimated that Labour’s change to the non-dom tax rules would bring in an extra billion”.

He goes on “Well other independent experts have taken him to task on Twitter for a basic error [no citation, no surprise there], most countries have double taxation treaties (DTCs). If you pay tax in one country on your earnings, you can’t be taxed again in another jurisdiction – the UK has over 100 such treaties”. Did anyone say otherwise?

Do go on. “On Twitter Jolyon has conceded ‘I accept DTCs could have some impact. There’s plainly some uncertainty about the numbers’. When you take this into account the net tax take will be nowhere near the billion claimed”. Where is the admission of error? There isn’t one. And no citation for the “nowhere near the billion claimed”.

This is shameless even by the abysmally low standards of the Fawkes rabble, as well as making next to no sense, except to the most tribal and right-leaning. Labour has stolen a march on the Tories, with Staines and his pals left clutching at the straws they just invented for the hell of it. Another fine mess, once again.