Corbyn Tax Smear Farce

As party leaders rushed to make their tax returns public yesterday, and its was revealed that Jeremy Corbyn had actually filled his in by hand - as opposed to Young Dave, his next door neighbour Gideon George Oliver Osborne, heir to the seventeenth Baronet, and London’s increasingly occasional Mayor Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, all of whom have a chap to do that sort of thing for them - the Tory apologists went into action.

Team Stupid presents united front

The inmates of the Baby Shard bunker knew exactly how to spin the story: they had to find a way to smear Corbyn in order to distract from the unfeasibly large sums of money that the likes of Bozza had been trousering over recent years. So the Sun’s non-bullying political editor Tom Newton Dunn, along with the paper’s alleged “Westminster Correspondent”, the odious flannelled fool Harry Cole, cobbled up a smear story.

“Question mark over Jeremy Corbyn's tax affairs after he failed to declare lecture earnings to taxman … Labour leader will be in serious trouble if he has evaded tax” is the headline, followed by the claim “JEREMY Corbyn did not disclose £450 of income to the taxman that he earned on top of his MPs’ salary last year, The Sun can reveal”. Do go on.

Yes Tom, it's L-A-M-E, as in crap

“It revealed a total of £1,350 in additional cash for nine lectures he gave about the Foreign Office to Capita … But his entry in Parliament’s Register of Members Interests reveals a total of £1,800 earned from lectures in the same period … The Opposition Leader’s office said it was unable to explain why Mr Corbyn did not declare the additional £450 to the HMRC in his tax return”. Is that it? Then it’s not much, is it?

The three payments of £150 came towards the end of the tax year. It’s entirely possible he wasn’t paid until later. But the Sun has to execute its crude smear. At least there is a semblance of credibility about Cole and Newton Dunn’s hokum, unlike that from the former’s previous berth, the Guido Fawkes blog, where the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his rabble have made themselves look even more stupid than usual.

Declaring “Corbyn’s Thousands In Offshore Income”, the Fawkes folks tell “What isn’t disclosed is that in previous years Jezza made a significant amount of income from offshore sources. In the last few years he declared £5,000 in payments from Press TV, the Iranian state television channel, and another £5,000 from Al-Jazeera, the Doha-based Qatar-backed channel”. IT’S NOT OFFSHORE INCOME IF YOU GET PAID IN THE UK, STUPID. THE CURRENCY SYMBOL SHOULD BE A CLUE.

But they just go right ahead and dig themselves in deeper: “Not to mention junkets to the Middle East, South America and elsewhere worth tens of thousands paid for by foreign governments”. THAT’S NOT INCOME, WHEREVER IT GETS PAID. How about an even more stupid observation? “The corporate tax rate in Qatar is just 10%”. IT’S PERSONAL INCOME AND HE WAS PAID IN STERLING. IN THE UK.

Staines really does have some meatheads on the payroll right now. Another fine mess.