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Protestors force Vodafone stores to close across the UK

This comes from Gabber News. Watch the video. Sweeeet! At least five Vodafone stores were closed in central London today as a result of protests taking place about the British government’s decision to give companies, such as Vodafone, huge tax breaks (approximately £6billion) at a time when ordinary people are having their benefits cuts and/or…

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This comes from Gabber News. Watch the video. Sweeeet!

At least five Vodafone stores were closed in central London today as a result of protests taking place about the British government’s decision to give companies, such as Vodafone, huge tax breaks (approximately £6billion) at a time when ordinary people are having their benefits cuts and/or taken away.

Scores of other Vodafone stores across the country have also had to close as protestors demand to know why the Conservative government is, amongst other things, choosing to make over half a million people redundant in the public sector, instead of making big corporations pay taxes that they owe.

 

13 responses to “Protestors force Vodafone stores to close across the UK”

  1. raphie Avatar
    raphie

    Vodafone’s Tax Avoidance Vastly Overestimated by Private Eye
    The £6bn figure being put around by Private Eye is incorrect. Just a cursory glance at the article would tell you something was amiss. They talk about an income of Euro 15bn from 2000 to 2009 and a possible additional Euro 3bn for 2010 rather than profits being paid into Vodafone’s Luxembourg company. Tax is based on profits not income. Profits are income minus costs. That is the first error. The profits will be much lower than the income. The second error relates to the conversion from Euros into pounds. They completely miss this step and tax the Euro 18bn of income at 28% UK corporation to come up with £5bn instead of around £4bn – if you use an average exchange rate over the last ten years of 1.25 Euros to the pound. The final thing that they miss is that the UK tax authorities are seeking to recover the difference between the tax that they have paid in Luxembourg (21%) and the UK corporate tax rate of 28%. In the Private Eye they incredibly quote the Luxembourg tax rate as 1%. The 7% extra tax that is to be paid to the UK, the difference in tax rates between the UK and Luxembourg, on Euro 18bn is £1bn. This cannot relate to the Euro 18bn which is only income and the tax on the profits will be much lower than £1bn. Part of the £1.25bn that Vodafone is paying to UK goes back to the takeover of the German company, Mannesmann, and the capital gains that Vodafone made on the deal and booked through the company they set up in Luxembourg.
    While Vodafone is clearly avoiding paying the full tax it is liable for – about another £1.25bn, much of this tax is in reality due to the German people and other countries in Europe where Vodafone have made their money which is being banked in the Luxemburg subsidiary.

    I think there are a number of dangers with the Vodafone tax avoidance issue:
    One, we vastly overestimate the amount of money that could be clawed back from corporate tax avoidance and this becomes a panacea for the cuts – I have seen £120bn quoted by some on the left (see my article on http://www.leftbanker.net on how much can be we get back from tax avoidance) when in reality is about £13bn a year. This then means that we don’t take on the real challenges which are income redistribution and control of the banks and oil industry.
    Two, we lose credibility because our analysis – in this case Vodafone – is so fundamentally wrong. All our other numbers are then challenged and we are not deemed fit to come up with an economic programme.

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  3. Liam Avatar
    Liam

    I take the points about the numbers Raphie. What’s interesting though is that a pretty large, young crowd took to the streets about the issue. Maybe we are seeing the start of flash mob politics. Then there was the large demo in Brighton, the largest, says Dave Hill in his account since the 80s.

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  4. Jodley Avatar
    Jodley

    What’s interesting is that a bunch of people from the Right to Work march stormed the negotiations of Unite and BA. Never mind the politics/maths, feel the flash mob.

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  5. Liam Avatar
    Liam

    The Unite thing was an unfunny farce that was disowned by its authors within a few hours.

    As I best I can work out this was built through Facebook and Twitter. It doesn’t seem to be an initiative from any of the left currents and maybe it’s a straw in the wind that we will start seeing sudden spontaneous protests and new people are coming up with new ways of doing things.

    We need more inchoate outbursts like this.

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  6. Jodley Avatar
    Jodley

    Leftbanker may be an oxymoron, but an outburst based on Private Eye’s innumeracy is nonetheless a bit of a disappointment.

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  7. rwillmsen Avatar
    rwillmsen

    I hope that whoever organised these protests, which struck me as very fresh when they started late last week but have now very quickly gone stale, will swiftly change targets, especially since the ‘right to work’ campaign have bundled in in their customary gauche and lumpen way. Does the SWP do *anything* under this own name these days? Is anyone fooled?

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  8. raphie Avatar
    raphie

    What I am really concerned about is just not innumeracy of PE but potraying tax avoidance as a solution to the cuts. It started form within the PCS and is now taken uo by some on left. It is only part of the soliution – esatimates on annual corpoorate tax avoidance is in the region of £9bn to £12bn per year. We should ecourage protest but take a slant that it is only part of the solution and distance ourselves from the aburd claims of the Private Eye. Imagine if some left wing movement got power partly based on the vast saings from tax avoiadnace only to find it was myth. It would completely demobilse the movement and it’s supporters. There is no substitute for the truth and a solid material analysis. No short cuts to resolving the crisis in the interests of the majority that does not invlove massive tax redistribution and control and ownership of the banks and oil industry.

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  9. Liam Avatar
    Liam

    In an interesting cross-fertilisation it seems that many of the people involved yesterday have connections with the Climate Camp movement.

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  10. Adamski Avatar
    Adamski

    out of interest then, i am pretty certain that i have heard mark serwotka refer to £140 billion lost a year through tax evasion a year. where does that sum come from?!

    this form of protest is good – first, it dramatises that there are alternatives to the cuts through highlighting the massive sums of money in the corporations, second, it means that opposition is not dominated by the trade union bureaucracy. (obviously i acknowledge that trade union muscle is vital in sinking the cuts, but it is important that the huge numbers of working class people and young people are actively drawn into an anti-capitalist movement not just told that they can passively tag along on trade union marches – they must be allowed into the leadership of the movement)

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  11. Doug Avatar
    Doug

    has anyone bothered to engage the people who actually work in Vodaphone stores in this issue or is this one of the usual ‘more revolutionary than thou’stunts beloved of a certain organisation?

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  12. David Ellis Avatar
    David Ellis

    If Vodafone is avoiding taxes then that is a disgrace and young people facing permanent jobelessness, welfare cuts, the end of payments to stay in school, ludicrous student fees and the rest of the assaults which will leave them as the Coalition’s collateral damage in their oh so `reasonable’ war to restore the functionality of the capitalist economy are right to protest it. Our job as socialists however is to point out that as a result of the Bankers Versailles any tax collected is money taken out of circulation and thrown down a black hole of debt and is therefore no different to a cut. It is true as well that, while a nation must take its tax collecting duties seriously if it wants to be able to borrow, closing the tax gap will not solve the crisis at hand. We must point out that Britain is bankrupt, that taxes are the state’s share of the profits made by the capitalists by stealing the surplus value created by workers and that the alleged £6 billion in lost revenue is but a piddling drip compared to the profits being privately appropriated by the shareholders and the bloated salaries of the board of directors but which belong in truth to the people. Vodafone (a company that was handed a license to print money when it successfully bid for one of the licenses to operate a mobile phone network sold by the last government) should be socialised not taxed and we’d never have to worry about their tax avoiding hi jinx ever again.

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  13. bill j Avatar
    bill j

    The figures is £120bn lost in tax. The PCS have published an de-construction of the budget on their website that’s got all the stats.

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