jeffs posts
According to the online newspaper, “David Gauke, a relatively unknown MP who was previously chief secretary to the treasury, has been appointed the new Work and Pensions Secretary in Theresa May’s cabinet reshuffle.
“Mr Gauke, a solicitor regarded as a quietly effective performer, has been given the high-profile role at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) as Ms May attempts to shore up her position in the wake of her disastrous performance in the general election.”
What can we expect from Mr Gauke? A lot of lies, obviously.
When government borrowing figures for August 2012 came in as the highest they had ever been for an August since records began, I wrote:
Exchequer secretary to the Treasury David Gauke said new figures showing borrowing for 2011-12 came in at £119bn, rather than the OBR’s forecast of £126bn, meant the government was dealing with its debts.
This is particularly rich, coming from him. Everybody now knows that the best way for the government to pay down its debts is to tax all the rich Brits who have stashed their cash in offshore tax-havens. Mr Gauke used to work for a tax avoidance firm and his wife is a tax avoidance lawyer. He is exactly the wrong man to lecture us on getting the deficit – the difference between government spending and tax receipts – down.
Shortly afterwards, Gauke was revealed to have been actively trying to gag a whistleblower who uncovered a “sweetheart” deal to write off a huge amount of tax owed to the UK by a private company.
According to The Guardian, it seemed Mr Gauke green-lit a plan to discredit testimony from Osita Mba, a solicitor with HM Revenue and Customs, after he took the notorious Goldman Sachs “sweetheart” deal to the public.
For those who don’t know about this, the deal with Goldman Sachs was worth up to £20 million, and was part of a series of four such settlements, with large companies, that netted £4.5 billion for the Treasury. That might seem like a lot of money, but how much did we not get?
I wrote:
It was a cover-up, in order to allow a company to escape paying the UK a huge amount of money, with the blessing of ministers including 0sborne and Gauke.
In Gauke’s case, of course, this is unsurprising. It has long been known – as can be seen by this entry on the right-wing Guido Fawkes blog – that the minister has not only avoided paying tax himself but also worked for Macfarlanes, a top city law firm that specialises in helping the wealthy avoid paying tax.
He is a hypocrite:
Before the 2010 election, our old friend David Gauke made a lot of noise about stopping the limitless tax deductibility of interest payments, that had been used by Boots (the chemist) to slash its tax bill. Six months after the election, when he was in a position to do something about it, he was telling everybody the rules would not be altered because business considered them a competitive advantage.
(Note my use of the phrase “our old friend” – indicating that, even in 2013 when those words were written, Mr Gauke could hardly be described as “relatively unknown”.)
He was later caught lying about the ‘tax gap’ – the difference between the amount of tax owed and the amount the government actually collects. I wrote:
Over on Tax Research UK… Richard Murphy has taken David Gauke, the financial secretary to the Treasury, to task over his fudged claims about the tax gap.
Gauke said: “The tax gap as a percentage has been lower in every year under us than it was in any year under the Labour Government”.
Mr Murphy replied: “Percentages are the evasive politician’s favourite tool, so I think that claim can be dismissed. What remains baffling is David Gauke’s apparent inability to see just how wrong his data might be. The government claims that the tax gap is £34 billion. And then it claims that HMRC recover £26 billion a year. Or to put it another way, £60 billion of tax abuse is attempted and 40 per cent is recovered.
“Is there anyone who thinks that remotely likely?”
He goes on to completely trash Gauke’s – and the Conservative Government’s – claims, and it is strongly recommended that you read the article for the details.
And, in the wake of the ‘Panama Papers’ affair in which former prime minister David Cameron’s family were implicated in a tax avoidance scheme, he tried to thwart EU plans to blacklist territories with a zero rate of corporation tax.
He is a fan of food banks and the fact that the government, of which he is a part, has massively expanded the need for them:
I had the misfortune to see Treasury minister David Gauke … saying he was not ashamed of the huge food bank uptake. He said they were doing a valuable job and he was glad that the government was signposting people to them. Nobody seemed to want to ask him: In the country with the world’s sixth-largest economy, why are food banks needed at all?
This does not bode well, considering he is now in charge of the government department most directly responsible for increasing that expansion.
I later reported:
Mr Gauke spent some time crowing about the fact the DWP rules have been altered to allow “signposting” to food banks by Job Centre advisors… (although claiming credit for government employees sending people to someone else, rather than providing help themselves, is in itself a mean-spirited shot in the foot).
At the Treasury, he oversaw plans to sell your personal tax data to companies, researchers and public bodies – plans that were hidden in the hope that nobody would notice:
The plans for HM Revenue and Customs to share its data are, apparently, being overseen by Treasury minister David Gauke… The government’s plans to change the law to allow the sale of anonymised individual tax data and release of the VAT register were buried in documents as part of the autumn statement and recent budget.
It seems Mr Gauke colluded with the HSBC Bank to allow more than 7,000 of the bank’s customers to avoid paying tax. I wrote:
HM Revenue and Customs was made aware of HSBC’s tax-avoiding practices in 2010 but from more than 7,000 British clients, the UK government has prosecuted just one person, despite having identified 1,100 tax avoiders.
Richard Brooks, author of The Great Tax Robbery (Oneworld, 2013), knows a thing or two about tax avoidance and evasion. He summed up the Coalition government’s collusion on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, referring to an agreement between the UK and Swiss governments, signed in 2007, to bring in “billions of pounds” in unpaid tax.
He said: “David Gauke, Tax Minister, and David Hartnett the senior tax official, started negotiating it straight after they’d received this data from the French authorities, so they knew that there was a mass of evidence of tax evasion at the heart of HSBC.
“They set about negotiating agreement with the Swiss Government which says… that ‘it is highly unlikely to be in the public interest of the United Kingdom that professional advisors, Swiss paying agents and their employees – in other words bankers – will be subject to a criminal investigation by HMRC.’
“So, knowing they’re sitting on all this evidence, they’ve simply washed their hands of it and said ‘we’re not going to prosecute’. And that’s why no-one has come before the courts in five years.”
So, far from being “relatively unknown”, Mr Gauke is a well-documented supporter of corrupt business practices, a liar, a hypocrite, an exploiter of the poor, and a man who will use his position to sell confidential information to businesses.
At the DWP, he follows Iain Duncan Smith, Stephen Crabb and Damian Green into the role of Secretary of State.
And, let’s be honest, after that lot he should fit right in.
Posted by jeffrey davies on 12 June 2017
=================================
jeffs posts
The SKWAWKBOX reported on Saturday the decision by Labour’s HQ to defund and withdraw support from marginal seats in a defensive strategy – primarily defending anti-Corbyn candidates – that cost Labour the opportunity to be in government by last Friday.
That article was based on personal testimony from those affected, including Liverpool city councillors who advised they were all ‘three-line whipped’ to campaign in the relatively safe seat of Progress Chair Alison McGovern and to ignore the marginal neighbouring seats of Margaret Greenwood in Wirral West and Mike Amesbury in Weaver Vale. Also affected was now-Labour MP Chris Williamson. This testimony was underpinned by corroboration from senior Labour figures.
Now the SKWAWKBOX is able to present further firm evidence of this diversion of resources to protect Progress candidates, including the unprecedented (and completely unbalanced) practice of ‘twinning‘ every constituency in an area, for campaigning purposes, with the same not-very-marginal seat while ignoring others just as near and far more threatened – a practice that has never, as far as Labour members and candidates the SKWAWKBOX spoke to were concerned, been part of Labour’s electoral process.
Exhibit 1 – the ‘twinning’ emails
Below is an email received by a member of Liverpool’s Wavertree constituency regarding General Election campaigning. It refers to Wavertree’s ‘twinning’ with Wirral South – the constituency of Alison McGovern, to which all the city’s councillors were also whipped to attend:
‘Twinning’ Wavertree CLP (constituency Labour Party) with Wirral South might seem a reasonable step.
Except that the SKWAWKBOX has received information from members in every other Liverpool constituency – Walton, Riverside, West Derby, Garston & Halewood as well as the next-door seat of Knowsley that they were all ‘twinned’ with Wirral South.
Wirral South was won by Alison McGovern in 2015 by a majority of over 4,600. Wirral West was won in 2015 by 417 votes – yet not a single CLP was ‘twinned’ with Wirral West and the city’s councillors were forbidden by Labour’s NW region to campaign in Wirral West.
That’s not the end of the matter. A councillor in the Walton constituency has confirmed that s/he was whipped, like other city councillors, to go to Wirral South – and that the whole CLP ‘executive committee’ was also whipped to support Wirral South.
Labour’s official machine not only failed to give any support to Margaret Greenwood in marginal Wirral West (or Weaver Vale) – it banned Labour officials from doing so and routed the support of ordinary members to Wirral South via ‘twinning’.
Exhibit 2: Bolton West
This behaviour was not limited to Merseyside. As the SKWAWKBOX revealed on Saturday, the marginal constituency of Bolton West – again with a pro-Corbyn candidate – was lost last week by just over 900 votes. Labour’s candidate there received no funding except a union donation of around £1,400 and could not even afford garden stakes to raise Labour’s profile. The MP had no official campaign team and had only a team of volunteers with no campaign-management experience.
A Bolton West member has advised the SKWAWKBOX that she contacted Labour NW for details of campaigning opportunities in her own constituency of Bolton West – and was told not to:
I phoned Region and told them I lived in Bolton West and I wanted to go doorknocking in Bolton West. Not only did they try to persuade me NOT to help out in Bolton West, they also refused to put me in contact with anyone from Bolton West.
Another Bolton West member said that they had asked for details of phone-banking in the constituency and were told that they couldn’t phone-bank in Bolton West:
You should be calling in Bolton NE and Oldham East.
Exhibit 3: Southampton
Nor is this behaviour limited to the north-west. The SKWAWKBOX received information relating to similar issues from members across the country. One member of a Southampton constituency told this blog:
Our Regional office/HQ and local party leadership pushed all resources into defending a safer seat which ended up with an 11,500 majority and left the neighbouring Tory marginal under-supported. The NEC had already imposed a non Corbyn-supporting candidate whose campaign pretended Corbyn didn’t exist.
That seat was lost by 31 votes. The campaign was extremely badly run which contributed to losing but if it had been fully resourced we might have been able to get it.
These examples are just a small part of the evidence that is building up about a craven and self-serving agenda that was enacted by Labour’s bureaucracy in an apparent attempt to ‘circle the wagons’ around right-wing candidates to protect them at the expense of defending marginal seats with pro-Corbyn candidates – and at the expense of any officially-funded attempt to win Tory marginals.
And therefore at the expense of a Labour government starting on Friday.
The incredible efforts of a host of volunteers who took the initiative to get out into those marginal consistencies meant that Labour was able to confound its doubters by winning 30-odd additional seats – including Weaver Vale – and successfully defended many Labour-held marginals – including Wirral West.
But Labour also lost a few marginal seats, reducing the net gains, while the (again volunteer-driven) successes in places like Canterbury and Lincoln showed what could have been achieved had Labour HQ supported the party’s leader and membership in their efforts instead of merely seeking to defend the number of right-wing MPs in the party, no doubt with an eye to retaking control of the Labour party in the event of a poor performance in the General Election.
In defending their own narrow, internal interests, the right-wingers at Labour HQ cost Labour the keys to Downing Street – and cost the party its chance to have a Labour government with a policy platform that inspired voters and would transform the fabric of our society.
That cannot be allowed to happen ever again and those responsible must be replaced by people with the best interests of the party and the country genuinely at heart.
Posted by jeffrey davies on 12 June 2017
