For 18 months the chief executive of the Student Loans company has been avoiding tax – with the inside help of George Osborne.
Ed Lester’s pay is diverted through a subsidiary company, in a scheme signed off by universities minister David Willets. The whole thing was sanctioned by Danny Alexander – George Osborne’s Lib Dem minion in the Treasury.
Unlike other public sector workers and student loan repayments, this dodge allows Lester to avoid having income tax and national insurance deducted at source, giving his accountants plenty of time to conjure up an ‘arrangement’.
David Willets (the one who hates students) probably could’ve come up with a better excuse than ‘money-saving’ – the idea being that if Lester had to pay tax like everyone else, then his wages would rise, costing the state more money.
This stupidity needs no further comment.
The Lib-Dems claim to be acting as a good influence on the Tories. But Danny Alexander’s actions show they are either too incompetent to oversee the Tories, or else totally complicit in their corruption.
This whole affair makes a mockery of the government’s claims to be tough on tax avoidance. From Vodafone to bank bonuses, the Con-Dem’s record in power has been consistently to look after their interests, and the interests of their class, first.
Everyone else has to make do with a government that is robbing their pensions to pay bonuses to bankers, letting inflation and pay freezes destroy our living conditions, and breaking up what’s left of our society’s safety net and flogging it off to the highest bidder.
They’ll sweeten the deal by offering a cheaper workforce – one with no pensions. They’ll pour in a generous public subsidy to attract the sharks. And finally they’ll shrug their shoulders when private companies rip apart our education, health and welfare, ditching unprofitable areas and demolishing jobs and conditions.
Fred Goodwin, Ed Lester, and all the other spongers growing rich off the crisis are merely the individual symptoms of a system which doesn’t work.
The economic crisis is forcing the bosses to demand new markets in which to make profit. The Con-Dem government, composed, financed, and elected by big business, is doing its best to help, trailing kick-backs in a trail of sleaze and corruption.
The government is rotten. The system which it defends is rotten. And those who defend it most convincingly, are those who gain the most by the exploitation of others. Those who are trying to take us all for fools.
Millions of us have no interest in a future of Tory sleaze and Labour betrayals; we say another world is possible - join us.
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