Dear Mr Cameron, Today I want to concentrate on immigrants, no, not your Racist Vans or UKIP kind, the kind I want to talk about are another beast entirely, costing the UK countless hundreds of billions of pounds. Take, for example France, a country which has banned fracking on its own soil. GDF Suez, partly owned by the French government, has bought a 25 percent interest in Dart Energy to explore fracking in the UK and French giant Total are also on board to frack Britain. Where I wonder will the profits go from these companies fracking Britain? Where will the taxes go? Will we see any? For whose benefit are they fracking? Whose infrastructure will they use to access sites, dispose of toxic waste and so on? Who will pay to clean up their mess and restore the land, if that is even possible, when they are done fracking? Foreign companies have bought into a vast range of British interests from water companies and rail franchises to chemical, engineering and electronic companies and banking. All these immigrant purchases and contracts see profits winging their way off shore. Big names like Google, Amazon and Starbucks famously avoid paying taxes in the UK, even whilst enjoying not just their selling power in the UK but the entire infrastructure that makes that possible. HMRC is now renowned for offering sweetheart deals to corporations and, as Margaret Hodge asked in 2013, If we got £4.5bn in, how much did we not get? After investigating Bernie Ecclestone for 9 years it is alleged that the Inland Revenue cut a secret deal allowing him to settle a £2 billion tax bill for just £10 million. Ecclestone apparently shifted a large portion of his assets to his wife which was then transferred to one of the Ecclestone family trusts based in Liechtenstein. The latest outrage is the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) which would allow corporations to sue the living daylights out of countries who attempt to protect their national interests and defend their citizens. It would allow a secretive panel of corporate lawyers to overrule the will of parliament and destroy our legal protections. These companies would have the right to sue us for loss of anticipated future profits, so, no bloody use to us, eh? Do we have an immigration problem, Mr Cameron? Oh yes we do! Time to break out the immigrant corporation Go Home vans perhaps?
Posted on: Wed, 09 Jul 2014 21:17:38 +0000