Last week, as the Tory faithful cheered on George Osborne’s new cuts in benefits for the working-age poor, a little story appeared that blew a big hole in the welfare debate... that the British government had since 2007 handed Disney almost £170m to make films here. Last year alone the Californian giant took £50m in tax credits. By way of comparison, in April the government will scrap a £347m crisis fund that provides emergency cash for families on the verge of homelessness or starvation. Farnsworth takes the financial year 2011-12 and tots up the subsidies and grants paid directly to businesses. They amount to over £14bn – that is, almost three times the £5bn paid out that year in income-based jobseeker’s allowance. Add to that the corporate tax benefits, the value of the cheap credit made available to banks and other business, the insurance schemes run by the government to protect exporters, the marketing for British business laid on by Vince Cable’s ministry, the public procurement from the private sector … Farnsworth calculates that direct corporate welfare costs British taxpayers just shy of £85bn a year. Our semi-secret system ... of the 44 companies that received over £1m in government grants between 2005 and 2011, 13 didn’t pay any corporation tax at all; a further 17 didn’t pay any corporation tax either the year before or the year of receiving their public money. These aren’t two-bit firms, either: Farnsworth’s list includes Tesco Personal Finance, Dell and Plusnet. And, of course, Amazon – which in 2011 alone took £7.7m from Holyrood for placing a distribution centre in Fife. The Welsh assembly promised it even more: £8.8m, as well as a £3m highway to connect its operations with other road networks. Just finished, it’s called the Ffordd Amazon road, for the avoidance of ambiguity about whose interests it’s meant to serve.
Posted on: Tue, 07 Oct 2014 11:37:09 +0000