The Socialist 27 January 2016

Housing: smash the Tory wrecking bill

Housing: smash the Tory wrecking bill

Davos summit: a broken capitalist system

Google pays pittance for avoiding £2bn tax

Red doors and wristbands scandal

Steelworkers may face benefit cut-off for not seeking bar jobs

Oscars snub black artists: fight racism and austerity in the arts

Labour councillor smears TUSC policy as 'BNP'

Them & Us

Top tweets: #TraditionallySubmissive

Teaching: a perfect storm is brewing

Teachers need national strategy for a national struggle

A day in the life of a teacher and mother

New wave of protests in Tunisia

India: student death exposes caste oppression

Tories 'Prevent' civil liberties

Labour councillor suspended for fighting cuts

Dave Nellist's byelection appeal to Jeremy Corbyn: 'let's discuss how to fight the cuts'

Labour election post-mortem: nothing to report!

The dark arts of Labour's right

Councillors must fight to defend our services

'People's budgets' and local democracy

Lewisham: no backsliding in council cuts fight!

"I have left work many times in tears" - a council worker

Trade union bill will stretch resources and limit action

Birmingham teachers strike to resist academy attack

24-hour tube strike suspended

Care services under threat in Haringey

Workplace news in brief

The end for deep coal mining jobs in Britain

Obituary: Dean Meehan 1962-2016

Letters

Protesting against closure of Huddersfield A&E

Coventry children's services closure protest

New Socialist Party branch fights against St Austell austerity

Socialist Party discusses the fight for socialism

Socialist Students bake-off

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Google pays pittance for avoiding £2bn tax

Google HQ, California, United States, photo by Robbie Shade (Creative Commons)

Google hasn't coughed up for a decade - and one estimate suggests it should be paying £200 million a year. Photo by Robbie Shade (Creative Commons) (Click to enlarge)

Andrew Carss

State benefits and tax cuts for rich corporations - pay cuts and job losses for the rest of us.

Search engine and advertising giant Google has agreed to pay £130 million in ten years of back taxes. This is a derisory sum considering Google recorded sales in Britain for 2014 alone of £4.5 billion.

The Tax Justice Network estimates it should be paying £200 million every year!

This comes after tax officials proposed in December laughably 'tough' fines of £300 for companies which submit their tax records late. For big firms, £300 will promptly be ignored. They will plough on regardless, hoarding vast profits to stow in offshore tax havens.

And who pays for the taxes they do not pay? We, the working class, in the form of relentless service cuts and pay theft. We didn't create the financial crisis, but we are certainly paying for it.

Meanwhile, the healthcare wing of US mega-corporation GE has taken root in the NHS. It makes hundreds of millions of pounds in sales of equipment and testing services - and apparently pays negative corporation tax!

Through tax benefits, GE Healthcare has actually made a net tax profit of £1.6 million, according to research by the Independent. This will come as an outrage to the hundreds of thousands of NHS staff, living on the edge of a knife, enduring pay freezes and job losses for years.

We cannot trust the Tories' tokenistic efforts to clamp down on tax avoidance. Much can be done to improve tax collection, but closing the loopholes will always be an uphill battle under capitalism.

We demand that all tax avoiding companies be taken into public ownership under democratic working class control.

Nationalise the banking industry too - it is complicit in this extortion, providing safe havens for the bosses' ill-gotten gains.

Take it all off them - and pay no compensation to leeching, fat-cat capitalists!

In this issue

Socialist Party news and analysis

Housing: smash the Tory wrecking bill