Danny Alexander attempted to burnish his radical credentials yesterday when he revealed that he had been boycotting Starbucks. After the chain promised to review its UK tax arrangements, he said: “I might be able to buy a coffee from Starbucks again soon”.
But asked by John Humphrys on the Today programme this morning whether he had been boycotting Starbucks, Amazon and Google, all of whom have been accused by the Commons public accounts committee of “paying little or no corporation tax”, Alexander offered a notably different response. “I’m a tea drinker, so I don’t tend to go to Starbucks or other such places,” he said, adding: “I do use Amazon from time to time, or I have.” So was the “tea drinker” ever going to Starbucks to begin with?
But regardless of his spending habits, as Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Alexander can and should be doing more to prevent corporate tax avoidance. He boasted today that the £154m of funding announced by George Osborne would give “HMRC the resources they say they need to do this.” But what he didn’t say is that the extra funding will barely begin to compensate for the £2bn of cuts Osborne has made to HMRC and the 10,000 staff due to be laid off. A report earlier this year by the public accounts committee found that job cuts among revenue officials meant the government collected £1.1bn less in tax than it would otherwise have done. “We are not convinced that the decision to reduce staff numbers working in this area in the past represented value for money for the taxpayer,” it said.
Asked by Humphrys whether she had been boycotting the unholy trinity, Labour MP and public accounts committee chair Margaret Hodge said that she was avoiding Starbucks and no longer used Amazon. “I’m a Kindle fanatic, so that’s a difficult one,” she said. “Google I find more difficult.” It says much about Google and Amazon’s dominance of their respective sectors that even the indefatigable Hodge struggles to avoid them.
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