The Institute of Economic Affairs, a UK-based Thatcherite "think tank" and lobbying group founded by a disciple of the far-right economist Friedrich Hayek and behind campaigns against the National Health Service and plain packaging for tobacco products and in favour of zero-hours contracts and unpaid internships, produced a report in June defending tax havens like Jersey and Guernsey and arguing against the ongoing international crackdown on dirty money and tax avoidance. An investigation by UK authorities was launched after allegations that senior politicians were given access to and editorial say in the report in return for donations, which has in turn revealed a link to Jersey. Jersey Finance have admitted that they helped fund the
Well, well, well! I should probably make it clear before we get into the real criticism here that the IEA are, as think tanks go, about as dodgy as you can get. They don't reveal their sources of funding as a matter of policy, but investigations by various organisations and news outlets have found them taking money from the casino industry, tobacco companies such as British-American Tobacco and Imperial Tobacco, oil companies such as BP and from assorted American businessmen set to potentially benefit from Brexit and from the continued relative weakness of trade unions. What a surprise, then, that the IEA has campaigned for the expansion of the British gambling industry and against plain packaging for tobacco products, tobacco taxation, trade unions and in favour of a hard Brexit. Rated by the the accountability group Transparify as "highly opaque", the IEA featured near the very bottom of their list of most transparent to least transparent think tanks inside the EU. When their Head of Health and Welfare isn't too busy asserting that "all doctors are communists", he's been laying a nice consistent shit on the idea of the IEA ever revealing its sources of funding.
Speaking of funding, guess who funds Jersey Finance. You guessed it - you and I! JF is a non-profit that's partially funded by the taxpayer (although a significant amount of its funding does come from Jersey's banks and other financial institutions). That's right, ladies and gents, who paid for this propaganda organisation to dish out cash to laissez-faire capitalist loons, to produce a whitewashing report criticising the international community for daring to try and hold these institutions to account? Joe Public, that's who, along with the bankers the report lavishes praise on. Now, call me old-fashioned, but something in me doesn't exactly sit right with the idea of taxpayers' money being shipped off to the UK to pay for hard-right lobbyists to attempt to prop up the quickly-collapsing international system of dirty money being hidden in offshore tax havens like Jersey. The fact that an organisation like Jersey Finance even receives public funding is a disgrace - at a time when economic diversification is urgently needed to slow the inevitable collapse of the finance industry, we should not be splashing cash on Thatcherite propaganda. Of course, the usual suspects will carp on about how the left ideologically hates finance, how we want to destroy the economy, how we don't understand the island's economic reality, and whatever else. Rubbish. Sooner or later, the financial establishment over here is going to have to wake up to the fact that actually, the dodgy system off of which they thrive isn't going to last forever, and when it goes, unless something is gone, our entire economy goes with it. Decades of neglect for any other industry, which is only beginning to be repaired, has left Jersey a one-trick pony, and one day, the trick's going to stop fooling people.
There's a really simple choice here - we diversify, or we die.
Pushing cash into pro-tax haven propaganda isn't exactly going to help.
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