Mr Kissyfur wrote:
Well, it's partly that, but also that the existence of tax havens exacerbates the problems of inequality (enabling the rich to get richer, by methods unavailable to the poor) and deprives the coffers of money that could be spent on resolving the problems of the poor, and being a resident there sort of enables? I guess? that state of affairs. And someone indirectly helping propagate the inequality then bemoaning it is the irony, really.
I will attempt to address this since I'm sick of having it chucked at me (MaliA was doing it back in January and Zardoz has just had a pop followed by a LOL from kalmar).
Apologies if this is TL:DR and I realise it's off-topic but to me at least it's moderately important, because I don't see how where I've ended up living has anything to do with my 'right' to comment on what's going on in London.
I originally moved over here in 1996 with Mrs AE, we'd met at Manchester Uni and were living and working over in Manchester - I was born and bred in Manchester, Mrs AE had moved to the IOM (from Salford) when she was four with her parents, but was back in Manchester for Uni (which is where we met). After I'd finished at Uni, MrsAE had continued with her studies whilst I was pulling £10K per year working at GAME (in Blackburn), which at the time was the highest paid job I'd ever had. As assistant manager I was salaried so couldn't earn any overtime, which made the 50-60 hours per week astronomically well paid on an hourly basis, even more so when you factored in 60 minutes travelling time each way.
Mrs AE's studies weren't going well, and I was fucking miserable, leaving the house at 6am and not getting back until 7pm six days per week. On top of that, Mrs AE's gran was taken seriously ill on the IOM.
Mrs AE and her gran were extremely close as to a large extent she'd been brought up by her gran, her mum and dad had worked ungodly hours running their own business for much of Mrs AE's childhood here on the IOM, and whilst they were never wealthy, they had finally managed to achieve a degree of material comfort, but at the cost of long, long hours (note - not tax evasion or the facilitation of it) - hence Mrs AE's gran often being her 'third parent'.
As such, we made the decision to move over here, I handed in my notice, Mrs AE jacked in her course, we loaded what we could into my dad's car and got the ferry over here.
Now at this point (and you'll simply have to take this on trust)
I had no idea whatsoever about the IOM's status as an 'offshore tax haven' or anything else, I didn't really think about it at all to be honest, if you'd have asked me I'd have said it was like the Isle of Wight or something like that, just another county of the UK. After all, it used the same currency, there were no border controls, it had the same shops, it was by all accounts just an extension of the UK.
When we moved over here I immediately set myself up in Douglas as a specialist in tax evasion, earning £100K per year and driving a Bentley.
No hang on, I remember, I worked a procession of shit low paid jobs, doing anything and everything that would bring a wage in. One was so crap that my employer deducted tax and NI from my wages without ever, y'know, giving it to the government, as I found out when the tax office said they had no record of me being in employment for those few months.
Mrs AE's gran died not long after we got here, but me and Mrs AE had a flat and we both liked it here, after years of living in Manchester (often the very shitty bits, especially at Uni when we lived literally a stone's thrown from Moss Side) it made a nice change.
Bar work, cleaning work, shop work, any hours anywhere on the island I did them, there was no minimum wage back then and the bar work tended to be split shifts, all I had to get around was a beat up Honda C90 with a front light that hardly worked, riding back from Douglas (about 16 miles) at 2am in the morning in the driving rain and thick fog and fucking gales was brilliant. I fell off the thing more than once.
I applied for jobs constantly and finally got a half-decent job at a local video production company, (please note the videos didn't evade any tax), albeit at the very low end of the technical scale as a duplicator. I showed willing and took an interest in the VT editing side of things, and worked my way up through the ranks there and got enough experience to enable me to move into another company at a trainee rank but a proper technical role, and from there I've worked my way up the ranks again to the point that I earn a decent wage in a decent job (still no tax evasion though!) - but quite frankly I think I've paid my dues over the years, I've worked part time or full time since I was thirteen years old.
I pay the taxes and NI that are required of me by law on the IOM, and I've built a life for me and Mrs AE and now our child here for fifteen years, only the last five or six of which I've been what you might call 'pretty well paid'.
As such I'm not going to apologise for where I live, whatever the IOM's status as an offshore centre may be, I'm not sure how it's relevant to the comments I've made in this thread, I came here as an honest worker and I have remained so for all the time I've been here. The city of London as a 'financial centre' is one of the biggest fucking tax dodge enablers in the entire fucking world, does anyone who lives in London or contribute to the London economy therefore fall foul of the same 'rule' about what they can and can't post about without suffering mockery due to where
they happen to live?Anyway, enough said.