Osborne is either a liar or a fool - or maybe both!

According to all the 'prints' this morning, George Osborne, our Chancellor of the Excheqer, for God's sake, is "shocked" at the many nefarious ways in which rich men avoid tax.  According to The Telegraph he said:

“I was shocked to see that some of the very wealthiest people in the country have organised their tax affairs, and to be fair it’s within the tax laws, so that they were regularly paying virtually no income tax. And I don’t think that’s right.

“I’m talking about people right at the top. I’m talking about people with incomes of many millions of pounds a year. The general principle is that people should pay income tax and that includes people with the highest incomes."

Upon which planet, do you suppose, has Mr. Osborne has been residing for all of his adult life?  And do you think a man of such obvious and almost total ignorance should hold the highest financial position in the land?  Would you even allow him to be a tax inspector?  In fact, would he even qualify as one of the pox-doctors' clerks on job experience programmes who man most of the desks in the Inland Revenue? I don't think so, given his early work experience, as reported by Wiki, which seems to show that he began as a clerk, went down to being a 'towel folder' and then sank to the lowest level of all, Tory Central Office:

Osborne's first job was entering the names of people who had died in London into a National Health Service computer.^[11] He also briefly worked for Selfridges, re-folding towels.^[11] He originally intended to pursue a career in journalism, but instead got a job at Conservative Central Office.^[11]

Or, perhaps, the alternative is true, that Mr. George Osborne, privately educated with a degree from Oxford, is simply a good, old-fashioned, born-again, lying liar only fit to flog second-hand Bentleys in Berkely Square.  If so, what else can I do but join him in saying, "I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked!"

 

Comments

[Whyaxye]

To be fair, he is probably not smart enough to know how taxes are evaded and avoided on that scale. This is a ridiculous toff's attempt to show that he is a man of the people, struggling like the rest of us, and perplexed at how venal some rich folk can be. I'll believe it after I start believing that Cameron has a use for a pasty other than as a PR prop.

[A K Haart]

I wonder if he's always relied on accountants and genuinely doesn't know how it's done or how pervasive it is?

Hmmm

No you must be right - a good, old-fashioned, born-again, lying liar.

[dearieme]

It's conceivable that he didn't know just how thoroughly many of the rich can avoid income tax. I'll bet, though, he has a pretty good idea of how thoroughly they can (usually) avoid Inheritance Tax.

[Jimmy]

He is not a fool.

[David Duff]

Perhaps, Jimmy, he's both - dread thought!