Well, those tax attacks worked out well, didn’t they? Tax avoidance is on the front pages of the newspapers, but not in a way that benefits either main political party.
Even though George Osborne’s guide to minimising your tax bill has gone viral, Labour isn’t benefitting because it has ended up talking about receipts for hedge trimmers, not the activities of hedge funds. It was a wrong turn easily taken by Labour but one that makes week three of its tax avoidance row messy.
Week one was messy partly down to Balls, too, after his ‘Bill Somebody’ interview, which fed the narrative that Labour was ‘anti-business’. Week two was better because Ed Miliband’s high stakes gamble with Lord Fink paid off after the peer backed down in an interview with the Evening Standard, and because the Tories had started the week auctioning their ministers to donors at the Black and White Ball.
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