Tories Trying to Undermine Justice by Appealing against Colston Statue Decision

I’ve already written a long piece about the acquittal of the four people responsible for the attack on the statue of Edward Colston. They were accused of criminal damage, but successfully defended themselves on the grounds that the attack was justified as the statue constituted a hate crime. The 12 good men and women true agreed, or the majority did, and so they were found not guilty. The right has been outraged, fearing that this defence leaves other controversial monuments at risk of destruction by the woke. I don’t believe that this is necessarily the case, and think that the threat to Britain’s heritage is probably exaggerated. As for the case of the Colston statue itself, there were campaigns to have it taken down going back thirty years or so. The people of Bristol voted for it to stay when they were polled, but now that it’s been torn down I think probably most people in the city are sick and tired of hearing about it.

But not, it seems, the Conservatives. Suella Braverman, our wretched attorney-general has apparently appealed against the decision. Mike and Zelo Street have both put up excellent articles stating what this appeal actually means. It’s another attack on British justice. Braverman and the Tories have no evidence and don’t allege that there was a mistrial, and so there is no real justification for an appeal. It’s just the Tories trying to revoke a decision they don’t like. This is an attack on the independence of the judiciary, which is one of the fundamental constitutional checks against government power. And the Tories aren’t just doing it with the verdict for the Colston Four. They’re also trying to pass legislation that would allow them to set aside judicial decisions against the government and its policies. It’s another step towards the right-wing dictatorship Johnson and co seemingly want for this country. It’s not too far from the way judges in the 17th century would send juries back to reconsider their verdict, and even imprison them, if they gave one they disagreed with. That power was undermined and discredited in a historic trial in Bristol in the late 17th century when William Penn, a Quaker and the founder of Pennsylvania and a group of his co-religionists were put on trial for seditious preaching. The jury repeatedly refused to convict them, and so the beak kept sending them back until he had them imprisoned until they came in line with his views. Which they didn’t. As a result, Brits not only have the freedom to be tried by their peers, but their peers have the freedom to deliver verdicts which accord with their consciences, not the authorities. Braverman’s appeal isn’t going to restore this unjust practice exactly, but it is doing something similar.

But it may also be a case of ‘be careful what you wish for. You might just get it’. Zelo Street’s article gives the learned opinion of lawyer Adam Wagner, who tweeted “there is a basic issue which will be becoming clear to ministers – a jury verdict sets no precedent, so the law is as it was, but a Court of Appeal decision would set an important precedent, which may not be the one the govt want”.

The Sage of Crewe also gives the opinion of those other internet legal gents, the Secret Barrister and and Jolyon Maugham. The Barrister said: “Not a single high profile criminal case can now pass without the Attorney General – a person with no experience of criminal law – exploiting it for political gain. It is difficult to think of an AG who has more enthusiastically abused their office”.

And the foxhunting lawyer gave his opinion on how much Braverman’s and the Tories’ determination to attack the verdict showed they really cared about British tradition and liberty: “By attacking the jury verdict in the Colston case Braverman tells a simple truth about how much Government really cares … about ‘British traditions’ … Theirs is a government without principles, without substance, of empty nationalistic signalling”.

But you wouldn’t know that by the way the right keeps banging on about our ancient constitutional liberties and the philosophers and lawyers who contributed to and guarded them. Like Sargon of Gasbag and the other Lotus Eaters raving about John Locke against the threat of the woke. Locke is one of the country’s great constitutional theorists. His Two Treatises of Government attacked autocratic theories of absolute monarchical power and instead provided powerful justification for the people exercising their sovereignty through elected representatives. He wasn’t a democrat. Indeed, the constitution he worked out for Virginia is based very much on the contemporary British social hierarchy and the power of the landlords. But it was a vital step towards modern, liberal theories of democratic government.

The Tories’ attack on the verdict represent another attack on these vital traditions and liberties in favour of restoring the power of a ruling class threatened by any indication of dissenting popular opinion.

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2022/01/suella-braverman-is-idiot.html

#Colston4: #Tories plan #appeal against verdict on statue topplers

Shock Horror! Private Eye Gives Good Review to Book Attacking Transgender Craze for Children

This is actually great. I like Private Eye, but I also have grave criticisms of it. Such as the way it wholeheartedly backed the demonisation of Jeremy Corbyn and the anti-Semitism smears, and which it’s still doing to a certain extent. But this time I think they’ve done something genuinely good. They’ve given a good, appreciative review to Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage. Shrier is one of a growing number of medical professionals, feminist activists and ordinary peeps, who are deeply concerned about the march of trans rights and its excesses. Many of them, such as J.K. Rowling, Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, Sheila Jeffries and their male supporters, like former Father Ted writer and comedy legend Graham Linehan, believe that transwomen really aren’t, and can never be, women, and that the acceptance of them as such has grave and detrimental implications for women’s safety and the nature of femininity itself. They are also concerned about the massive increase in children, and especially girls, who are being diagnosed as transgender. They are concerned that this is a profound mistake, and that the reality is that deeply psychological disturbed, vulnerable girls are being influenced and manipulated into believing that they are really boys trapped in the wrong body. This is leading them to possibly unnecessary, life-changing surgery which will leave them infertile and with a range of other, serious medical problems. Shrier and another American researcher, Dr. Debra Soh, share these concerns, though are supportive of older transsexuals.

Unfortunately, the trans lobby, of which gay activist group Stonewall is now a part, are determined to silence any criticism of transpeople and the whole issue of gender reassignment, no matter how polite and well supported by the scientific and medical evidence. Such critics have been reviled as ‘Terfs’ – Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists. The Irish gender critical group, The Countess Didn’t Fight For This, have also been called ‘Tans’ – presumably a reference to the Black and Tans, the British military auxiliaries, who committed horrendous atrocities during the Irish Revolution, and even ‘British'(!). This is despite the fact that their name refers to the Countess Moskovitz, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat who became a socialist, feminist and Irish patriot, serving as a general during the Revolution. Over on this side of the Irish Sea, Rowling was accused of wanting to murder transpeople simply because she said she didn’t believe they were women. The rest of her message was actually very supportive of them. She told them they should dress how they liked, have sex with whoever would have them and live the best life they could – hardly a vicious condemnation. But to the militant trans activists, her refusal to accept them as women meant she had a deep loathing for them and really did wish them harm. They reacted with abuse and have tried to silence her, as they have similar critics.

It’s in this context that Private Eye published its supportive review of Shrier’s book. It’s in the literary column of this fortnight’s issue for 22 January – 4th February 2021. Entitled ‘Agenda Wars’, it runs

Thalidomide for morning sickness. Transorbital lobotomies – an icepick to the eye socket – for unruly psychiatric patients. Agonising vaginal meshes for the incontinent. The history of medicine is littered with confidently prescribed treatments that had terrible side-effects.

According to Abigail Shrier, an American journalist, the pattern is repeating itself with the puberty blockers and testosterone given to teenage girls who declare themselves to be transgender. Yet her bestselling book, Irreversible Damage has been subjected to the liberal version of a fatwa: there were calls to ban or burn it, and it has not been reviewed by the Guardian or the New York Times.

Crack it open, then, and let the wrongthink begin! Except this book has nothing in common with Mein Kampf apart from the idea of a struggle. It is a folksy, anecdotal tour of a well-evidenced phenomenon: in the decade to 2018, the number of female teenagers seeking help from gender clinics in the UK rose by 4,400 per cent. The statistics are similar in other countries.

We know that today’s teenage girls report high rates of anxiety, that they spend hours online, and that, compared with previous generations, fewer drink or get pregnant. So where to these isolated, stressed, straightlaced kids channel their anguish? Shrier’s answer is that they come out as trans. Then, egged on by adult activists and even their schools, they see any parental scepticism – “you’re 14, Flora, perhaps it’s a phase” – as evidence of transphobic bigotry.

Until recently, “transexuality” largely meant people born male who wanted to have surgery and live as women. As a psychological condition, being trans could happen to anyone, regardless of their personal politics. Kellie Maloney was a Ukip candidate and Caitlyn Jenner was a life-long Republican. But its links with fetishism made this model of transness seem grubby; too many women had found lingerie in their house and discovered their husband was having an affair with himself. So left-wing activists, inspired by the gay movement’s successful “born this way” rhetoric, championed the idea of “gender identity”, an inner sense of self. Being trans was now nothing to do with sex, and everything to do with living your life. Happily for commercial medicine in the US, surgery and hormones could help with that.

Shrier is very clear that adult transition, which she supports, is very different from “rapid onset gender dysphoria”(ROGD) among teenagers. It is an important distinction: trans adults should be entitled to free, safe, empathetic medical care. (In 1972, Jan Morris had to have her surgery in Morocco.) There are also a handful of children whose gender distress is “insistent, consistent and persistent”.

But girls with ROGD are a distinct group. The tend to announce their transness suddenly, along with others in their peer group, and regurgitate the language of forums where being non-binary or something more exotic (lumigender, anyone?) brings great social cachet. They are anxious and unhappy: they don’t want to be degraded like the “teen sluts ” on Pornhub and they can’t imagine being as flawlessly feminine as an Instagram influencer. The answer to these feelings used to be feminism. Now it’s gender identity: they’re not like the other girls, because they’re not girls at all. Shrier argues that ROGD is closer to anorexia than to, say, being a goth – and we don’t treat eating disorders with liposuction.

In Britain the tide is turning against the snap diagnosis of unhappy girls as happy-boys-in-waiting. An English court ruled that under-16s are unlikely to be able to give informed consent to puberty blockers, since these drugs almost always lead to cross-sex hormones (and therefore infertility and impaired sexual function). Fox-bothering QC Jolyon Maugham is trying to get this overturned, but the ruling has emboldened activists – who have faced threats, harassment and career penalties – to demand evidence for the frequent claim that teenage transition “saves lives”. So far, England’s only child gender clinic, the Tavistock, has been unable to produce such evidence.

What comes across from Shrier’s book is the real unhappiness of too many teenage girls – and the mix of groupthink and arrogance which suggests that the answer must be today’s equivalent of an icepick to the eye socket.

Critics of ROGD have also pointed out that, if left to themselves, 80 per cent of child transgender cases sort themselves out naturally. The child becomes a normal member of his or her natural sex. But almost all children put on puberty blockers go on to have surgery. If that’s the case, then the majority of such kids are being horribly mutilated, primarily for ideological rather than medical reasons.

Furthermore, despite the liberal rejection of critics of the transgender movement, not all such critics are Conservatives. Kellie-Jay Keen and Graham Linehan are people of the left, as is the female Guardian journo who found herself sacked from the newspaper for not following the pro-trans line. They appear in right-wing media because it’s only these media that’s giving them space to air their views and concerns. That has to change.

I don’t wish to spread hate against transgender people, or see them suffer abuse or assault. But there is another side to this argument, and in my view that side is thoroughly based on scientific and medical fact and motivated by deep moral concerns. From what I’ve seen, the intolerance, including violent assault as well as abuse, comes from the trans side. I hope therefore more books like this will be published and people are made aware that there is also another view, which needs to be seriously considered.

For those wishing to see more from Abigail Shrier, She’s been interviewed on YouTube by Graham Linehan and Kellie-Jay Keen.

Shrier’s Interview with Keen is at

Abigail Shrier – Irreversible Damage. The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters – YouTube

Her interview with Graham ‘Glinner’ Linehan is at

A chat with Abigail Shrier – YouTube

She’s also been on the Joe Rogan Experience, which can be seen at

Abigail Shrier on the Transgender Craze Amongst Teenage Girls – YouTube

Private Eye Attacks Hypocrisy of Non-Dom Tax Dodging Press Barons

Five years ago in 2015 the then leader of the Labour Party, Ed Miliband, outraged the press barons in Fleet Street by suggesting the abolition of non-dom tax status for people actually living in the UK. This frightened them, as many of them, such as Evgeny Lebedev, the owner of the I and Evening Standard, David and Frederick Barclay, the weirdo owners of the Torygraph, and Heil owner Viscount Rothermere, also avoid paying British tax through non-dom status. There was therefore a flurry of articles in their papers scorning Miliband’s suggestion and declaring that if it came in, it would bankrupt Britain by forcing all the millionaires in London and elsewhere to flee the country. And the papers certainly did not tell their readers that there was more than a bit of self-interest behind their attacks on Miliband.

Private Eye, which, according to editor Ian Hislop, skewers humbug, therefore published an article in their ‘In the Back’ section, ‘Street of Sham’ in the issue for 17th to 30th April 2015 attacking this fine display of gross hypocrisy. The piece ran

So consuming was the Tory press’s rage at Ed Milibands’s plan to make Russian oligarchs and gulf petro-billionaires in London liable for the same taxes as British citizens, its hacks forgot to declare their interest.

“London backlash over Ed’s non-dom attack,” boomed the front-page of the London Evening Standard, as if a mob had descended on Labour HQ to defend London’s much-loved oligarchs and hedge-fund managers. “Attacking non-doms could backfire on us,” continued an editorial inside. Sarah Sands, the Standard’s Uriah Heepish editor, did not risk her career by saying who the “us” included – namely her boss, Standard proprietor Evgeny Lebedev, the Russian who last year dodged the Eye’s repeated questions over his own domicile.

Silence infected the Telegraph too, where not one of the reporters who warned that Labour’s “cataclysmic” decision would drive away “tens of thousands of entrepreneurs and business leaders” mentioned that their owners, the weirdo Barclay twins, reside in Monaco and the Channel Islands to avoid British tax.

Instead they quoted James Hender, head of private wealth at Saffery Champness accountants, who warned that the rich may leave. The Telegraph didn’t tell its readers that Hender boasts of his long experience ensuring that “the most tax efficient strategies are adopted for non-UK situs assets” for his non-dom clients.

It was the same at the Mail, which failed to declare that its owner, 4th Viscount Rothermere, is treated by the tax authorities as a non-dom. And at Sky, political editor Faisal Islam reported that “Baltic Exchange boss Jeremy Penn slams Labour non-dom plans” without declaring that his owner, Rupert Murdoch, does not pay UK tax and that Penn acts for super-rich shipping owners.

Jolyon Maugham QC, who has advised Labour and the Tories on tax reform, tells the Eye that any reader silly enough to believe the Tory press and tax avoidance industry should look at what they said in 2008, when Labour introduced the first levies on non-doms.

Back then the Mail then said the central London property market would crash as non-doms sold up and moved to Switzerland. In fact, between Labour introducing the levy and 2014, prime central London property prices rose 41 percent. At the end of 2014, Knightsbridge estate agent W.A. Ellis said 54 percent of sales were to overseas buyers.

The Mail was equally certain the City would suffer. On 8 February 2008 it cried that the levy “risks the City’s future”. The British Banking Association warned of “a devastating blow”. The Telegraph of 12 February 2008 said that “the country’s wealthiest individuals are being bombarded with leaflets and letters explaining how easy it would be to relocate to Switzerland, Monaco and a host of other countries”. Not to be outdone, Mike Warburton, senior tax partner at accountants Grant Thornton, said the levy was the “final straw”.

If a word of this had been true, there would be no non-doms left for Milband to tax. As it is, there are 115,000 because, as Maugham says, London remains a “very nice place to live, if you’re wealthy. And that won’t change.” Or as the Financial Times put it: “The many advantages of London as a financial centre do not dissolve simply because of a change in a hitherto generous tax treatment of resident non-domiciles.”

The pink ‘un has only recently realised the iniquity of the non-dom rule, with an editorial last month calling for its abolition. Editor Lionel Barber modestly claims some credit for Miliband’s stance. But as editor for almost a decade, why was he so late to the party? Surely not because, until 2013, FT owner Pearson was run by US-born Dame Marjorie Scardino, who would certainly have qualified for non-dom status and whose London flat, the Eye revealed, was owned via an offshore company?

The Daily Mail’s owner, Lord Rothermere, is a particularly flagrant tax dodger in this regarded. The current Rothermere inherited the status from his father, who really was not resident in the UK. He lived in Paris. But Rothermere junior appears very much to have made Britain his permanent or at least primary residence. He has a parking space in London, and the Eye reported a few years ago he was extensively renovating his stately home in the West Country.

The non-dom tax status, offshore banking and other ways used by the corporate and super rich to avoid tax are part of the reason for the increasing impoverishment of everyone else. They aren’t paying their fair share of the tax burden, but receiving massive tax handouts instead. Thus the NHS and other important services are deprived of money. The tax burden is then passed onto ordinary, working people. This reduction in taxes for the rich used to be justified under Thatcher with the argument that the money the rich saved would somehow trickle down to the rest of us. This hasn’t worked. It doesn’t encourage the rich to open any more businesses or employ more people. The money just sits in their accounts earning more interest.

It also doesn’t the rich closing businesses and laying people off either. This was shown a year or so ago in America, when one of the corporate recipients of the Republicans’ tax cuts closed a branch or a factory, laying hundreds of workers off.

And the purchase of London property by foreigners is also a further cause of poverty. Ordinary people in the Smoke can’t afford to buy homes as rich foreigners – not asylum seekers or migrants – push property prices up far out of their reach. Some of these homes are simply left empty as an investment in what is known as ‘land banking’. This has a knock-on effect for the rest of the UK. Here in Bristol property prices have also risen to extremely highly levels through Londoners forced out of the capital relocating to the city. And in turn, some Bristolians are looking for cheaper homes elsewhere in places like Wales.

London still is a ‘very nice place to live, if you’re wealthy’, but the tax cuts which make Britain so comfortable for the global rich are causing poverty, misery and homelessness for everyone else.

And this is applauded and cheered by hypocritical press magnates and editors.

Mail on Sunday about to Dox Jolyon Maugham

The lamestream media really are becoming vile and dangerously vindictive. Of course, we knew that all too often they were absolute scumbags already from the way they’ve smeared and libeled decent left-wingers like Michael Foot, Mike from Vox Political, Jackie Walker, Ken Livingstone, Marc Wadsworth and so many, many others. Foot was libeled as a KGB agent, something that even Private Eye found ridiculous and disgusting. Mike, Walker, Wadsworth and Livingstone were all smeared by the press as Jew haters and Holocaust deniers, simply for the horrendous crime of being true Labour folks, and daring to criticise Israel for its apartheid and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Or because they dared to stand up for those who had. As a result, they’ve had to endure unspeakable abuse on social media. Walker’s been told by racists that she can’t be Jewish, ’cause she’s Black, and that she should be lynched, set on fire and her body dumped in bin bags. And Mike showed me the other day the splenetic abuse he gets from bigoted morons, who’ve swallowed the lies about him. But the media seems to be digging ever lower depths.

Laura Kuenssberg yesterday revealed that Omar Salem, the father of a sick child at a hospital BoJob was visiting, was a Labour activist and gave out his twitter handle. This has resulted in this principled man getting a mountain of abuse from the indignant, vitriolic right. Because Salem had the temerity to tell BoJob how disgusting his destruction of the health service is. It doesn’t matter that a doctor at the hospital shares Salem’s disgust and outrage at the poor service the hospital is providing because of the cuts. The Beeb and the rest of the Tory propaganda machine laughingly called the mainstream media cannot tolerate any criticism of the party. Dissenters must be crushed, vilified, humiliated and terrorised into silence.

Now it seems they’re going to do it to Jolyon Maugham, a long time critic of government policy. According to Zelo Street, Maugham has tweeted that the Mail on Sunday is going to dox him. That is, they’re going to reveal his private address. This comes after he has received death threats because he opposes Brexit. This is mentioned in an article discussing how the Mail on Sunday’s hack, ‘Whinging’ Dan Hodges, has lied on twitter about Jon Lansman’s move to replace the post of deputy leader of the Labour party, which was vetoed by Jeremy Corbyn. Said veto has the support of Lansman, but never mind. Hodges has lied about the decision, claiming that the Labour office now resembles a scene from the Death of Stalin but without the jokes. When this was very obviously shown to be wrong, Hodges claimed that Lansman was going to be set up to take the fall for the decision by  Corbyn. He was going to be the patsy, just like Lee Harvey Oswald was for the JFK assassination. Peter Oborne, who left the Torygraph because he was disgusted at the way the editors were slanting stories in line with the wishes of their advertisers, said it was part of the ‘deformation professionelle’ of journalism. For which he also claimed partial responsibility. Oborne’s very definitely a man of the right, but he does have journalistic integrity which is more than the hacks at the MoS have. And he’s been reviled by the press for it. Tim Fenton, the man behind the Zelo Street blog, also has experience of this kind of intimidation. After he published an article criticising the Speccie for supporting Tommy Robinson, Robinson and his islamophobic stormtroopers turned up on his doorstep.

And if all this wasn’t sordid enough, apparently the ‘Fake Sheikh’ Mazher Mahmood is also working behind the scenes at the Mail on Sunday. This is the scam artist, who used to work for the News of the World trapping unwitting slebs into saying or doing something indiscreet or illegal. He dresses up and poses as an Arab sheikh in order to ingratiate himself with his victims. He’s got some aristos into trouble for saying something uncomplimentary about the royals, got a Radio 1 DJ the sack after persuading him to buy drugs for him, and tried to get George Galloway to say something monstrous about the Holocaust. But Galloway recognised him and didn’t fall for it, stating instead that the Holocaust was a crime against humanity. Mahmood’s employment was supposed to have stopped due to the phone hacking scandal, but apparently he’s still running around doing the same old tricks. Still, the Zelo Street article has a handy photo of him, so keep it handy if you’re a public figure. And bear in mind that he’s as much Arab nobility as I am, even if he is Asian.

See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/09/dan-hodges-cut-righteous-crap.html

But doxing people after they’ve received death threats. This looks like the media’s way of putting people in genuine fear for their lives, but in a manner that allows them to deny any responsibility. Hitler and Goebbels used to do that kind of thing against their enemies in Weimar Germany, before they moved on to outright assassination themselves. Joachim C. Fest describes in his book, The Face of the Third Reich, the way they’d smear political opponents, including members of the Weimar police and civil authorities, as Jews even when they weren’t simply for propaganda purposes. It was deliberately dangerous, as other right-wing groups were also carrying out attacks and assassinations on the ‘traitors of Versailles’, as they called the mainstream Weimar parties. Now the Mail and its sister paper are doing exactly the same and for the same reason: they also believe that the people they smear are traitors, though because of their opposition to Brexit.

And so BoJob and the Tory press and media are leading us ever further into real Fascism and state terror.

Private Eye on More Tax Avoiding Press Barons

I found this feature on in Private Eye’s issue for the 17th-30th April 2015 on how Yevgeny Lebedev, the former owner of the Independent, the Barclay twins, who own the Telegraph and Lord Rothermere all use their non-dom tax status to avoid paying British tax.

Non-Dom Press Barons
Street of Sham

So consuming was the Tory press’ rage at Ed Miliband’s plan to make Russian oligarchs and gulf petro-billionaires in London liable for the same taxes as British citizens, its hacks forgot to the declare their interest.

“London backlash over Ed’s non-dom attack,” boomed the front-page of the London Evening Standard, as if a mob had descended on Labour HQ to defend London’s much-loved oligarchs and hedge fund managers. “Attacking non-doms could backfire on us,” continued an editorial inside. Sarah Sands, the Standard’s Uriah Heepish editor, did not risk her career by saying who the “us” included – namely her boss, Standard proprietor Evgeny Lebedev, the Russian who last year dodged the Eye’s repeated questions of his own domicile.

Silence infected the Telegraph too, where not one of the reporters who warned that Labour’s “cataclysmic” decision would drive away “tens of thousands of entrepreneurs and business leaders” mentioned that their owners, the weirdo Barclay twins, reside in Monaco and the Channel Islands to avoid British tax.

Instead they quoted James Hender, head of private wealth at Saffery Champness accountants, who warned that the rich may leave. The Telegraph didn’t tell its reads that Hender boasts of his long experience ensuring that “the most tax efficient strategies are adopted for non-UK, situs assets” for his non-dom clients.

It was the same at the Mail, which failed to declare that its owner, 4th Viscount Rothermere, is treated by the tax authorities as a non-dom. And at Sky, political editor Faisal Islam reported that “Baltic Exchange boss Jeremy Penn slams Labour non-dom plans” without declaring that his owner, Rupert Murdoch, does not pay UK tax and that Penn acts for super-rich shipping owners.

Jolyon Maugham QC, who has advised Labour and the Tories on tax reform, tells the Eye that any reader sill enough to believe the Tory press and tax avoidance industry should look at what they said in 2008, when Labour introduced the first levies on non-doms.

Back then the Mail then said the central London property market would crash as non-doms sold up and moved to Switzerland. In fact, between Labour introducing the levy and 2014, prime central London property prices rose 41 per cent. At the end of 2014, Knightsbridge estate agent W.A. Ellis said 54 per cent of sales were to overseas buyers.

The Mail was equally certain the City would suffer. On 8 February 2008 it cried that the levy “risks the City’s future”. The British Banking Association warned of “a devastating blow”. The Telegraph of 12 February 2008 said that “the country’s wealthiest individuals are being bombarded with leaflets and letters explaining how easy it would be to relocate to Switzerland, Monaco and a host of other countries”. Not to be outdone, Mike Warburton, senior tax partner at accountants Grant Thornton, said the levy was the “final straw”. If a word of this had been true, there would be no non-doms left for Miliband to tax. As it is, there are 115,000 because, as Maugham says, London remains “a very nice place to live, if you’re wealthy. And that won’t change.” Or as the Financial Times put it: “The many advantages of London as a financial centre do not dissolve simply because of a change in a hitherto generous tax treatment of resident non domiciles.”

The pink ‘un has only recently realised the iniquity of the non-dom rule, with an editorial last month calling for its abolition. Editor Lionel Barber modestly claims some credit for Miliband’s stance. But as editor for almost a decade, why was he so late to the party? Surely not because, until 2013, FT owner Pearson was run by US-born Dame Marjorie Scardino, who would certainly have qualified for non-dom status and whose London flat, the Eye revealed, was owned via an offshore company?

So there you are. Fleet Street’s extremely rich proprietors, with the exception of the Financial Times, take the view that, in the words of the ‘Mayflower Madam’, the brothel owner arrested for tax evasion in New York now over a decade ago, paying tax is only for the ‘little people’. And they have no qualms about getting rich, while shifting the tax burden on to the poor and demanding low wages and zero-hours contracts. All the while proudly declaiming their patriotism, like the Sun, owned by Rupert Murdoch, resident in America. So much for real patriotism.

Private Eye on the Non-Dom Press Barons of Fleet Street

Ed Miliband’s announcement a few weeks ago that he would end non-dom tax status was greeted with howls of derision from the right-wing Tory press. The Evening Standard, Torygraph and the Heil all claimed that if the various millionaires resident in Britain, who weren’t paying their taxes here, were forced to do so, then they would all leave en masse.

As Private Eye pointed out in last week’s issue, these paper’s stance has hardly been disinterested. Their owners are all non-doms. Evgeny Lebedev, the Russian oligarch, who owns the Evening Standard, last year dodged the Eye’s questions on where he pays his tax. The weirdo Barclay brothers, the owners of the Torygraph, are tax exiles in Monaco and the Channel Islands. And the Mail’s Viscount Rothermere is another one. He inherited his non-dom tax status from his father, despite not living abroad and building something that can only be described as a stately home in the south of England.

Sky also decided to join in the criticism, while obviously not mentioning that its owner, Rupert Murdoch, also doesn’t pay tax in Britain. Neither in fact, does Dirty Rupe’s papers, the Sun and the Times, which the Eye revealed a few years ago to be registered abroad for the purposes of corporation tax. So much for the true-blue British patriotism of these papers.

The Eye refuted all this criticism by printing the views of Jolyon Maugham, a QC who has advised both Labour and the Tories on tax policies. Maugham pointed to the similar criticisms levelled at Labour by the papers when the party first started levying taxes on non-doms in 2008. Then the Mail predicted a massive stock market crash, and it, the Telegraph and the British Banking Association all warned that Britain’s millionaires were considering leaving the country. In fact, the opposite was true. By the end of 2014, according to the Eye, about 54 per cent of property sales in Kensington were to foreign purchasers. At the moment, there are 115,000 non-doms in London, because the capital is still an extremely attractive place for millionaires.

The article also points out that the Financial Times also supports the ending of non-dom tax status. They suggest, however, the paper didn’t come out and make its opposition to the tax status earlier because until 2013, it was partly owned by Dame Marjorie Scardino, who would have been entitled to non-dom tax status on her London flat.

Readers of Johnny Void’s blog will know about the problems created in London by the presence of the global super-rich, and the way they are pushing ordinary working and lower-middle class Londoners out of the city. In a post I reblogged here a few days ago, Mr Void described the appalling destruction of London’s working class and counter- or alternative cultural heritage. Like the historic Black Cap gay bar, Soho, Tin Pan alley, parts of Camden market, and the relocation of St Martin’s school of art. It does seem that the capital’s real, living heritage that has grown up over decades and centuries, is being gutted in order to leave the capital another sterile, homogenous global environment for the planet’s super rich.

This has to be resisted – not just in London, but all over England and the UK. It’s part of a general process throughout Britain where gentrification and the desire to please and attract the wealthy from across the world is destroying working class communities, and the places they live, work, shop and relax across the UK.

The problem isn’t that if Ed ends the non-dom tax bracket, there’ll be an exodus of oligarchs and multi-millionaires, as the Week put on its cover last Friday. The problem is the opposite – that if the power and cupidity of the super-rich isn’t curtailed, they’ll price the poor out of their homes altogether. It’s most acute in London, but if it isn’t stopped, it’ll come to somewhere near you very quickly.