Jimmy Carr and Amazon

"I've applied for a car loan", runs the newly minted joke.  "He's the only one with any money".

What to make of David Cameron's condemnation of the comic's tax affairs?

No two people can agree on how much tax it's right to pay.  Given the relativism inherent in this, it seems sensible for the law to cut through moral disagreements and tells us when tax is due.  After all, the law is merely the legislative opinion of the government of the day.  Anything not caught by the law is fair game, one might think.

Well, up to a point.  I wouldn't condemn Carr for minimising his exposure to tax.  But for someone whose career depends on ordinary people liking him (ordinary people who not only don't have Carr's money but moreover don't have the opportunity to evade the chilly embrace of PAYE), reducing the amount of tax you pay to single figure levels seems like remarkably bad PR.  The fact that Carr once took part in a lame TV sketch show which lampooned Barclays for tax avoidance is useful ammunition for his opponents, but essentially something of a sideshow.  For the real crime of tax avoiders like Carr, whose USP to some extent rests on their identification with the common man, is hypocrisy.

Spare a thought for journalists on the Guardian, fulminating every other month about some corporate tax avoider like Vodaphone but knowing (I try and remember to write in and tell them, just in case they've forgotten) that Guardian Media Group bought the publisher Emap via a series of offshore companies in order to avoid tax.  How they must be grinding their teeth into their skinny lattes.  Or not.

Think of those latter day saints U2, fulminating about the poor whilst squirrelling their own vast wealth away offshore to make sure not too much money goes to the Irish exchequer, an exchequer whose spending cuts are even as I write forcing people out of their jobs and homes.  If U2's fans were capable of joined up thinking, they would never fork out again to experience the compassionate warbling of diminitive tax dodger Bono and his mates.  But I'm not holding my breath.

For while it may be perfectly legitimate for Carr and his fellow travellers to minimise tax, the rest of us don't have to like it much.  I have for example recently decided to stop buying books from Amazon, and I recommend that you do the same.  Amazon do millions, if not billions, of business in the UK.  But they don't pay any tax here.  Amazon have the right to arrange their tax affairs in any legal way they like.  But we don't have to buy books from them.  I find www.abebooks.co.uk a perfectly good substitute.

As for David Cameron, if he doesn't like Jimmy Carr's tax arrangements, he could always change the law, no?