Broke Britons and ‘jammy’ dodgers

All right, that might have some of you spluttering into your cornflakes. Well, please de-splutter yourself. There are still times when those of us who bat words around for a living can afford to have pride in our trade.

Any day you care to mention, in fact, from the smallest newspaper to the largest, or their ever-expanding websites, on television and the radio, journalists are doing their best to inform people under what are not always easy circumstances.

This week saw a couple of fine examples. Two of our national newspapers carried important investigations. Each camped out at different ends of the social spectrum to report on what is and is not fair about life in Britain today.

And one thing that is definitely not fair is the tax reportedly avoided by wealthy individuals, including allegedly the comedian Jimmy Carr. Who knew that being snide was quite so very lucrative? But we shall return to that in a moment.

The publications in question were The Guardian and The Times, which are not always in accord over what sort of society we live in, but taken together, their findings are telling.

To The Guardian first of all, which commissioned an extensive study of the finances of employed people. This suggested that seven million working-age adults face extreme financial stress, being “one small push from penury”.

An estimated 3.6 million households have little or no savings, struggle to feed themselves and their children at the end of the month, have no assets and can be floored by an unexpected bill.

These figures are, as Labour MP Frank Field puts it, a “mega-indictment on the mantra of both political parties, that work is the route out of poverty”.

Many of these working poor live on the economic cliff-edge – and the view down isn’t pretty. This threadbare scenario clangs discordantly with David Cameron’s oft-quoted belief in “a fair society in which effort is rewarded and work pays”.

These people shuffling along the ledge are playing by the rules, trying to do the right thing, and they are broke, bust and struggling. If that sounds fair to you, perhaps you are Mr Cameron or possibly Jimmy Carr.

The Times turned its attention to tax avoidance, with an investigation that began by looking at wealthy individuals who are said to use a single Jersey-based scheme which the newspaper claims shelters £168 million a year from the taxman.

The man who runs the scheme told an undercover reporter, who posed as an IT consultant earning £280,000 a year, that changes in Budgets made little difference. “It’s a game of cat and mouse – the Revenue closes one scheme, we find another way round it.”

On Tuesday, The Times reported that the comedian shelters £3.3 million a year through a Jersey-based company, which ‘lends’ him the money back – and as loans are untaxable, Mr Carr is said to do very nicely.

Introducing its investigation, The Times said that tax avoidance costs the country £7 billion a year – with £4.5 billion being lost thanks to wealthy individuals employing tax-avoidance measures.

These tactics are mostly perfectly legal, but they are “morally repugnant”. I didn’t say that, by the way, although I believe it to be true. That was the Chancellor, George Osborne; so why aren’t you doing more about it, George?

HOW sad to learn the actor Brian Hibbard has died of cancer. Years ago, at a different encampment on the word mountain, I interviewed Brian once or twice.

He was a member of The Flying Pickets, a bunch of left-wing actors who improbably found themselves at the top of the charts in 1983 with their a cappella version of Only You.

Brian had Teddy Boy looks and a surprisingly sweet voice. He led the group, who met in 1980 while performing the political play, One Big Blow.

I saw the Pickets perform a number of times in south London. They were good fun, but the novelty wore off for Brian, who returned to acting.

He had a varied and respectable career on stage and screen, with a spell in Coronation Street playing a womanising garage mechanic.