socialmedian: While we rail at MPs, the City gets away with murder

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While we rail at MPs, the City gets away with murder | Nick Cohen

Source: The Guardian

Nov 08, 2009

Summary

Nobody benefits more from our emasculated MPs than tax-avoiding plutocrats and bonus bandits

Luck rather than a conspiracy explains why the newspaper that broke the expenses scandal is the property of billionaire recluses, who prefer holing up in a Channel island fortress to paying the same taxes as the rest of us.

The Observer would have run the story if we had been offered it, as would most other newspapers. As it happened, the exposé went to the Telegraph owned by Sir David and Sir Frederick Barclay, who received knighthoods from the British state even though they live in a castle on Brecqhou, an islet off the tax haven of Sark.

Typically for British press barons – or I suppose I should say Sarkian press barons – they are happy to use England's oppressive libel laws to limit the freedom of other papers to criticise them. Publicity-shy though they may be, they deserve examination because by a fluke of circumstance they are at the centre of the political crisis, and for reasons I will get to, the economic crisis as well.

Rahm Emanuel, chief-of-staff for the then

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