Why I voted To Leave
Many people ask me why I voted in favour of Brexit, a question which most people who voted for remain seem unable to answer. This is my response. Despite the condescending attitude of many remain voters, I am not stupid and I am not a racist, so immigration was not a major factor for me. For many years now we have sold our products online. For that reason, we have dealt heavily with Ebay, Paypal and Amazon. A few years ago, all these companies re-located their European HQ’s to Luxembourg. The reasons they did it were not clear to me at the time. Then I read the following about Jean Claude Juncker. Courtesy of Wikipedia.
In early November 2014, just days after becoming head of the commission, Juncker was hit by media disclosures – derived from a document leak known as LuxLeaks – that Luxembourg under his premiership had turned into a major European haven of corporate tax avoidance. With the aid of the Luxembourg government, companies transferred tax liability for many billions of Euro’s to Luxembourg, where the income was taxed at a fraction of 1%. Juncker, who in a speech in Brussels in July 2014 promised to ‘try to put some morality, some ethics, into the European tax landscape’, was sharply criticised following the leaks. A subsequent motion of censure in the European Parliament was brought against Juncker over his role in the tax avoidance schemes. The motion was defeated by a large majority.
In 2017, leaked diplomatic cables show Juncker, as Luxembourg’s prime minister from 1995 until the end of 2013, blocked EU efforts to fight tax avoidance by multinational corporations. Luxembourg agreed to multinational businesses on an individualised basis, often at an effective rate of less than 1%
So you could be forgiven for assuming that Jean Claude Juncker was some corrupt little figure who had bribed and cheated his way to the top of a minor European country and would soon get his just desserts. You would of course be wrong as he became the leader of the EU team negotiating the withdrawal of the UK from the EU. I began to think that this is probably just the tip of the iceberg. These massive multinational companies earn billions of pounds from their operations in the UK but don’t pay tax on those earnings, except in Luxembourg where they get special deals for as low as 1%. Amazon etc. are winners. They get to pay minimal tax. Luxembourg are winners. They earn a relatively huge amount of tax income from businesses where they would normally get nothing. We in the UK are enormous losers. Unlike other UK based companies, every pound of profit has a large percentage paid back into the UK government coffers in tax. With these companies every penny is siphoned away to their US headquarters.
Then I started to look around at other companies, even UK based companies. They move their factories around Europe with impunity to exploit differences in labour costs, so it stands to sense that they will also do it with their tax liabilities and the EU are complicit in allowing this to happen. It was then that I started to realise that the EU is not a union of people and states. It is a union of big business and rich individuals who can lobby for new laws and change the level of the playing fields at will, to suit their own purposes and without the dangerous interference imposed by democracy. So, the everyday working people who don’t play the system, earn their wages and pay their taxes are supporting this vastly unfair and corrupt system. That was why I decided to vote to get out of it, the sooner the better, deal or no deal. Nobody knows what the result of leaving the EU is going to be and we may even get into a mess. But at least it will be our mess and we wll have the democratic processes in place to get out of it with no interference from a corrupt and non-elected European executive.
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