How Personal Attacks Let David Cameron Off the Hook Over Tax Loopholes

It's no surprise that DC's offshore trust was called Blairmore. That was exactly what he did when he came to the Commons yesterday. As was so often the case with Teflon Tony, a week that had started with The Leader on the ropes, sucker-punched by popular opinion, ended with a bunch of nbd, whatevs, what were we all so het up about anyway? The electoral children of Britain were put to bed by daddy and told to stop being so daft. #ResignCameron? It was just so much #notoschooldinners.

What begun with statements, revised statements, "clarifications", the full release of tax returns and a £200,000 gift from mummy splashed all over the Sunday papers, ended with a masterful Parliamentary performer making the fuss seem unjustified, the clamour a witch hunt.

The Mirror, The Guardian, Islington Council – he pointed out – all have offshore portions of their funding. "Families who want to support each other" should be allowed to do so. The allegations about his dad were "deeply hurtful and untrue", and in part his fuzzy head – in releasing four increasingly contradictory statements last week – was due to his pain over his father being dragged into this, "a hard-working man and a wonderful dad". All very heart-rending.

Then, in classic Cameron style, he projected out. There were three new initiatives. And a bunch of old ones – his government, he noted, had closed over 40 tax loopholes, more than any other.

Jeremy Corbyn got to his feet. Physically, at least. Words started to come out of his mouth, but they may as well have been flies for all the difference they made. Only halfway in did Jezza realise that this wasn't an anxiety dream – he was in the House, and he was delivering a rambling, woolly lecture.

His voice rose in pitch as he finally looked down at his notes and saw a point worth making: "Does he not realise why people are angry? Six years of austerity could have been avoided if we hadn't been ripped off by the super-rich."

People started to perk up again – oh yeah, there'd been these Panama Papers things. Turns out the debate wasn't just over whether Cameron was rich (many had suspected he might be, and some even that he was "trapped" in wealth). This was about an entire financial system jerry-rigged by hyper-mobile international capital and the venerable puppetry of blind-eyes and outright bullshit. What was Cameron going to do about that?

Well, he was going to get back on the ad hominem – Corbyn had made the error of releasing his own tax return at 15:35, five minutes into the start of the debate, and Cameron managed to convincingly muddy the waters by bringing that up.

Then it was time for a range of Tory squires from the shires to ask their own questions of the PM. These mainly formulated as: "Would the Prime Minister agree with me that he has done nothing wrong, and is basically a pretty straight kinda guy and everyone would save themselves £30,000 in tax if they could, even though it's not actually that much money?"

No one formulated it better than Alan Duncan MP, who said, "Shouldn't the Prime Minister's critics really just snap out of the synthetic indignation and admit that their real point is that they hate anyone who has got a hint of wealth in them?" before saying that this attitude risks a House of Commons "which is stuffed full of low-achievers who hate enterprise, hate people who look after their own family and know absolutely nothing about the outside world". Oiks, in other words.

Even Andrew Tyrie, the big-brain head of the Treasury Select Committee, who's done a lot to turn the screws on the system in his time, put it to Cameron that his only real error was in "commenting on the Jimmy Carr case". True, in one sense. By the time he'd published his personal tax returns over the weekend, it was obvious that nothing illegal was going to be in them. But that was surely never the point.

The point was that Jersey is not a centre of international finance because specs of dirt off the coast of France make good financial centres. It was because it had created an environment where Brits could pay less tax simply because the quantity of money they had was big enough to warrant moving it to Jersey.

It's about the fact that there is a point in the life of everyone's money where it evolves wings, where its girth grows so great that it develops a hard exoskeleton that can shield it against taxation. And that you or I don't have nearly as much access to that ability. Our money is too feeble – it won't jump over tax hurdles. There is an implicitly regressive tax system, and, as Quavering Jeremy Corbyn hinted, people are pissed about that.

The debate rumbled on, but Cameron already knew he was safe. Despite the shiny-sweaty patina of his rubberised forehead, he was in quippy form. Caroline Flint's query on whether people on less than 100k were "low achievers" – in response to Alan Duncan – was met with "I have always considered the Hon Member a high achiever. After all, she put the boot into [Gordon Brown] in ways I never could."

It was left to Dennis Skinner – a Lynton Crosby-invented Tory secret weapon, real name Crispin Smythe-Wilkes – to seal a great afternoon for DC. The PM was "dodgy", he asserted – unparliamentary language that he then refused to retract. Expelled from the chamber, Skinner's performance instantly turned into the social media main event.

No, the message was, this certainly wasn't about the professional classes – lawyers, accountants, brokers, all being complicit in the architecture of enrichment. This wasn't about decades of governmental failure to tackle the problem, to even admit it was a problem, that problems existed.

This was just 1980s class war. Exactly the crabs-in-a-bucket politics of envy that Teflon Davey had been warning us all about. All over Twitter, boneheads who hate "toffs" rapped their knuckles on their boney heads in applause.

The tragedy is that Corbyn's supporters were already the most switched on to the debate around tax iniquities. And if their leadership would stop punching itself in the face for even a short while, things might actually get somewhere.

@gavhaynes

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