Canary Wharf echoes with the sound of the Labour leader’s attack on Tory tax avoidance, says Matt Wright.
At the Welsh Labour Conference on Valentine’s Day, Labour leader Ed Miliband took aim at tax avoidance and fired darts at the heart of a Conservative-led government which ‘thinks that wealth and power fence people off from responsibility’. Though he was speaking in Swansea, Miliband’s speech has a special resonance here in East London, where the Canary Wharf estate fences off wealth and power from the surrounding population.
Canary Wharf towers over East London, and one of its towers is emblazoned with the HSBC logo – the badge of the bank badged by Miliband as the second home of tax avoidance. No wonder Miliband’s stance has been well received by many of the impoverished East Londoners living in the shadow of HSBC Tower.
HSBC chief executive Stuart Gulliver has been obliged to apologise for his company’s previous dealings with the super-rich and their tax affairs. Acknowledging the whistleblowing role of a former employee of HSBC’s Swiss bank, Gulliver insisted that the company had already heard of these problems and acted accordingly. ‘We must put the recent media coverage into context….The media focus has been on historical events that show the standards to which we operate today’.
But the fall-out won’t stop there – not if Miliband has anything to do with it.
The Conservatives have long had a PR problem: how to make the party of the rich and prosperous appear as a One Nation party. Not an easy task! Their reputation as the ‘nasty party’ stems from their readiness to cut public services while raking in cash from private donors – benefactors who may even have cut one or two corners in their lucrative, business careers.
Partly because of mounting political pressure from Miliband and Labour, sections of the public are beginning to associate guests at the recent Black and White Ball, the high-profile, Tory fund-raising event, with the estimated 7000 Brits who are thought to have entered into various tax avoidance schemes. Though Cameron himself would never be so abrasive, this kind of association further associates his Conservative Party with the bad old days of ‘rottweiler’ Norman Tebbit and the outright class conflict of the Thatcher years.
With the polls only 80 days away, Cameron’s camp must be fearful that even indirect connotations of class conflict could cost them the forthcoming general election. Standing at the foot of HSBC Tower and looking across to the grossly uneven development of Poplar, Woolwich and Bow, it’s not hard to see why.