Getting angry with tax avoiding companies is only natural. Its part of growing up. So when Starbucks are shown for the exploitative tax dodgers that they are, a lot of people boycotted them. Talking with their feet. Its what we do. It was no loss to me, I’d avoided them for years because their coffee’s shit. So I’d made my, kind’a, ‘pre-tax statement’ ages ago.

But companies are in the end, in some way or another, accountable, first and foremost, to their customers. Without whom, there is no company.

It was harder to boycott Google because it is without a doubt the most essential ‘thing’ in the life of every civilised person in the world. So we just amended their name in our ‘favourites’ to ‘Fucking Google!!’ and let that be sufficient to voice our extreme displeasure. Using another search engine is, quite frankly, unthinkable.

So now its Apple. The biggest company in the world. Paying tax amounting to about 0.005% of their profits, which are expressed in loads of billions every quarter. Even in Ireland that’s low. But that’s how its been.

Until now. When those ‘fucking Europeans’ have voiced their displeasure and demanded a payment of back taxes amounting to 13 billion Euros. To be payed to the Irish government.

Who don’t want it.

I’ll have it. Then everyone can be happy.

The Irish don’t want it because the deal they did with the late Steve Jobs, back in the day, allowed very favourable tax terms. Ok, perhaps not quite as favourable as those mentioned above but creative accounting is what corporations do. And that is why Apple is based in Ireland. And not in the British Virgin Isles, Bermuda or Grand Cayman. Employing 6,000 Irish persons and putting masses of cash into the local and national economy. That was the deal: set up shop here, rather than over there, and we’ll give you all sorts of benefits, because OUR ECONOMY IS SHIT AND WE NEED OVERSEAS INVESTMENT. And it was shit. And now its not. Because of companies like Apple and many others, who took advantage of what the Irish offered in a wonder of quid pro quo which turned the Irish economy around in a decade.

Now Europe wants its quids out of the pro quo and everyone’s up in arms.

As a (fairly) staunch ‘remainer’ (remember THE VOTE?) I’m curious about this. We have some Euro bitch demanding that a sovereign nation (Ireland is an independent republic, in case you missed that) within the Eurozone implement a fine on its favourite company because it breeches European tax laws, not Irish tax laws. They obviously don’t have many, if any.

So really, from my perspective, I don’t give a shit about Apple, nor the 13 million, because I won’t benefit from it in any way at all. But I do care that unelected Euro demigods can try to force an independent country to go back on a long-standing deal because ‘they’ don’t like it.

I normally delete the little ‘signature’ from my words but today, in protest (no idea against whom), I shall leave it in.

Happy Wednesday,

A xxxx

Sent from my iPad