At the rich countries' summit, in the Swiss ski resort of Davos, Osborne hailed his recent tax deal with internet giant Google as "major success of our tax policy, a victory for the government".
By using the Davos summit, Osborne was hoping to pull the wool over the eyes of the public. But, as it turned out, this was no big deal for him - just a very good deal for Google: it had just agreed to a £130m back-payment covering the past... 10 years!
Tax experts were quick to work out the sums: this meant that out of the estimated £7.2bn profits Google had made in Britain over that period, it was getting away with paying a total of £200m, instead of the £1.6bn it should have paid! Never mind that Google announced it would pay a £3.5bn bonus to its shareholders, out of its £30bn war chest!
But, of course, rather than demanding the missing £1.4bn from Google, Osborne preferred to force 400,000 old and/or disabled households to pay the notorious bedroom tax, whose annual total receipts are less than one third as much!
A state run by and for the capitalists
None of this should come as a surprise, of course. The efforts made over the past decades, by every government, to cut the rate of corporation tax, are there to prove how far the state will go in order to boost the capitalists' profits.
In this respect, whether the government is a millionaire's club, as is the case today under the Tories, or not, as was the case under Labour, makes no difference. The whole machinery of the state, with its army of senior civil servants, most of whom are Oxbridge-educated and closely linked to the wealthy, is there to do the capitalists' bidding from behind the scenes.
Between these unelected senior civil servants, who have often themselves worked in the top spheres of the private sector, before joining the civil service, and the cohort of "advisers" seconded by the big companies to assist them in their tasks, the interests of the capitalist class are in safe hands.
Osborne's latest appointee to the new Office of Tax Simplification, former Tory MP Angela Knight, is a case in point. A former chair of the British Bankers' Association during the peak period of the Libor scam, Knight will remain on the boards of three City financial firms. It isn't hard to guess that she won't insist that the likes of Google pay their taxes, and that her idea of "simplifying" taxes will be to reduce them for the capitalists and their companies, no doubt, under the pretext of "cutting red tape"!
Open the books! workers' control!
The reality is that, behind the politicians' rhetoric and bragging, the state and its institutions, elected or not, are nothing but a fig leaf to conceal and legitimise the capitalists' profiteering.
Take the scandal of HSBC's massive tax avoidance scheme through its Swiss subsidiary. In 2010, HMRC received a file leaked by a Swiss whistleblower, with the details of accounts in which 8,883 wealthy British had stashed a total £14bn. But nothing was done about it at the time.
It was only last year, after a media campaign, that HMRC re-opened the case - only to close it earlier this month! And what was the result? Out of 150 identified potential prosecutions, only one was followed up. Neither HSBC nor its directors were targeted, despite having organised the scam. In fact, the only criminal case actually pursued, was against the whistleblower himself, who got a 5-year jail sentence - forcing him to claim political asylum in France (luckily for him, he got it!).
In another case, HMRC has just given up on its attempts to clamp down on 2,000 taxpayers using a tax avoidance scheme involving the Isle of Man. As if the state couldn't do something to stop this island, which is supposed to be British, from being used as a tax haven by the 30,000 companies (for 88,000 islanders!) which are registered there!
In this society, the crooks are allowed by the powers-that-be to get away scot-free, while the whistleblowers who expose them are the only ones to be prosecuted. Yes, this is what this profit system is - a world upside down, where a tiny minority of capitalists gets away with systematic theft at the expense of society, while the vast working-class majority is supposed to carry on slaving away to increase their wealth.
In the short term, there is only one way to stop the capitalists' theft - by forcing them to show their accounts so that everyone can see where their profits go and by forcing the state to publish what taxes they pay. And a mobilised working class would have the means to protect thousands of whistleblowers, thus allowing the entire working class to exercise control over these capitalist delinquents.