An astonishing eleven million documents were leaked from law firm Mossack Fonseca which detailed how the rich and famous – not to mention the politically powerful – used this tax haven in Panama to avoid paying income tax in their own respective countries.   It’s already more or less brought down the government in Iceland, and people are out on the streets protesting even as I type.  And depending on what else is revealed in this vast array of documentation, who knows what may follow.   However, the kind of protest currently being seen in Iceland is highly unlikely to be repeated here in the United Kingdom.  Here, we prefer to take to Facebook, moan and complain for a while behind the sanctity of our computer screens, and then log off to go and watch Pointless.

Since David Cameron became our Prime Minister in 2010, the Government – largely made up of upper-class Eton-fed ex-public schoolboys – has adopted a more or less ‘who gives a f***’ attitude towards the British people.  They know that when a scandal or some less than favourable news story breaks, all they have to do is sweat it out for a while and then it will all go away.  By way of an example, look what happened when it was revealed that Iain Duncan Smith charged the taxpayer (not David Cameron’s father, obviously) £39 for a breakfast at The Ivy in London?  Facebook went nuts for about 24 hours and it all went away.  Sure, it still pops up now and again, but nothing the Government cannot handle.  Speaking of IDS, his recent resignation as Work & Pensions Secretary came as a knee-jerk reaction to waking up one morning with a sensation that he couldn’t identify; it was something he had never experienced before.  It was called a conscience.

What could damage the Government is the upcoming referendum on whether the United Kingdom should stay as part of the European Union or not.  Europe has always been an issue that has split the Conservative Party more or less right down the middle; if the country votes to opt out of Europe, then that spells the end of Mr. Cameron’s tenure as Prime Minister, and he might as well hand over the keys to No.10 Downing Street to Boris Johnson right away.  If the country votes to stay in, as I suspect it might, then it will be business as usual for David Cameron and Boris will just have to wait his turn to become Tory leader.

In the United Kingdom we have an inept and quite frankly corrupt Government whose business and policy decisions are based upon favouring their friends and relatives in business and they are completely disinterested in the approximately 99.9% of the population who didn’t go to Eton, or who are unable to fiddle this country’s tax laws to run fake and dodgy deals in Panama.  “We are all in this together,” they tell us, all the while helping themselves to tax dodges, leaving the lower paid members of society to actually pay those taxes that provide our schools, hospitals, and Iain Duncan Smith’s breakfast.  It’s outrageous.  We should be marching to Westminster in our hundreds of thousands, demanding this Government be brought down.  Every last one of the cabinet must resign.  They are all in it together, not us.  It depends, of course, on your definition of “it.”  The disabled face losing £30 a week from their benefits, while Eric Pickles spends £500,000 a year on limousine travel.  The minimum wage is set at around £7 an hour, while George Osborne – possibly our most unqualified and inept Chancellor – pockets £500,000 from the sale of his “second home” (originally paid for by – guess who – the taxpayer).

How many more scandals must break loose before the British people wake up and start smelling the corruption that has cost hundreds of thousands of jobs, closed hundreds of our valuable libraries and other public services, and made a hypocrite of our Prime Minister, who in 2012 blasted “comedian” Jimmy Carr for dodging income tax while he knew that his own father had done the same?  In 1642, Civil War broke out in England because the King (Charles I) was thought to be corrupt, and while I am not advocating war – or indeed any kind of violence whatsoever – I certainly advocate protest of a peaceful kind that will not go away until every last member of our Government resigns. x