Lead story

March to unseat Cameron

by Daphne Liddle

THE PEOPLES Assembly, along with many other progressive trade unions and campaigns, had long planned a mass march through London this Saturday against austerity, in defence of the NHS and the restoration of union rights. They will still be marching for those causes. But another one has been added as the main slogan of the march: “Cameron must go!”

Since the leak of the “Panama Papers” from the Panama-based lawyers Mossack and Fonseca, the details of the Cameron family dealings through a company set up by the Prime Minister’s father, Ian Cameron, called Blairmore Holdings Inc have been emerging. It was moved to Ireland in 2010, the year David Cameron became Prime Minister.

A source close to Blairmore Holdings — which is still operating with assets of £35 million — said the company had been moved because its directors believed it was about to “come under more scrutiny”.

The truth about this company had to be dragged slowly out of Cameron. At first he claimed it was “a private matter”. Then we were told that David Cameron had no offshore holdings, then that there were no longer any offshore holding that the family would benefit from “in future”.

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March to unseat Cameron

Scottish Industrial News

by our Scottish political affairs correspondent

JOURNALISTS at the Greenock Telegraph recently received awards for “successfully illustrating that you can achieve great digital audience growth and strong copy sales” according to their boss, Newsquest chief executive Henry Faure Walker.

Only a few days later the US-owned media group announced to the same journalists, and on 28 other weekly titles, that they would be sacked unless they signed up for new contracts by 13th April.

The terms include a reduced pension scheme, losing a day of annual leave, an increase in the working week from 35 to 37.5 hours and sick pay slashed by one half.

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Scottish Industrial News

Editorial

Reforms are not enough

LABOUR leader Jeremy Corbyn has been performing at his best recently in the wake of the Panama Papers revelations, demanding the resignation of David Cameron and his miserable money-grabbing crew in a way that Miliband, Brown or Blair would never have done. They could not; they were tarred with the same mammon-worship themselves.

And Corbyn has been quick to get to the nub of the issue — the real scandal is not that they have benefited so much personally from not paying their own taxes but that Cameron and his cronies have made it legal to cheat in this way — that they have fostered the offshore tax havens, which are mostly British-controlled territories, that have made tax avoidance possible and even admirable for the filthy rich around the globe.

They have made the City of London — which was built on slavery, greed, duplicity and the sale of monopolies by the Crown — into a modern tax haven. It has become an investment centre in itself, with ever rising property values where the extremist fundamental mammonists can salt away their ill-gotten gains in buying up fabulous homes that may never be lived in but which are guaranteed to multiply their sale value continually.

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Reforms are not enough