Star Wars

I’ve now started a long overdue personal boycott of Starbucks. As if this outfit’s long history of UK tax dodging wasn't bad enough, their wretched managers are now trying to claw back any future tax bill from their low paid staff by, amongst other things, stopping paying them in their (half hour) lunch break. This was the last straw for me and no amount of sugar in the coffee could sweeten this!
It’s yet another example of less well off people being made to pay the price for greed, bungling and rank disloyalty by overpaid executives. And of course it is the approach taken by this equally wretched government with the scrapping of Remploy at the same time as promising a nice tax reduction for the rich one of the most appalling examples of its true values.
Tax dodging companies - of whom there are many - and individuals should have been made to cough up long ago. They are freeloaders on society and if they want to go elsewhere we should see if we could struggle along without them.
Payment of taxes should not be voluntary and it remains to be seen how much Starbucks and others (such as Amazon and Google) actually pay in the future. The years of austerity brought on by avaricious banks and incompetent and misguided government would be easier to endure if we really were ‘all in it together’. Perhaps we could then meet up for a coffee fairly traded at home and abroad!