WHY WE SHOULD AND SHOULD NOT CARE ABOUT THE PANAMA PAPERS

I’ve been trying, I really have, to give a flying flatulence about Paul Burrell, former butler to the late Princess Diana, having some shares in an offshore trust based in the British Virgin Islands called Black Dragon.

But I’m afraid I find myself caring as much as I do about the news that martial arts movie star Jackie Chan has holdings in offshore companies including one called Jumbo Jaz investment. Or that Simon Cowell, various sports stars and someone from FIFA also use such vehicles to stash their cash.

Which is about as much as I care about, I don’t know, the Lithuanian shoe polish industry, maybe. No, I exaggerate. Not that much.

As for the revelations that these secretive, tax avoidance schemes are also favored by associates of Vladimir Putin, deposed Iraqi ministers from the Saddam era, Chinese nomenklatura, bank robbers, and lots and lots of Nigerians, well, color me just so surprised.

So some bloke we’d never heard of from Iceland has resigned. Like we care.

What we should care about very much though, I think, is the way that this “Panama Papers” story is being a manipulated to a particular end by politicians and the left-leaning media.

Look at Sen. Bernie Sanders – or try to without laughing, for after all his initials are BS.  The leftie media is now proclaiming that the Panama Papers are his keys to the White House.

Not only is Hillary personally compromised yet again. It plays perfectly to that notion Socialists like Sanders are obsessed with these days: that there’s a corrupt, uncontrollable elite who can only brought to account by a good old fashioned dose of the kind of hard-left politics which worked so well for Cuba, East Germany, and the USSR.

Look at Jeremy Corbyn. The British Labor leader hasn’t got this big in his trousers about a front page news story, I imagine, since Margaret Thatcher died.

At last, Corbyn has found a foreign policy mission worth really fighting for. No, not the nuclear deterrent – which he wants to scrap. Not ISIS, whose terrorists he thinks shouldn’t be shot under any circumstances on British streets and who at least one of his party comrades thinks should best be won over by friendly cups of tea.

No, instead Corbyn has seized this opportunity to declare war on the British Virgin Islands and any other British overseas territories and crown dependencies which earn their bulk of their living as tax havens.

Yeah! That’ll show them! That’s what Britain really needs in a prospective leader: a bearded Trotskyite Islamist-suck-up vindictively eager to ruin the livelihoods of people in far off places while making not a smidgen of a difference to the lives of anyone in Britain.

Here’s the thing that should most disgust us about this overblown story: it is just another power grab by the global governing elite.

Sure it’s disgusting that kleptocrat dictators and other low lives are leeching their people’s resources and stashing their cash in secret vaults, and if we help their people get the money back and then send the dictators back home to be lynched, yes, that would be poetic.

But this stuff is a distraction. A side show. It’s going to do nothing to make our own lives better or solve the world’s most serious problems.

For the world’s most serious problem is this: governments are trying each year to take more and more of our money and spend it either on ever more pointless crap or on expanding the role of government generally.

Not even Ronald Reagan could stop this government expansion. When sovereign nations like the US try it on, it’s dangerous enough.

But when the leaders of all the world’s countries start making noises about ensuring that no one, ever again, can hide their money from the grasping claws of the state, well that’s when you really need to start worrying because it brings the One World Government so dearly beloved by the Communitarian Left one step closer.

There’s a basic truth about tax which our global elite seems determined to ignore. If you keep it low enough and fair enough, nobody tries to avoid it.

How many magnates from Hong Kong are on the Panama naughty list? None, I’d guess. When the tax rate is as low as 10 per cent, it’s just not worth the hassle of not paying it.

British writer James Delingpole is the author of such “fantastically entertaining” books as 365 Ways to Drive a Liberal Crazy, and Welcome To Obamaland: I’ve Seen Your Future And It Doesn’t Work

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