IN THE time of Biblical prehistory goats got a pretty raw deal, with mankind's sins metaphorically loaded onto them before they were slain at the altar or sent off to perish in the desert.
The Westminster poll a month from now will undoubtedly go down in UK political history as the scapegoat election. In the party manifestos, the psalm books for our secular day, there will be pledges of righteous punishment, the only consistency being the utter disconnect between those who are made to suffer and those who actually committed the crimes.
Whether it be "sanctioning" the benefits of claimants to atone for the sins of the bankers, demonising immigrants on red Labour coffee mugs or UKIP escalators up the white cliffs of Dover instead of blaming business for exploiting zero hours contracts, or making the Greeks the whipping boys for the Eurozone crisis, it seems hardship must be meted out, preferably to the blameless.
One of the funnier moments in Holyrood's brief history came when First Minister McLeish sought to make a point about hypocrisy, declaring: "It begins with H and ends in Y." "Henry!" came the back-bench rejoinder. Well, George Osborne should be wary on the campaign trail should he speak of the importance of a nine-letter word ending in "Y" because it's not austerity, Gideon, it's hypocrisy.
He knows, but pretends not to, that it was never the benefits bill that pushed the UK wildly into debt. It was the banking bail-out. But he is now rewriting history so that a claimant can have her benefit slashed for missing a Job Centre interview because it clashed with a hospital appointment, or another because he was attending a loved one's funeral. A price worth paying, because we're all in it together. Not.
Had there been an announcement yesterday that the one-time People's Party had produced a mug inscribed "Controls on immigration. I'm voting Labour," I would have put it down to a Photoshop job for April Fool's Day. But no, this was real, as was the Farage poster with escalators ascending the White Cliffs of Dover. The latter was comical, the former unforgivable.
Scapegoating has featured in other modern political decisions, of course. Who can forget that we invaded Iraq to avenge a terrorist attack on the Twin Towers masterminded by a citizen of Saudi Arabia who was tracked down to a compound in Pakistan?
But the current exemplar of the scapegoating tendency is Greece, its debt crisis frowned upon and sneered at by Northern Eurozone countries who are culpable in its creation.
A magnificent report by the Amsterdam-based think tank SOMO, the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations, points out that the Netherlands is culpable for creating tax loopholes which deny the Greek government legitimate income from corporate taxation, and German companies are among those who are exploiting these tax-shifting measures.
The sub-title of Fool's Gold pretty much tells the story: "How Canadian mining company Eldorado Gold is devastating the environment and local livelihoods in Greece and avoided taxes by using Dutch mailbox companies."
We would call them brass plates rather than mailbox companies, but the narrative is depressingly familiar, affecting not only the environment through open cast mining but human rights in terms of the heavy-handed suppression of local protests. The report is excellent on these issues, but let's concentrate on the "tax planning" issue, since it sounds better than words like avoidance or evasion.
A Canadian company has set up a subsidiary in the Netherlands to give it a foothold in the EU and a subsidiary in Barbados because, hey, we all like a bit of sun on our backs. Any profit from the environmental rape of Thrace, which gave birth to Spartacus, is popped over to Amsterdam, which passes it as debt repayment to Barbados, which gave birth to Sir Garfield Sobers. The result is that Greece, according to SOMO, loses out on corporate tax income. It's called profit shifting.
As Tax Consultants International noted: "The Dutch holding company regime is still the most popular holding regime in the world. The primary reason for this popularity is its tax efficiency (mostly 0% tax), the flexibility of Dutch corporate and tax law and its relatively low cost of incorporation and annual maintenance."
Other companies involved in similar scams in the Netherlands or Luxembourg are German giants BMW, Bayer and Bosch. It hardly helps Ms Merkel's case when she meets the new Greek government. Stern lectures from Northern Europe for the feckless South can be filed under hypocrisy.
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