Margaret Hodge Lectures on Morality

Margaret Hodge Lectures on Morality

The first in an occasional report by John Bean

All nationalist parties in Britain justify their existence by correctly pointing out that there is now little difference between all three parties that make up the amorphous Lib-Lab-Con. Recognising this as a fact, some among the politically naive have been persuaded to vote UKIP, even though it was by its very birth a continuation  of Toryism, fully supporting globalist economics and dedicated to preserving the status quo. It is now welcomed by the establishment media who recognises its ‘respectable’  usefulness as a safety valve to drain off potential support for a forward-looking, social nationalist alternative, such as the new British Democratic Party.

We could not choose a better example of a typical participant of the feather-nesting Lib-Lab-Con conspiracy than the multimillionaire Margaret Hodge. Staunch Labour, and one time leader of the council of Red St.Pancras, she was made Chairman of the important Public Accounts Committee by the Coalition Government immediately after it was elected in May 2010, and approved by Cameron. Reporting on this in the Daily Mail of 11 June 2010, Jason Groves reminded those of us still politically awake that:

“As leader of Islington Council in the 1980s and early 1990s she was accused of complacency over allegations of serious sexual abuse against children in  the authority’s care.

“That did not stop her friend Tony Blair making her Children’s Minister in 2003, where the abuse controversy followed her.”

Moving up to the present, at the end of November we find Margaret Hodge, in her role as chairman of the Public Accounts Committee giving a dressing down to Matt Brittin, the Google boss in  Britain, for his company’s same tactics as other international businesses such as Amazon and Starbucks, in paying far less corporation tax than British owned firms. She told Mr Brittin: “We are not accusing you of being illegal. We are accusing you of being immoral.”

Now tucked away in the business section of the Torygraph some ten days earlier there was an interesting report by Helia Ebrahimi which seemed to question the morality of  some of her own financial dealings. Namely the tax affairs of Stemcor – the £6.3billion-turnover business controlled by her family.

The Telegraph report said that Conservative MP Pritti Patel has written to Mrs Hodge demanding that she re-assess her position as chairman of the PAC and explain why the steel trading company founded by her father and run by her brother has paid almost no tax in theUK. Ms Patel suggested that Mrs Hodge had a duty to “both meet, and be seen to meet, the standards to which she held others to account.”

Stemcor, where Mrs Hodge has a 9pc stake of the business, was founded by her father, Hans Oppenheimer (who traded in pre-warEgyptwhere Margaret Hodge was born). It employs 2,000 people in 45 countries. In theUK, where Semcor is based, the company generated £2.l bn of sales with £65.2m of profit  in the year ending December 2011.

It paid just £157,000 in tax last year, equating to just 0.01 pc of its revenues.