Jeremy Corbyn calls on governments to tackle 'global scandal' of tax avoidance in powerful UN speech
Channel: Sports-Sports
Date: 2017-12-09

Jeremy Corbyn calls on governments to tackle 'global scandal' of tax avoidance in powerful UN speech
GENEVA (Reuters) - Britain’s opposition Labour party wants a close relationship with the rest of Europe after Brexit, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn told an audience at the United Nations in Geneva on Friday.
The Labour leader will highlight the estimated 100 billion dollars a year lost to developing countries from corporate tax avoidance and $1 trillion dollars a year are sucked out of the Global South through illicit financial flows.
Jeremy Corbyn today made an impassioned plea for governments to tackle the “global scandal” of tax avoidance.

He called out the Tories for their failure to act saying: “Our government has played a central role in enabling the corruption that undermines democracy, and violates human rights.”

The Labour leader highlighted the estimated 100 billion dollars a year lost to developing countries from corporate tax avoidance and $1 trillion dollars a year are sucked out of the Global South through illicit financial flows.

Speaking at the UN in Geneva, Corbyn he warned the “dominant global economic system is broken” and that it has produced a world where a wealthy few control 90 percent of global resources, of growing insecurity and grotesque levels of inequality within and between nations.”

But he said the “crisis” presents an opportunity to do things differently saying Labour would work with tax authorities in developing countries, as Zambia has with NORAD, the Norwegian aid agency, to help them stop the looting.

Speaking ahead of Anti-corruption day tomorrow he said: “Corruption isn’t something that happens ‘over there’ – It is a global issue that requires a global response.”

British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn speaks during a United Nations panel on human rights and international cooperation in Geneva, Switzerland, December 8, 2017. REUTERS/Pierre Albouy
“We want to see a close and cooperative relationship with our European neighbours outside the European Union, based on solidarity as well as mutual benefit and fair trade, along with a wider proactive internationalism across the globe,” he said.

“My own country, Britain, is at a crossroads,” he said. The vote last year to leave the European Union meant hard thinking had to be done about Britain’s role in the world, he said.

“There are some who want to use Brexit to turn Britain in on itself, rejecting the outside world, viewing everyone as a feared competitor,” he said.

“Others want to use Brexit to put rocket boosters under our current economic system’s insecurities and inequalities. Turning Britain into a deregulated corporate tax haven, low wages, with limited rights, cut-price public services, in a wholly destructive race to the bottom.”

Corbyn said his party stood for a completely different future, drawing on the internationalist traditions of the Labour movement and of Britain.

In a wide-ranging speech about human rights and multilateralism, he did not immediately comment on the Brexit divorce deal struck by Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May and the European Commission earlier on Friday.

The European Commission said that enough progress had been made in Brexit negotiations to allow a second phase of talks on future relations to begin.

Reporting by Tom Miles, editing by Larry King

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