Money's too tight to Menschn

Forgot Nostradamus and the Mayans, we’re about to lose a living prophet, to the United States at least. I speak, of course, of Louise Mensch.

It might seem at first that Louise Mensch lacks the celestial foresight of Nostradamus. After all, she failed to predict the descent of Comet, although it should come as no surprise. It’s been in trouble for years, and shops cannot survive without customers. It was all part of the grand economic narrative in which the clunky retail giants and their dusty display units were outmanoeuvred by the plucky dotcom start-ups, who were more light-footed (perhaps because their staff wore sandals to work), and who used sparkly internet magic to make stuff cheaper. As consumers, we had nothing to lose but the old retail chains.

But now we know that Comet never deserved its fate. The smokescreen has been revealed: behind friendly homepages that welcomed you by name lay colossal global enterprises, playing the same tax-avoiding, devil take the hindmost tricks as the mega corporations. And hindmost there were plenty: Woolworths. Clinton Cards. Game. Peacocks. JJB Sports. La Senza. Blacks. Hawkin’s Bazaar. Barratts. Oddbins. Borders. Virgin Megastore. Consumers, myself included, preferred the convenience and competitive prices of internet shopping over queues and car parks, but because the new dotcoms had a tax gameplan they deluded us into thinking it was a fair contest. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world its head of operations was in Luxembourg. 

Neither Louise Mensch nor the Mayans could have predicted that in 2012 a whole AA-to-Z of firms and famous figures would have their tax tactics scrutinised by such diverse forces as Vince Cable, UK Uncut, Anonymous, and the Public Accounts Committee. Indeed, thanks to the tax bods at AA and Acromas, I have something to look forward to the next time I’m out cycling and a motorist tells me I should pay road tax. (Instead of replying “there’s no such thing”, I can politely inform them that although 98% of my tyre-to-road interfacing occurs on UK transit infrastructure, the multi-channel leasing arrangements of my cycling operations to myself via several offshore tax havens means that despite having pedalled over 500 miles this year, my distance travelled is actually at a net loss and I am therefore not liable for any tax. And then I will cycle away very quickly so they can’t get me.)  

What led me to realise the true wisdom of Mensch was the recent news that Caffe Nero might have sidestepped its tax bill. 

I liked Nero because for years it helped me cultivate a coffee-connoisseur smugness with which I annoy friends and colleagues. To me, other people were mere slaves to purveyors of that burnt bean, murky run-off that needs adulterating with aspirational adjectives and gallons of milk to make it palatable, whereas I eschewed the big tax-avoiding brands, only getting black coffee at Nero in the proper I-talian style. So, while friends wasted their mornings ordering and waiting for fraudulent skinny frappie-frothies and criminal tall icy-ones, I simply walked in and ask for a medium-black-americano-take-away-with-a-little-bit-less-water-than-usual-oh-I-don’t-know-up-as-far-as-half-a-cup-or-something-yes-please-umm-well-that’s-probably-still-a-bit-too-no-it-doesn’t-matter-it’s-fine-thanks, and went on my way. 

And when Louise Mensch chose the medium of the television programme “Have I Got News For You” to impart her prophesy that only all or nothing relationships with capitalism were morally-consistent choices, I laughed along when she was butchered by Baker, Merton, and Hislop. “Ain’t no-one gonna stop me from grumbling about globalisation, just because I walked past a Tesco once in 1998”, I didn’t hilariously say at the time. And as Hislop did hilariously say at the time, “you don’t have to want to return the stone age to complain about the financial crisis”. 

But in our mockery of Mensch we failed to comprehend her transcendent perception, her crystal sagacity, her intellectual poise when she told us we couldn’t be “against capitalism apart from the lattes”. She’s right, we could not. 

If indeed it turns out that the Nero has fiddled, then, as Louise Mensch knows, in the future there won’t be any decent, honest, taxpaying coffee shops left. In fact there won’t be any taxpaying shops left at all, just miles of A-roads straddled by Amazon distribution centres and racks and racks of Google servers. In the future, you’ll have to swallow a bastardised ultra-capitalism or you’ll have to fashion your clothes, food, and coffee out of stone and half-completed loyalty cards. Louise Mensch wasn’t being crass on Have I Got News For You, she was sending us a warning. And rather than heeding her parables we drove her into exile. Come back Louise Mensch, your people need you!