Steve Reed (Croydon North) (Lab/Co-op):...Mary Portas, who led a
Government review of the future of British high streets, now has
this to say about the Government: “They need to wake up. It’s
shameful that they have still not readjusted their thinking on how
Amazon and the delivery giants should be paying equivalent rates of
tax online. It’s shameful they’re not doing anything about it.
Their slowness in understanding, their tardiness, is ridiculous.”
Sir David Amess (Southend...Request free
trial
(Croydon
North) (Lab/Co-op):...Mary Portas, who led a Government review of
the future of British high streets, now has this to say about the
Government:
“They need to wake up. It’s shameful that they have still not
readjusted their thinking on how Amazon and the delivery giants should
be paying equivalent rates of tax online. It’s shameful they’re not
doing anything about it. Their slowness in understanding, their
tardiness, is ridiculous.”
(Southend West) (Con):...Amazon
flights come into Southend airport. We have five of them during the
night, so they are not doing local residents much good because they
are disturbing them. They are wonderful for Amazon of course, but
Amazon along with other large
online retailers, has taken advantage of the pandemic to grow its
business while still avoiding paying taxes or just paying a
fraction of the taxes it should, based on the money generated by
its UK sales. Our Government should certainly see if they can apply
a bit more pressure. High streets, Southend included, have more and
more empty shops—we cannot exist just on charity shops—and although
the business rates holiday has helped, it needs to be extended
beyond March...
(Coventry South) (Lab):...While this
pandemic has pushed workers into poverty and forced small
businesses to close, for mega-corporations and their super-rich
owners it has been an opportunity to exploit. They are using this
public health crisis to entrench their dominance, drive out
competition and grow their obscene wealth. Take, for
example, Amazon and its billionaire owner,
Jeff Bezos. Now with a corporation worth more than
$1.5 trillion, Bezos’s wealth has soared since March. It is up $66
billion in the last eight months, meaning that he could give every
single Amazon worker a bonus of $105,000
and he would still be as rich as he was at the start of this
pandemic.
This grotesque wealth and Amazon’s growing
dominance are of course connected with our struggling high streets,
because Amazon has not got where it is by
playing fair —quite the opposite, in fact. While workers and small
businesses pay their tax, Amazon’s tax dodging is
pretty legendary. Just last year, on revenues in excess of £13
billion, Amazon paid just £14 million in
corporation tax. Its profits are up 35%, but its tax bill just by
3%. This is not a level playing field, so it is no surprise that
small businesses and high streets cannot compete. Its employment
practices are no better. From being forced to urinate in bottles to
meet targets to almost daily calls to the emergency services to
treat exhausted staff, Amazon’s workers describe
being treated like “robots”. It is their labour that makes the
company’s wealth, but it is Bezos who takes the
wealth. To level the playing field, it is time we put an end to
these unfair practices. It is time Amazon paid its fair share of
tax, respected workers’ rights and paid a fair share. For the sake
of our small businesses, workers and the public purse, it is time
to make Amazon pay.
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