Trailing in the polls with three days to go until the London mayoral elections, Zac Goldsmith continues to attack his rival Sadiq Khan by accusing him of having links with extremists. It is a pretty desperate strategy, reduced to making the charge that Khan has ‘shared a platform’ with extremists. It is also somewhat undermined by the revelation that Goldsmith himself has been photographed smiling alongside Suliman Gani, the Tooting Iman who is subject of many of the claims. Gani also appears to have shared platforms with Conservative MP for Battersea, Jane Ellison, on a number of occasions.
But one thing puzzles me. While Goldsmith’s campaign has stooped to a relentlessly negative attempt to taint Khan with vague charges of links to Islamic extremism, Khan’s campaign has declined to hit back by going for the jugular on Goldsmith’s most-obvious weak spot: his past as a non-dom. After what can be best described as gentle prodding, Goldsmith published his tax returns in February, revealing that he had paid £4.5 million tax on around £10 million worth of income and capital gains tax since 2010. Much of the income came from a family trust.
But crucially the tax returns he published relate only to the years since 2010, when he was elected to Parliament. They leave a big question mark over how much tax he was paying prior to his life as an MP. He does not deny that he inherited non-dom status from his father, Sir James Goldsmith, when he died in 1997 and that he maintained that status until it was to become an obvious millstone around the neck of his parliamentary career. As a British resident, Goldsmith would have been liable to pay tax on any income he earned or brought into the UK, but there is the question: did he have offshore investments and how much tax did he avoid through being a non-dom?
You don’t have to be a socialist to see something deeply unsatisfactory about a man standing for office in a tax-raising public authority in Britain if he has himself avoided paying tax in Britain. Many conservative voters will find that unacceptable too. So why won’t Labour go for the jugular and bang on about Zac and tax as Goldsmith has banged on about Khan and his extremist associates?
There are two possible explanations. Firstly, Khan’s campaign doesn’t think it needs to. Polls show that their man has a strong lead, so why bother descending into negative campaigning – and risk losing supporters that way – when you don’t need to?
The other is that there has evolved an informal agreement among candidates that they will avoid attacking each other over their personal finances. Few MPs across the political spectrum were spared at least some embarrassment over their expenses – Khan himself returned £2,550 which he had spent sending 18th birthday cards, Happy Eid and Happy Diwali cards to constituents. As an MP would you really want to attack others knowing that the fallout is likely to be the other side poring over your own financial affairs? Politicians’ financial affairs have become the equivalent of boxers’ goolies – out of bounds for attacks on each other – even if the press continues to sniff out financial irregularities.
Zac is unlikely to win on Thursday, but if he does, Labour may well end up regretting that it pulled its punches over his finances.
Comments