[oceanstone]

What goods or services could be boycotted, to protest these actions by the British Gestapo?

Largest UK companies (that seemed recognizable): HSBC, Shell, BP, Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays, GlaxoSmithKline, Unilever, Vodafone, Anglo American (thought the name was funny for a huge British company), Prudential, Coldplay

Edit: Added services

Edit 2: Added list of largest UK companies

Edit 3: Added Coldplay

[snitko]

Money. The less government money you use, the less they can tax. Cash or Bitcoin. Don't give them a cut. I wouldn't advocate tax evasion, although the truth is, if you pay taxes, you finance this bullshit.

[oceanstone]

I'm actually an American. It looks like Unilever, Shell, BP, and HSBC are all based in Britain. Those brands are pretty popular in the USA, so that was an interesting find.

[beedogs]

Does the UK actually make anything anymore? I thought they were like the US and had become a "service-based" economy. I guess you could boycott visiting.

[lostlogin]

A shiite ton of military equipment - Britain is a big arms exporter.

Here is a story about exports to repressive regimes, this bit alone is troubling, and a believe it's just a fraction of exports. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/blood-money-uk...

[youngtaff]

Cars, loads of them and we even export cars built by Japanese car companies to Japan

[snitko]

Why boycott companies? It's not companies who did this.

[oceanstone]

Companies based in Britain bring in tax revenue, which then funds the British authorities, who look to be rather corrupt.

[snitko]

Right. So what happens if a company decides to protest and not pay taxes? Government is going to make its life very difficult, to say the least. How is this a company's fault if a gang of bandits steal money from it to finance nasty things?

It's like saying "Let's not go to this bar anymore, because mafia comes in every now and then and confiscates profit from the owner". Owner is not responsible and the mafia is going to invade every bar you switch to, because it follows the money.

[oceanstone]

Tax evasion isn't a good way to protest. If it were, you'd see a lot of people jumping on that bandwagon, just so they could have more money at the end of the year! Imagine that being pitched on a shareholder's meeting. "This fiscal year... we are going to protest our taxes. We project a 30% increase in profits."

[snitko]

It's not a good way to protest and people don't jump on that bandwagon simply because government is gonna make their lives very very unpleasant. That's why I say that I wouldn't advocate it - it is immoral to demand from people that they complicate their lives by engaging into a fight with IRS or whatever your tax agency is in your country. But essentially, taxes are forced payments. If it wasn't so, I guarantee you, 90% (if not more) would stop paying.

[oceanstone]

You bring up an interesting idea. What if taxes were completely voluntary... would anyone pay them? Would anyone elect to pay sales tax if it were not required? I feel like the world might resemble Mad Max if this were the case.

[lostlogin]

Pick other issues you have concerns about (human rights, animal rights, dubious banking practices, tobacco etc) and you get 2 birds with one stone.

[oceanstone]

Totally. There are a lot of reasons to boycott a few of those companies. The tail end of your comment reminds me an animal related reason to boycott BP.

[takluyver]

If less tax is raised in UK, do you think that's actually going to stop things like this happening? Of course not, it's just going to make life slightly shittier for British people. The way to fix this is to make it a big enough political issue in the UK that the government backs off.