The UK Government with London as its capital city and owning a subordinate UK-owned  family of  tax-havens (The Cayman Islands, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands,  Turks and Caicos, Jersey and the Channel Islands, Gibraltar and the Isle of Man) sits  at the very heart of the global tax haven/tax avoidance scenario.   At the personal level it is deeply ironical that David Cameron  himself gained substantially from his (Scottish) father’s business acumen in creating a wealth management investment fund in the tax-free haven of Panama. Indeed it was Mrs Thatcher’s policy of ‘freeing capital’ that encouraged the export of wealth while allowing companies to use the competitive market of  international low-tax regimes in order to set up off-shore business accounts, off-shore sales corporations and banks.

Thus the Herald is correct to point out that “TAX avoidance will top the agenda of the G8 summit which begins today at Lough Erne in County Fermanagh.” (Taxing times for the G8 Monday June 17^th.)

The Ulster venue has a certain historical propinquity in that the great 18^th Century Scottish Enlightenment scholar and moral philosopher Francis Hutcheson, Principal of Glasgow University came from the area that now hosts this conference.   For surely at the very heart of this meeting of the G8 should be a concern for some fundamental analysis of the near moral collapse within the global business world. One of Hutcheson’s students, Adam Smith,  warned of this moral bankruptcy in his Wealth of Nations  when he railed against  “the vile maxim of the masters of mankind….. All for ourselves and nothing for other people.”

Smith’s “masters of mankind” have much to ponder over in order to produce meaningful actions for change.  Hutcheson and Smith both argued for ‘natural rights and a morality of enterprise…  such as are not hurtful to others in their persons or their goods ’.

I am not confident that this or any G8 meeting of ‘old empires’ include the necessary moral attributes in order to make any substantial difference for the betterment of mankind.