Sam Leith: Are B-listers just pawns in the tax game?

We feel the blush of confidence that wealthy celebrities who invested in film funding schemes were on the wrong side of it

othing quite tickles our appetite for indignation like seeing a fresh bunch of famouses named and shamed in the Sunday papers for their involvement in a possible tax avoidance scheme. Sploosh! Like a bucket of Chum off the back of a shark boat they go: Borat! David Baddiel! Him of Men Behaving Badly, the one without the ears! Kate Adie! That cricketer! The scoundrels! Alleged scoundrels, sorry.

It’s all very exciting but as we enter the blood frenzy, shouldn’t we wonder a little bit if we’re not being played? Individual stories are what grab the attention: Sacha Baron Cohen serves, at the top end of the crackdown narrative, the role that White Dee from Benefits Street serves at the bottom.

Both make a good distraction from boring old corporate tax avoidance, which robs us of much more money than a TV personality, and at which government — because corporate tax avoiders have lobbyists and own media and put ex-ministers on boards — is much more minded to connive.

HMRC “never discusses individual cases”, they say solemnly. But you can be fairly sure that they aren’t exactly making it difficult for reporters to identify just whose records at Companies House will put them in the frame.

I don’t doubt that these film schemes were a bit dodgy. The clear and funny implication is that, in the post Sex Lives of the Potato Men era, nobody could regard an investment in the British film industry as a straight-faced attempt to make either money or art.

But I do doubt that all those who followed the advice of their financial advisers and signed up did so in conscious bad faith.

We feel the blush of confidence that wealthy celebrities who invested in film funding schemes were — wherever the moral line is to be found — on the wrong side of it.

I know a good many one-man “companies” on the corporation tax rate who would tut-tut away without the slightest self-questioning. As with many situations of mild moral indeterminacy, the differing perspectives available can be set out in the form of a conjugation: I am tax-efficient; you are tax-avoiding; he is Gary Barlow.

Which is why it seems to me that rather than endorsing some daft, loophole-filled scheme set up by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown in an effort to suck up to British film for Cool Britannia purposes, then repenting of it and seeking to plug the loopholes with the guts of a bunch of B-list celebrities, the powers that be might work on getting the rules clear in the first place, and then making enforcement a matter of principle rather than public relations.