Privateer PM won't tackle tax avoiders

It's a shame that more Tories don't share Stephen McPartland's belief that it's time to start making corporate giants pay their fair share of tax.

If they did there might be a chance of pushing David Cameron into closing Britain's gaping tax loopholes. Instead, the Prime Minister talks airily of collective global action - shorthand for "I won't do anything, and when no-one else will either I can blame them."

The truth is there's no need for collective action. The world's leading tax havens are all British-controlled and Cameron can stop their activities any time he chooses.

But he won't - not when his party receives millions every year from tax-dodging donors. Not when it's so convenient to keep using the budget deficit as an excuse to slash public services, including axing the very tax inspectors whose job it is to pursue the likes of Amazon and Starbucks.

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This is why the battle against tax-dodgers can't be fought in isolation. It's part of a much broader war over what kind of society Britain will be.

We want a society where everyone genuinely is in it together. Where everyone pays their fair share of tax. Where everyone has access to the same high-quality public services. Where everyone has a good education, decent health care and dignity in retirement.

Cameron wants a society run by the rich, for the rich.

Where taxes are an inconvenience to be wriggled out of by any means available, where public services are starved almost to death by underfunding and exist mainly to funnel our cash to the private sector via outsourcing scams. Where a wealthy few make out like bandits while the rest of us work longer and longer for less and less.

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That's starkly illustrated by his savage assault on our NHS, which is being torn to pieces at massive expense so that the private sector can feast on the remains.

We get worse care at greater cost - and the Tory donors behind NHS privateers like Circle Health get a fat return on their investment in Cameron's party.

The threat to the health service is still not fully understood by most of the people who will be its victims, because the Tories deliberately concealed their plans in barely comprehensible bureaucrat-speak about consortiums and commissioning groups.

Only now - as hospitals start to talk about closing A&Es and specialist care units - is the danger becoming obvious.

Time is running out. But it isn't too late, if we can turn the Defend London's NHS campaign into a national movement to save one of this country's great treasures.

Saving our NHS would be a massive victory in the fight to stop Cameron and his coalition of millionaires from dragging Britain back into the dark ages.