Each persons income and tax in the public domain?

ALL? He would have paid up to 40% tax on his income, so at least 60% of it would have been his after tax. No need to exaggerate, durhamjen, that just invalidates your point and makes it look like soapbox ranting.

Would you be proud of your dad if the money he had made and left you in his will came from tax dodging?

We still do not know how much. What about the rest of the message, Elegran? Is that not important? You are getting as good at deflecting as Cameron.

Last year Milliband was attacked by both the press and Cameron suggesting his father was anti- British. Ralph Milliband was an intellectual working at Oxford university, helping to form the minds of future generations, when he was younger he took part in the D Day landings in Normandy.

Ian Cameron set up companies abroad to avoid paying tax.

David Camarons Father couldn't have gone to the D day landings even if he wanted to: he was disabled.

My point is though what did he achieve apart from what I have listed? Milliband gave to society including all the tax due. Cameron appears to have taken from society in the form of being unfair about the tax due.

Underlying this is that chickens do eventually come home to roost. I can remember flashman Cameron standing up in parliament spouting innuendo about Ed Millibands father as did the press.

What did Milliband Senior give to society, some of his Markist (sp) claptrap, no doubt. And probably spouting at the same time: Come the revolution brother, the Rolls Royce is mine.

Wow! There speaks the voice of reason and balance

Petra that gave me a laugh. Good one.

It is balanced now, one Father did this, another Father did that.

Thank God we are not all judged by whatever our Fathers did eh?

Any chance of discussing the op?

As you were!

Cameron junior said he is going to put his tax returns in the public domain, going back to before he came into power.
We'll just have to wait and see if he does it all.
I am sure if he tries to fiddle it again, someone will let us know. He doesn't seem to have many friends now.
Love to see Boris's and Osborne's as well. I wonder if Dave will make them. After all, he promised it over two years ago and we are still waiting.
Back to the OP, daphne. I know it's been said before, but just reminding people what it's all about, as a few seem to have forgotten.

I think it is a very good idea to make tax returns open to view. It's a "social no no" in this country because those in power encourage us to think that such transparency equals some sort of communist plot - just as Obamacare was viewed by many in the US. You would think people would have more sense, but apparently not.

Some of the very highest paid people obviously pay much more in tax than the very lowest paid because they earn vastly more money (those that don't use all sorts of legal and illegal measures to avoid paying tax, that is.) If you're receiving £2 million per annum you should be paying more tax than someone receiving £18,000 per annum. Some people are wealthy enough not to work but live on the profits derived from their investments and, again, some of them will use all sorts of loopholes to avoid paying tax. And yet the people who work to produce those profits cannot opt out of paying income tax and, because they are subject to 20% VAT on goods, pay - relative to their income - much more tax than wealthier individuals.

It is only through taxation that a country is able to provide the sort of infrastructure and stability that businesses need - roads, railways, health care and education for employees, public order, etc. etc., so business owners and investors should be prepared to pay their share.

Eloethan, Don't forget that National Insurance is now 12% on ALL earned income for those with an income over £8000pa, although it's capped at £43,000, so people on a lower income actually pay a higher percentage of their income.

People so easily forget your last paragraph. People invest in the UK rather than a small deprived third world country precisely because we have a skilled, healthy workforce, political stability and good infrastructure, etc etc.

It makes me very cross that some business people won't invest in the people who are making them money. Maybe the government should charge them a fee for their employees' education, health care and transport links. Hang on a minute! It's called tax!

Interesting to hear that Cameron has published figures from his tax return but not his actual tax return ...

It isn't the complete one either there are a few pages missing.

“And later on I will be publishing the information that goes into my tax return, not just for this year but the years gone past, because I want to be completely open and transparent about these things.

“I will be the first prime minister, the first leader of a major party, to do that and I think it is the right thing to do.”

Brilliant. Why wasn't it the right thing to do before the Panama papers came out?

Yes, daphne, I'd forgotten that, and it's really important.

D day landings?!! Ian Cameron was born in 1932, hardly old enough in 1944 to do anything apart from the boy scouts!!

We haven't learned anything new about Cameron. We all knew he came from a rich family and that rich people have ways of staying rich. Another shrugtastic story.

I don't think people should be asked to make their private financial affairs public unless it is public money they are using. It's nobody else's bloody business.

Cameron hasn't done anything illegal, though I think some of what he has done in the past is what he called immoral. He strikes me as a bit of a dope over all this, actually, with hopeless crisis management skills

Gracesgran has rather summed comments well.

I am simply sick of the rotten taxation system than continues to give to the rich at the expense of the vunerable?

Lets use the determination for change to create a time table for Mr Cameron to bring in changes that get rid of off shore tax fund schemes. Replaced by a fair taxation systems for all UK tax payers.

Our lack of fairness in our democtratic structures is worrying and needs an urgent overhaul..

If Cameron now desires to clean up any unfairness in our society then even our political unbalanced electoral systems will also need an overall.

We need far greater transparency of our political unbalanced structures in the UK
Cameron has now a great chance of giving the country greater leadership and fairer infrastructures, though whether the Tories will agree to changes I am not sure. The next few months will see how prepared the Tories are prepared to move a fairer society.. Cameron now has the opportunity to be a true statesman putting Britain before party dogma.

That's a tall order, NanaBridget. Cameron and Osborne have presided over making this country more divided and unfair than it has ever been before.
Do you think that, because they have been caught out, they will now change their whole philosophy?

www.taxresearch.org.uk will show you how it should be done, but Cameron does not like Richard Murphy.

It would be great if the Conservatives took steps towards ensuring more transparency and fairness. The problem with that is that their ideology is for a "small state" with very low taxation. Many Conservatives believe the tax system to be unfair and see it as totally justified to use methods of avoiding tax because they disagree with the principle of those earning the most paying the most.

On the Conservative Support website, these are the values that are headed up:

"Free market, Small state, Low taxes, Independence, Individuality, Self determination"

I agree with Eloethan that daphne's point is really important. Do we really think it is OK that the overall income of the very rich is taxed at a lower rate than the overall income of the middle-earners and the poor? The so called "squeezed middle" (earnings either side of £40,000) are, in addition to the squeeze on jobs at this level which is generally lowering salaries, increasing work-load or cutting jobs altogether, squeezed by the government/treasury too.

I also agree with NanBridget that transparency is the only way forward. Given that openness (of all incomes and tax) you would soon see the media adding the NI on to the tax of groups of people and, I am pretty sure, we would see that many very rich and rich would pay a lot smaller proportion of tax on their income (including "unearned").