grtdkad – Member

‘travellers’ on a permanent site. Immobile.
Not travelling = Not traveller

I think you’re confusing travellers with sharks? One of them has to keep moving constantly, the other can stop occasionally. A traveller on a permanent site isn’t neccesarily there permanently- it’s the site that’s permanent.

Yep there’s routinely threads on here about how to best avoid paying import duty on bikes/bits from the US, how to best fiddle the bike to work scheme etc etc – doesn’t really bother me except for the hypocrisy of it all.

Elfin. Comparing vodafone to travellers is cheap sensationalism.

Oh it is, is it?

Explain please.

(Sits drumming fingers on table, waiting…) 🙄

Deleted my own comments, had a second thought, just incase my employers are listening 🙂

You say that, but for balance have you ever tried calling vodafone’s customer care call centre?

Elfin. Comparing vodafone to travellers is cheap sensationalism. Vodafone employ many thousands of UK citizens, pay them a wage, NI contributions etc and that wage is then ploughed back through the economy as the employees spend their hard earned pennies, pay their income taxes etc. Just how are you comparing that to what travellers contribute?

Since you say it like that, it must be ok for vodafone not to pay tax. 🙄

less than a century ago these people were a common and even welcome sight on our roadsides.. but our attitudes changed

They would still be fine and welcome to me.

However, if some nasty scrotes turned up in a van pretending to be competent tradesmen, conned someone out of several thousand pounds worth of work, did a terrible job illegally, then threatened to firebomb the owner of the defrauded company for daring to confront them, before disappearing off to a nearby ‘travellers site’ where they claim immunity, please excuse me for not really liking the way they do business or my drawing some sort of link between your picture and my scenario.

You can stop drumming your fingers now Elfin, that must have been a long night for you…

Not condoning VF shirking tax, or even suggesting they might be an entirely saintly company. But I am trying to shed a little balance to any arguement that looks to compare them to a community of travellers by pointing out why the economy (not to mention charity) benefits from them. If anybody can compare how travellers benefit the UK economy in a similar fashion I’ll happily reform my viewpoint and can all happily box them both in the same category.

The comparison is quite straightforward.

Both Vodafone and a certain % of travellers don’t pay the tax they should. The amount of tax owed by both parties differs, as does their method of avoidance. It is not possible to distinguish between the two unless you wish to offer a subjective opinion on the travelling community.

There you go, easy.