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Are you angry that HMRC lets big business avoid huge sums on their tax bills? Are you concerned about the impact the cuts will have on our public services? There is something you can do! Help us take HMRC to court over the deal that allowed Goldman Sachs – the global banking giant- to get away with avoiding millions in unpaid tax.

We are taking HMRC to court because we believe that their secret deal was unlawful. HMRC and Goldman Sachs can afford the best lawyers in town, so we need your help to take them on. It’s the people’s court case.

Our fantastic lawyers are taking the case on a no-win, no-fee basis, but if we do lose our legal case we are likely to be liable for HMRC and Goldman Sachs legal costs, and we can’t imagine the bill is going to come cheap! Without this money we can’t continue with the legal challenge.

activism banks ukuncut

The findings of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel economics prize, are devastating to the beliefs that financial high-fliers entertain about themselves. He discovered that their apparent success is a cognitive illusion. For example, he studied the results achieved by 25 wealth advisers across eight years. He found that the consistency of their performance was zero. "The results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill." Those who received the biggest bonuses had simply got lucky.

Such results have been widely replicated. They show that traders and fund managers throughout Wall Street receive their massive remuneration for doing no better than would a chimpanzee flipping a coin. When Kahneman tried to point this out, they blanked him. "The illusion of skill … is deeply ingrained in their culture."

banks Economics

Gold­man Sachs, which re­ceived more sub­si­dies and bailout-re­lated funds than any other in­vest­ment bank be­cause the Fed­eral Re­serve per­mit­ted it to be­come a bank hold­ing com­pany under its “emer­gency sit­u­a­tion,” has used bil­lions in tax­payer money to en­rich it­self and re­ward its top ex­ec­u­tives. It handed its se­nior em­ploy­ees a stag­ger­ing $18 bil­lion in 2009, $16 bil­lion in 2010 and $10 bil­lion in 2011 in mega-bonuses. This mas­sive trans­fer of wealth up­wards by the Bush and Obama ad­min­is­tra­tions, now es­ti­mated at $13 tril­lion to $14 tril­lion, went into the pock­ets of those who car­ried out fraud and crim­i­nal ac­tiv­ity rather than the vic­tims who lost their jobs, their sav­ings and often their homes.

banks OccupyWallStreet

Anticuts campaigners squatted a flat above a branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland on Lapwing Lane last weekend, in protest at government spending cuts and high bankers’ bonuses.

banks manchester

It's bonus season, the time of year when bankers show us what they really believe. As soon as they get their money, they spend much of it on land and houses. They know that these are safer investments than the assets in which they trade. If they trash the economy again, they at least will survive.

This year the frenzy will be almost as bad as ever. But it could have been worse. Here is the story, revealed by a leaked document, of how our government covertly tried – and failed – to kill tougher European rules on bankers' bonuses, and how the chancellor of the exchequer appears to have misled parliament

banks