They might protest, these people over at Facebook, that this business of their company paying only £4,327 in tax last year sounds worse than it is. Certainly, it sounds dreadful, not least because the average person in Britain pays £5,392.80.
“Aha!” the Facebook types might retort, perhaps while playing air hockey, or bouncing around their open plan office on adult Space Hoppers, “but that’s not corporation tax, is it? The average person doesn’t pay any of that!” Which is true, but then nor does the average person working in Britain earn as much as the average person working in Britain for Facebook. The former earns £26,500. The latter earns £210,000, in part because Facebook bundled what would otherwise have been its British profits into a