If I'm so Left, why does the Left Wing Twitterati piss me off?

I associate myself with Left wing politics, I love the welfare system which we enjoy in the UK providing stuff such as the NHS and Child benefits. However, when I'm on the internet, I sometimes feel that my other love, that of rational thought, gets in the way of being truly 'Left'. Either with us or against us is the rallying cry when a small dissenting view might tweet in to view.

I felt my left wing credentials being called in to check (by only myself, I might add, but silence can speak louder than words or JSON) today when I brought up my twitter time-line and was presented with this lovely succinct image.

Left Wing Twitteratti caption: "This is the problem with catching tax avoiding companies".

Go on, look at it, let it make you hate, let the pixels contained allow your Red blood to boil until your heart explodes and tears itself from your sleeve. "This may help to explain things" cried Rupert Myers, "Can these figures really be true!?..If so the people at HMRC and DWP need a calculator for Christmas!!" asserted Susan Indy. "Learn to read a graph properly" declared my internal thought processes.

We are taught that as a business increases its profits, the tax it pays should increase proportionally to its income. Small businesses pay small tax, big businesses pay big tax, and HUGE companies pay small tax. Wait, hang on. So, the £70bn+ tax that has been evaded must surely come from HUGE companies? How many of them can there be?

There's Vodaphone, I've heard Laurie Penny talk about them (sometimes about tax, other times about her phone bill). There's Google, I use them. Oh, Starbucks! That's another. Jazzy's newsagent on Netherhill Road? Probably doesn't produce big enough profits, or despite being the classic Left enemy of a capitalist (well, why else would sell things for money?) a tax avoider.

So, we can assume for ourselves that the number of HUGE businesses avoiding tax to the level of £70bn is perhaps in the upper tens, if breeching the 100 mark at all.

Let's move on to benefit fraud, despite it's rather vague description. Is this all fraud from the DWP? or just Housing benefit fraud but no Child benefit fraud? Let's assume that it is over the same time period as the business figures, less we throw another parameter in to this graph (I'll get to that in a moment). In the UK for May 2014 there were 5.2 million claiming benefits. Most of these (99.3%) are claimed correctly and without fraud. Leaving 0.7% of 5.2M people apparently committing benefit fraud, that's 36,400 people. A tiny bit more than our estimate for the companies.

Right, so back to the graph. 300 people investigating around 100 companies gives no more than 3 people to a company, and 3250 investigating 36,400 people giving each investigator around 10 people to look at. However, and here's a difference: A company consists of many people, say one CEO and a board of directors. This would have the effect of, in some cases, rounding out the numbers such that both workforces were perfectly adequate for the task ahead.

A two dimensional graph, like the one above which shows two axis (amount of money and number of workers) represents a linear equation. To be an accurate graph, there should be changing variable except what the axis represent. In theory, this graph should actually be a 3 axis surface plot of money, workers and number of people under investigation. Until then, it's just a pointless exercise in the whole "those who shout loudest are the truth of the internet".

The best way to fix tax avoidance? Don't use Vodaphone. Don't buy coffee at Starbucks. Don't use Goog... in fact, I quite like my chromebook, android phone and android watch. Does this make me less of a left-winger?

No, I still vote for the party that I think will bring the better society rather than the ones that will dismantle it.