A campaign has been launched by protestors against the ongoing Gaza-Israel conflict, which says that as the UK government is “actively enabling a genocide in Gaza… British taxpayers can legally withhold taxation.”

While much has been written elsewhere on the rights and wrongs of the war and the legalities of the UK’s involvement, I want to focus here on this notion of withholding taxes, the argument for which essentially runs like this:

1. It is illegal to fund genocide. 
2. The UK government is “enabling a genocide” in Gaza. 
3. A portion of our taxes pays for the UK government to do this.
4. Paying taxes is therefore breaking the law.
5. We should withhold our taxes until the UK government stops. 

This has been jumped on by tax lawyer Dan Neidle of Tax Policy Associates, who suggests that “none of the claims have any legal basis” and could well result in significant legal and financial consequences. His claims are strongly disputed by the campaigners, who say that “tax experts are not best placed to judge the legality of the campaign” and that their (unnamed) “team of experts” is, in fact, correct. 

I will leave it to the reader to judge which party to trust, and as I am neither a lawyer nor an accountant and am in no position to advise anyone on anything, I will instead take a layperson’s look at the campaign website.

The Nuremberg Code

First up, the campaign says it is illegal to pay tax if any of it is used to fund “genocide, murder or any criminal activity” as per the UN Charter, the UK Terrorism Act, the International Criminal Court, and… the Nuremberg Code? 

Regular readers will have come across the Nuremberg Code in The Skeptic before, as some people believed the Code prohibited the COVID-19 vaccine rollout. Those people were wrong on that, but they were at least correct that the Code does refer to experimentation on humans. 

But I’ve no idea why this tax campaign refers to the Nuremberg Code, unless the campaigners believe the UK government is illegally funding some kind of involuntary human experimentation in Gaza? If they do, I missed it on their website. Perhaps they meant the Nuremberg Principles, which relate to war crimes. 

Is defending Ukraine bad, too? 

The preview document for the “Declaration of Deed and Trust” that can be downloaded on the campaign website – which, in fairness, doesn’t seem to be the final version – says that taxes, which have gone via Parliament’s Consolidated Fund to the Ministry of Defence (MoD), are being used “for the instigation, facilitation, support or conduct of various illegal wars, invasions, occupations or armed attacks on the people of diverse independent Sovereign States, most recently Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, the Yemen and the Ukraine” [sic].

Reasonable and differing opinions are available on UK involvement in most of that list of countries, but it would surely be quite a stretch to say that British financial and military support for Ukraine’s defence against an all-out invasion from a foreign power is in some way illegal, or constitutes supporting an invasion, or an occupation of Ukraine, or an attack on Ukraine. 

One can of course reasonably think the UK taxpayer should not fund Ukraine’s defensive efforts, but the implication that supporting the legitimate government of Ukraine with military aid is somehow supporting an attack on the people of Ukraine is certainly audacious. Perhaps this will be clarified or removed from the final draft.

War Crimes and Punishments 

The document also says that if the UK government ceases the activity that the campaign says is illegal, the pledger still won’t pay until “1000 of the leading instigators, perpetrators, financiers, investors, advisors, company directors, public officials and natural persons complicit in the criminal acts” have criminal proceedings initiated against them. 

One might well ask who these 1,000 people are, and who gets to decide. More to the point, the campaign’s argument seems to be that it is illegal to pay taxes if those taxes fund illegal wars – but even if that is true, why would that make it legal to withhold taxes if a seemingly arbitrary number of unnamed people aren’t prosecuted?

Dilution and Responsibility

The campaign website says that their legal reasoning is applicable to Council Tax as well as income tax, because a percentage of this goes to paying council employees, who then pay a percentage of that salary as taxes to Parliament’s Consolidated Fund, a percentage of which then goes to the MoD. This does feel like the dilution of culpability on the taxpayer is starting to get a bit watery. 

In any case, from a very basic common sense and historical standpoint, taxpayers have not generally been held accountable for the actions of their governments. The many trials that followed the Second World War saw thousands of people in Japan and Germany prosecuted for their wartime conduct… for specified war crimes, not for merely paying their taxes, even though we all know that terrible atrocities were committed with those funds. 

Will it work? And a DISCLAIMER

I don’t know if this will work, as – obviously – I’m not qualified to provide legal or tax advice. The campaign says they are seeking advice from a KC to provide a written opinion on the campaign so that participants know the risks. Their argument seems to be that participants would not be avoiding tax but withholding it from the government it in a “Deed of Trust” until the above conditions are met. It remains to be seen whether the courts would agree. It is certainly worth noting that, in a typical year, something like 50 people are jailed for failing to pay council tax, and a further thousand people a year receive suspended sentences.

In fairness, No Tax for Genocide also notes that it does not provide legal or financial advice, in a fairly large disclaimer at the bottom of the main page.

There’s an asterisk halfway through the disclaimer paragraph, but I can’t find a footnote or endnote that it points to. Hopefully nothing important, given the seriousness of the campaign and the possible implications for participants…