Victory ... winning small battles leads to winning wars.

So, it looks like the public have spoken and Starbucks are going to start paying the tax they had tried so hard to avoid. Whether these payments will be of the order that will put the company back on a good PR footing with the general public remains to be seen. Interestingly, it was not just Starbucks who were playing the avoidance game. Amazon and Google ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-20288077 ) have also been enjoying the fruits of their tax accountants hard work.  The point here is that, if the public vote with their feet, they can achieve anything. Now - how long will it be before the hard pressed citizens rise up and tell Government it must deal with the Starbucks, Amazons and Googles of this world before it hits the easiest and softest of all tax targets - the average man and woman - who have no choice but to pay tax and who, because Starbucks, Amazon and Google do not pay their moral fair share are being sunk by debt. Remember folks, if the boys and girls at the top paid their whack then the people at the bottom wouldn't be taxed to the degree they are. 

As an illustration of a girl at the top who takes her moral contribution seriously - I give you probably the most famous of writers, after Shakespeare - J K Rowling ( http://www.businessinsider.com/jk-rowling-on-high-taxes-2012-9 )  and from the article concerned I note the following:  

It is with this as a backdrop that it's worth recalling why the richest woman in the UK, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, says she remains a citizen of Great Britain even though she's now a billionaire.
The bottom line?
Rowling loves her country, and she wants her kids to grow up there. And, as someone who once depended on the safety net designed to help those going through hard times, she feels a debt to her society.

Here's Rowling in the London Times (via Chris Bertram of Crooked Timber and Frank Black) :

I chose to remain a domiciled taxpayer for a couple of reasons. The main one was that I wanted my children to grow up where I grew up, to have proper roots in a culture as old and magnificent as Britain’s; to be citizens, with everything that implies, of a real country, not free-floating ex-pats, living in the limbo of some tax haven and associating only with the children of similarly greedy tax exiles.

A second reason, however, was that I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major’s Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism. On the available evidence, I suspect that it is Lord Ashcroft’s idea of being a mug

SEE ALSO: "With An Ache In His Heart And In His Balls"--The New Book By JK Rowling