Take tax avoidance. No Labour politician on the campaign trail can draw breath without mentioning “Tory tax dodgers”, yet a moment’s research reveals that they’re up to their necks in tax avoidance themselves. Like the Conservative Party, Labour is part-funded by people who avoid paying tax, including Unite the Union, which didn’t pay any tax in 2011 or 2012 despite owning £56.6 million of stocks and shares. Only today, the Times has revealed that Margaret Hodge – the Labour chair of the public affairs select committee who has been the scourge of “dodgy” tax avoiders for five years – received more than £1.5 million in shares in 2011 from the tax haven of Liechtenstein. Worse than that, it turns out that three-quarters of the shares in the Liechtenstein trust had previously been held in Panama, which Hodge herself described as "one of the most secretive jurisdictions” with “the least protection anywhere in the world against money laundering". Margaret Hodge is the secular equivalent of one of those American evangelical preachers who turns out to be living in sin with a 16-year-old stripper.