Black Day in Bluesville, 15/4/2009 (original) (raw)
First-ever report by any national newspaper on the Oxbridge Presses' tax wheedlings of 1940-1978
The Oxbridge presses aren't charities, but are given unfair tax breaks
They have taken advantage of dubious rulings, skewing the publishing industry
Response article by Andrew Malcolm, The Guardian, 15th April 2009, links added; newsflash follows.
Click for Guardian website version
click image to enlarge
From the 1920s the two presses wheedled away at the Inland Revenue, only to find themselves repeatedly rebuffed
You reported on the uncertain future of lithographic printing at Cambridge University Press, but on various points you seem to have been misinformed (Cambridge blues: dons step in as digital age threatens jobs at world's oldest publisher, 6 April).
Your article states that CUP is a charity. However the CUP and its 'sister' press at Oxford are not discrete charities. This is an easy mistake to make. I myself made it right through the seven-year breach-of-contract claim against OUP that I eventually won in 1992. In fact, as I later learned, the two presses have never sought or been granted charitable status, do not have charity registration numbers, and until surprisingly recently were liable for corporation tax. They do not qualify as charities for the simple reason that bookselling is not recognized by the law as a charitable purpose.
The Oxbridge presses do, though, operate from charity-owned buildings and are therefore exempt from business rates - a burden many of their competitors find crippling. They also, of course, have the inbuilt advantage of their prestigious brand-names and historical pedigree, as your article recounts. However, many titles bearing Oxbridge's imprimaturs are nowadays 'packaged' by firms quite unconnected with the universities.
From the 1920s onwards the two presses, ineligible for charity status, wheedled away instead at the Inland Revenue authorities, only to find themselves being repeatedly rebuffed. In 1940 CUP applied for tax exemption, but the Revenue's special commissioners adamantly refused, concluding that CUP's commercial book trading took it outside the charitable educational purpose of the university proper. In 1944 and 1950 similar claims by OUP were also rejected.
In 1975 CUP tried again, deluging the Revenue with over 100 pages of Latin charters and letters patent dating back to Henry VIII, and pleading that its claim be "conceded quietly". It was, and was then extended to Oxford: this dubious decision has since skewed the entire publishing industry, allowing the leviathan OUP systematically to gobble up potential rivals and become the UK's largest publisher. Yet the decision is not even recorded in OUP's own histories of itself.
Your article also says: "Setting up a digital printing operation costs a lot of upfront money - cash that CUP says it has not got." This suggests that digitisation is new at Cambridge; but CUP has in fact been computer-printing since the mid-1990s, when it was one of the very first publishers to take the plunge into "print on demand", the new technology that allows books to be laser-printed and glue-bound one copy at a time, to individual purchasers' orders.
In 1999 CUP stated that this technology at a stroke strips authors of their traditional copyright-reversion rights by keeping their books "eternally in print" - but this claim has yet to be tested in law.
Our universities are supposed to be, among other things, centres of objective, accurate and detailed legal analysis. Surely our two oldest and most venerated will want to be certain they are not compromised in this mission by their book publishing operations.
Andrew Malcolm is the author of Making Names, and The Remedy - an account of his lawsuit against OUP akme@btinternet.com [now www.akmedea.com\]
The Response column offers those who have been written about in the Guardian an opportunity to reply. If you wish to respond, at greater length than in a letter, to an article in which you have featured, please email response@guardian.co.uk or write to Response, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. We cannot guarantee to publish all responses, and we reserve the right to edit pieces for both length and content. Curiously, the Guardian published not one single response letter to the above article.
AKMEFLASH: On the morning of 15th April 2009, OUP Communications Director Rachel Goode rushed a circular out to all OUP employees ordering them not to respond to the above article - possibly an infringement of their human rights under EU law. OUP's employees were further instructed that if any journalist confronted them with questions about the UPs' tax-exemption applications of the 1920s, 1940s and 1970s, they were outrightly to lie about the history. I don't know if a similar instruction was issued to CUP employees. - A. M.
Click for the next item in the Charity Reform series, or for An Ultra Sort Run Andrew Malcolm's article on print-on-demand in The Times Literary Supplement, 18th June 1999. Also see The last word in academic publishing, article by Christina Zaba in The Guardian, 16th April 2009 (exits www.akme)
CLICK FOR:
THE AKME CHARITY REFORM AND PUBLIC BENEFIT INDEX
THE OXBRIDGE COLLEGE ACCOUNTS INDEX OR OUP ACCOUNTS INDEX
THE MALCOLM vs. OXFORD CASE INDEXES: I (1984-92) AND II (2001-02)
THE SURPRISING TRUTH ABOUT OUP'S 'CHARITABLE STATUS'
THE HISTORY OF AKME AND OF THIS WEBSITE
THE AKME OXFORD CUTTINGS LIBRARY
e-mail: akme@btinternet.com