A Christmas Carol
We are all aware of how tough life has become for the poorest in our society, with Food Banks probably our fastest growing industry. A report by the Centre for Social Justice this month warns that the UK is in danger of slipping back into a Victorian age with a widening gap between mainstream society and an impoverished underclass.
As we watch ‘A Christmas Carol’ once again, Dickens will be holding up a mirror to the 13.4 million people who lead lives marred by family fragility, stagnant wages, poor housing, chronic ill health and crime.
The report, ‘Two Nations: The State of Poverty in the UK’, argues that the most disadvantaged in Britain are no better off than 15 years ago, at the time of the financial crash when the first period of austerity was launched and from which it seems we have never recovered.
At the other end of the scale there are 26 obscenely wealthy individuals who own as much as the poorest half of the world’s population put together, and thousands of billionaires and multi-millionaires who pay tax at between 0% and 0.5%. There really is one rule for the rich and one for the poor.
For thirteen years we have been promised a ‘high wage, high skills economy’, but what have we got instead? Zero hours contracts, Deliveroo, Amazon workers on minimal pay with tightly controlled toilet breaks, total dependence on cheap labour from abroad in our fields and care homes and P&O crews summarily sacked and escorted off their ships.
The theory of ‘trickle down economics’ is an illusion. Profits made by big companies stay with the directors and shareholders. Economic productivity works essentially by finding the cheapest possible labour or by making redundancies.
Meanwhile Jeremy Hunt, in his recent budget, refused to increase income tax thresholds such that nearly 3 million low and middle income people now have to pay basic or higher rate tax for the first time and all existing tax payers have to pay more. Those tax brackets have been frozen since 2021 and the chancellor has said that they will stay frozen until 2028! That is a massive on-going tax increase for people on modest and average incomes!
Our vital public services are in desperate needs of adequate funding. So how about starting with a wealth tax on the multi-millionaires who evade tax on an industrial scale? Let’s end the hypocrisy of off-shore banking and shell companies!
Taxes need to be raised, but let’s do it the Robin Hood way: by taking from the rich and giving to the poor.