Rishi Sunak: he likes money but he doesn’t understand it. By giving benefit money to the rich in tax cuts, he is cutting away the foundations of the UK’s economy. How will you be able to afford anything?
Once again, the Tories are threatening defenceless benefit claimants in their endless campaign to bribe donation money from rich benefactors.
More people looking for work relieves pressure on employers to increase wages, because jobseekers will undercut each other in their desperation – and I use that word advisedly – to get a regular wage packet.
Now Sunak is threatening more than six million Universal Credit claimants – most of whom are in work – with an effective cut in payments if he decides to make the annual benefit increase next April lower than the rate of inflation.
The apparent reason is to fund another tax cut for the very richest, in time for the next general election; he’s buying support where he wants it by harming those he doesn’t ever expect to help him.
Here’s the Mirror:
the Prime Minister refused to commit to inflation-proof benefit rises next year, arguing that payments had already gone up by a “huge amount”.
For clarity, it doesn’t matter how much payments have already increased. Inflation is always a measure of how fast prices are rising. If the inflation rate slows, prices are still rising, only more slowly. Increasing benefits at a rate lower than inflation means millions of working people and benefit claimants will not be able to afford basic necessities.
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is thought to be considering a real-terms cut this autumn. Payments usually rise each April by the inflation figure of the previous September – expected to be 6.9%. But the Government is looking at a lower figure, leaving 6.1 million on UC worse off.
A rise 1% below inflation would result in a low-income working couple with two children losing £220. Asked if he could guarantee benefits continue to rise with inflation, Mr Sunak declined but insisted he would “make sure we look after the most vulnerable”.
That has to be a lie; Sunak has already attacked “the most vulnerable” with his plan to push long-term sick and disabled people off benefits.
Be in no doubt: this is an attack on you.
The fear is that, by buying support from the rich, Sunak will be able to rely on their influence to persuade – or coerce – you or people like you into supporting yet another godawful Tory election win.
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End SEND cuts: the Tory war on kids with special needs has been going on for years – this image is from 2019.
Here’s a shocking admission from the Tory government:
The government has quietly signed a contract targeting 20% cuts to the number of new education plans for children with special educational needs and disabilities (Send) to bring down costs, the Observer can reveal.
Then junior education minister Claire Coutinho – recently promoted to the cabinet as energy secretary – subsequently told MPs that no targets were in place.
The cuts target has emerged as councils across England grapple with huge financial deficits on Send budgets caused by a combination of rising demand and longstanding underfunding.
So the Tory government cut support for school pupils with special educational needs by a fifth and then lied about doing it.
On the same day we find this out, I see this on my ‘X’ (formerly Twitter) feed:
Rishi Sunak facing Cabinet split over plans to cut benefits in real terms to fund tax cuts
Alex Chalk, justice secretary, tells @TrevorPTweets that 'we must do everything we can for the most disadvantaged'
'I will want to ensure… we are decent, humane and support people'
Never mind the talk about benefit cuts; what we get from this is that the Tories are cutting spending in order to cut taxes – for the rich again, most likely, although this could be an election tactic.
They take money from SEND kids because those people and their parents are powerless to stop them; all they can do is hold protests on the streets, and the police have been empowered to put a stop to that.
Meanwhile, rich people have leverage – especially if they give donations to the Conservative Party; they can threaten to withdraw that money. There is a financial incentive for Tories to hand money to them.
So the question for parents of kids with special needs is simple:
Are you happy that your government places your child’s needs as secondary to giving more money to people who are already filthy rich?
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Google: facing an increase in the UK’s digitial services tax from 2% to 10%, this firm and others gave Labour shadow ministers gifts worth £16,000 and it was subsequently cancelled. The increased would have brought £3 billion into the UK Treasury.
Is Keir Starmer’s Labour as bent as a figure-eight? Judge for yourself with this tale of shadow ministers scrapping plans for a 10 per cent digital services tax after receiving £16,000 in gifts from Google and other companies in the sector.
The tax hike would have brought £3bn to the Treasury, providing an opportunity to cut taxes on struggling small businesses – but it seems £16,000 for people including shadow business secretary Jonathan Reynolds was enough to put a stop to this valuable change:
• 15 August 2022: Labour promise a 10% digital services tax.
• 26 June 2023: Labour scrap their promise of a 10% digital services tax.
In between, Labour Shadow Ministers accepted £16,000 in freebies from digital services companies.
Information from Open Democracy says Reynolds was talking about the tax increase right up until he took a £3,377 package for two to attend Glastonbury as a guest of YouTube, which is owned by Google. The day after, reports emerged that he had ditched the plan.
It was not the only time senior figures in Starmer’s team accepted luxury gifts from Google in the months before the party’s U-turn. Shadow culture secretary Lucy Powell’s political adviser, Labour’s executive director of policy, and the party’s head of domestic policy all accepted tickets and transport to, and ‘hospitality’ at, the Brit Awards in February from the digital giant. Powell’s register of interests estimates that the adviser’s ticket was worth £1,170.
Starmer’s political director also accepted transport to and ‘hospitality’ ahead of the event from Google, though his ticket, along with that of Starmer’s private secretary, was covered by Universal Music.
Starmer had accepted a £380 dinner from Google for him and one staff member during the World Economic Forum in January.
In total, openDemocracy estimates that Labour shadow cabinet members and their staff accepted luxury gifts from Google worth nearly £10,000 over the months before they announced their policy U-turn.
And that’s just Google. The estimate of £16,000 in total may, in fact, be low.
Take a look at the full Open Democracy article (link below). The attached comment from ‘Tory Fibs’ is also useful because it crystallises the problem with Labour – or any political organisation – taking money or gifts-in-kind from businesses facing tax increases or legislative regulation:
It doesn’t really matter if these donations influenced Labour policy. That is not the point. Politicians need to put distance between themselves and the monied classes to remove even the very appearance of wrongdoing. Perception alone is enough to corrode political trust.
My perception is certainly that Labour cannot be trusted to implement the right policies for the UK because its representatives are corruptible with cheap bribes.
And no – it doesn’t matter whether Jonathan Reynolds was otherwise influenced to cancel the policy.
It seems as though he shut down a £3 billion plan to help small businesses because a digital giant gave him tickets for Glasto.
And it seems as though the total cost to the digital services industry of shutting down this £3 billion plan was a mere £16,000. That’s pocket money to these people.
Until Labour – and all the other political parties – stop accepting these gifts from people and organisations their decisions may affect, they can never be trusted.
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The truth: if you oppose the Conservatives, you MUST now oppose Keir Starmer’s Labour as well – because they are on the same side as the Conservatives.
Obviously, she didn’t say it in as many words.
But the Labour Party was brought into being in order to re-balance the UK’s system of government so that people who had to work – or seek work – for a living would have improved rights and a fair share of the profits accruing from the work they did.
Part of the latter would come from pay deals, and part from a re-distribution of wealth using progressive taxation.
Keir Starmer’s version of that party has already kicked any plan for improved workers’ rights into the long grass, and his attitude to the current wave of strikes and the cost of living crisis shows that his party won’t be imposing better pay for workers on profit-gouging bosses.
And now Rachel Reeves is telling us there won’t be any change to progressive taxation under a Starmer Party government.
His Labour will support the current, corrupt system from the first day of any government it forms to the last.
💷 Rachel Reeves has just admitted that Labour will not implement a wealth tax of any kind if they get into power.
🥀 We've said it before and we'll say it again, nothing will change if this so-called opposition gets into government.
Labour is finished – as a party representing working and working-class people. A change of name is in order but Starmer won’t go that far because he wants tribal party supporters to keep voting for him and his cronies, following the Peter Mandelson maxim that they don’t have anywhere else to go.
This Writer isn’t convinced about that, though.
The Green Party offer of a £70 billion wealth tax is looking mighty attractive just now.
You might also take a look at what the Breakthrough Party is doing.
And there are myriad Independents springing up to offer alternatives.
But those are thoughts for the future.
The message today is that if you don’t want to see Tory policies and corruption continue, then you must not vote for either the Conservatives or Labour at the next election.
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Targeted: this poster appeared in 2019 so the number of sick and disabled people who have died is likely to be far higher – especially after the Covid-19 pandemic. Papers like the Telegraph seem to be trying to make that number skyrocket.
What’s going on at the Daily Telegraph? First we find that the paper has been spreading falsehoods that the boss of a supermarket chain that keeps its groceries as cheap as possible and pays its workers more than most has blamed the minimum wage for inflation (he hasn’t); now this:
“It raises the question, just how much of our hard won salaries are spent on the benefits of those who do not work?”
It raises the question, just how much of a role does the media play in fuelling disability hate crimes? And what do early eugenic arguments look like? pic.twitter.com/btRfVRkU0j
And the website to which Samuel Miller links, here, pulls no punches – claiming the tool to calculate “how much of your salary bankrolls the welfare state” is “straight out of the Nazi handbook”:
British Newspaper Attacks Disability Benefits With 'Calculator' Straight Out of the Nazi Handbook | The Mary Sue https://t.co/yAVBD2auyP
The Telegraph article states: “Of the 5.2 million people claiming out-of-work benefits, roughly 3.7 million have been granted indefinite exemptions from finding a job, following a surge in claims of mental health issues and joint pain during the pandemic, it emerged last week.”
The Mary Sue piece responds [boldings mine]: “As a propaganda piece, it’s not subtle. “Roughly 3.7 million have been granted indefinite exemptions from finding a job” is a funny way of saying that 3.7 million disabled people, who cannot work due to their disabilities, have been awarded up to £515.40 a month (maybe going all the way up to £782.35 if they’re severely disabled) in order to keep them from starving to death on the streets.
“Putting this number down to “a surge in claims of mental health issues and joint pain during the pandemic” is derisive and clearly intended to diminish the reader’s perception of what are, in fact, disabling conditions to live with that, yes, actually were caused by the pandemic—either a result of infection with the virus itself or the psychological impacts of lockdown, mass death, and the other sociological effects of a global pandemic.”
The Torygraph continues: “On top of this, the controversial decision to maintain the state pension triple lock is estimated to cost taxpayers £1,000 each over the next four years, according to calculations by the TaxPayers’ Alliance, a think tank.
“It raises the question, just how much of our hard-won salaries are spent on the benefits of those who do not work? With the calculator below, Telegraph Money can now reveal how much of your salary goes towards bankrolling the welfare state.”
In fact, none of our salaries are spent on benefits. The system doesn’t work that way. The government of the day sets its spending levels and then taxes us enough to keep that spending from pushing inflation too high (not accounting for interference from external influences like foreign wars and Brexit).
But let’s not allow trifles like the facts to get in the way of the Torygraph‘s argument.
Back to Mary Sue: “Note the emphasis on “do not work” and how it conflates the people who cannot work due to age or disability with the fantasy figure of the refusenik, who lounges around at home, wilfully choosing not to work, all on the government’s tab. It should be clear by now that the purpose of this article is to raise outrage against both the welfare system itself and the most vulnerable people who are dependent on it, but still, there’s more.”
The Torygraph states: “Despite Rishi Sunak’s insistence that he is a “low tax conservative” who wants to “bring people’s taxes down”, his chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, has implemented a combination of frozen thresholds, removed investment incentives, and increased corporation tax – all while keeping welfare spending close to £300bn a year.
“At the same time, welfare spending was the single biggest component of public sector expenditure in the financial year 2021-22, at £298.7bn out of a total of £952.3bn. For the typical taxpayer, this amounts to close to a third of their annual tax bill of £6,500 paid directly towards benefits.
“Using the latest public spending data, our analysis shows someone with the average UK salary of £33,000 sees £2,000 a year spent on welfare.”
Mary Sue responds: “The authors of the piece, Alex Clark and Tom Haynes, go on to object to the marginal and long overdue increase of corporation tax (even though the U.K. still has the joint highest uncapped headline rate of tax relief among G7 countries), the freeze on higher rate tax thresholds (meaning the wealthiest aren’t getting a tax cut), and the fact that this didn’t coincide with a lowering of government welfare spending, as if the former requires the latter as a form of penance.
“They seem outraged that most public sector spending goes toward the welfare state, with around a third of the average individual’s tax bill going toward it—this despite acknowledging that the percentage of public spending that goes toward welfare benefits has actually gone down while overall spending has gone up.”
The Torygraph: “Many high earners are now paying relatively more towards the welfare state because of the lowering of the 45p tax threshold in 2023-24, which now stands at £125,000, down from £150,000 before. Telegraph analysis shows 6pc of the average salary goes towards paying for benefits, compared to 13pc of a high earner’s salary.
“Someone earning £150,000, five times the average salary, contributes close to £19,000 towards the welfare state – more than nine times the contribution of someone on the average salary.”
Mary Sue: “But of course, the greatest outrage in this piece is reserved for the very wealthiest, who, due to earning significantly more than people in lower tax brackets, accordingly pay more tax and therefore contribute more to the welfare system. Leaning heavily on the fact that the highest tax bracket’s threshold was lowered from £150,000 pa to £125,140 this year, requiring the people in that gap to pay a whole 5% more on anything they earn above that limit, Clark and Haynes bemoan that a larger percentage of their tax bill goes towards maintaining the welfare system than lower earners. Someone earning five times the average U.K. salary pays up to nine times the amount towards the welfare system, we are told, as if this isn’t the entire point of staggered tax rates and how the system is supposed to work.”
Mary Sue then makes a hugely important point [boldings mine, again]: “It’s incredibly difficult to successfully apply for disability benefits of any kind in the U.K. According to a recent government study, the release of which is suspiciously close this particular Telegraph article’s publication, “the health assessment system for deciding if someone can claim disability benefits is grueling and often incorrect.” 90% of PIP (the most common benefit) claimants are denied on their first attempt with 89% of them denied again on their second round.
“While 3.7 million people considered too disabled to work may seem like a lot, when the total number of disabled people across the country is taken into consideration, 12.1 million, it suddenly seems a lot more reasonable. There aren’t too many people in receipt of benefits, or capable of working but given a pass not to—it’s the exact opposite, and the amount of money disabled people are awarded by the government is, in most cases, barely enough to live on.”
“Labelling them as “useless eaters,” people who required care and support while being unable to contribute to the state, the Nazis distributed a flurry of propaganda focused on presenting disabled people as a financial burden to everyone else—a burden that prevented “good Germans,” who worked and paid taxes, from being able to access the resources they needed. This propaganda was so ubiquitous that it even made its way into children’s maths books.
“How many steps is a calculator—designed to let you know exactly how much enabling disabled people’s continued survival costs you personally—removed from this? How far off is an article dedicated to decrying the expense of disabled lives as an undue burden, especially on the upper classes?”
Charitably, the author of the Mary Sue article doesn’t believe those who wrote the Torygraph piece were deliberately trying to stir up hatred: “it seems very likely that the authors have bought into the British right wing cultural obsessions of benefit frauds and disability fakers, a group of people that are vanishingly rare but which conservatives see as boogeymen around every corner. I’m sure they believe all those people now experiencing joint pain and mental health problems, as a result of a mass disabling event which caused those specific medical problems on a large scale, are just lying to get out of having to work.
“It’s a very convenient thing to believe if you want to pay lower taxes and are resentful of having to share even a fraction of your wealth with people less fortunate than yourself. It ties in very nicely with all the other conservative ideals that The Telegraph and its readers stand for, and that’s why it’s so dangerous: That’s exactly how and why it worked so well the last time.
“Painting a group of people as too expensive to keep alive is literally the first step to genocide, and given the political environment, in which hate speech against a number of groups as well as legislation targeting them has become normalized, in both the press and parliament, its very concerning that The Telegraph felt comfortable publishing an article that so openly expresses these sentiments.
“I wonder how many people’s disability benefits the coronation could have paid for instead. Funny how papers like The Telegraph didn’t have an issue with taxpayers funding that.”
In fact, some of us would suggest that the genocide has been happening, quietly, for more than a decade – since before the Conservatives came back into office in 2010, in fact.
Back in 2015, after This Writer (that’s me) forced the government to honour a Freedom of Information request I had submitted, we all learned that 2,400 people had died between dates in 2011 and 2014 – within two weeks of being denied the sickness benefit ESA on grounds of being “fit for work”.
Nobody knows how many have died over a longer period after being found “fit for work” because the Department for Work and Pensions has never bothered to check. But the newspapers have been full of stories telling how people have died of starvation, of ill-health due to their disabilities, or simply committed suicide in despair because of the cruelty of the system.
Changes to the way ESA is assessed – removing the admittedly-hated “Work Capability Assessment” in favour of the even-worse Personal Independence Payment assessment – are expected to deprive a million people of the benefits they need to survive.
And benefit sanctions – which have been proved to be useless in getting people with long-term illnesses and disabilities back to work – are to be stepped up, pushing more vulnerable people towards taking their own lives.
As This Writer has stated many times over more than a decade in which I’ve been writing about it, this is genocide by proxy. The government creates conditions that force sick and disabled people to die, and then claims to be totally innocent of causing the deaths.
And it is at a time when these changes are being introduced that bosses of a national, right-wing, newspaper decide to publish an article demonising the sick and disabled (together with other benefit claimants and pensioners).
Going back to Mary Sue‘s “Nazi” motif, everybody know by now (don’t they?) that before World War II the Daily Mail actually supported Hitler’s regime in its articles.
Now it seems to be the Telegraph that has taken up the baton of the fascists.
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HMRC: it’s using artificial intelligence to gather information about you. But is it gathering too much?
This does not seem right:
The taxman has been using its own data system for years to snoop on taxpayers.
HMRC holds billions of our data items, including email and bank records, as part of its system used to target taxpayers for investigations.
It has revealed that there are now 55 billion items of data relating to taxpayers in its ‘Connect’ system, which was launched to tackle the growing tax gap, according to tax investigation insurance experts PfP.
The tax gap is the difference between the tax that should be paid and the amount HMRC actually collects and last year the figure stood at £32billion.
The article goes on to say that Connect has been in use since 2010 and its database has now grown to 6,100 gigabytes of taxpayer data.
The implication is that none of the information about any of us has been discarded – and it seems to me that this is in breach of the Data Protection Act.
The fifth data protection principle states that information should not be kept longer than is required for the purpose for which it was collected.
No specific time limit is given but HM Revenue & Customs’ own guidelines suggest that six years is the reasonable limit.
That means, by its own measure, HMRC may have retained seven years’ worth of information illegally.
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Once again, Gary Stevenson proves he’s worth his weight in gold:
So people with accumulated wealth earn huge amounts of passive income from it – and this should be taxed to prevent them from using it to buy all the other assets available and driving the rest of us into poverty.
If these people leave the country – as is often threatened – then it won’t make a difference because the income they gain from their wealth can be taxed here in the UK; the reason they say they will leave won’t stop happening if they do.
And this is part of a larger argument that taxing the asset-rich more may make it possible to tax the income-rich less – so high-earning working people who have threatened to leave the country in the past, over tax, may end up with no reason to do so.
(Remember back in the 1980s, when Phil Collins kept threatening to leave the UK if it elected a Labour government?)
So refusing to tax the wealthy on the riches that come from their assets that are fixed in the UK is a political choice by the richest man in the UK (Rishi Sunak), that is supported by a lie.
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Jeremy Corbyn: his Project for Peace and Justice has just announced its five demands for government (of any stripe) to deal with the cost of living crisis and bring real prosperity to everyone.
After Jeremy Hunt announced his “E’s and Wizz” Budget and Keir Starmer brought out his “five missions”, here’s a message from the Project for Peace and Justice, brought to you by Jeremy Corbyn:
Last week, the Chancellor announced a budget that did nothing to alleviate the obscene levels of poverty and inequality in our society – instead protecting the riches of global corporations and the wealthiest in our society.
He should have used the opportunity to present policies to deal with the cost of living crisis with a budget that could have made a difference to the lives of all those that have suffered under 13 years of austerity, the Covid-19 pandemic and a decline in real wages.
That’s why we need an alternative budget that puts people first, based on the following five demands:
A REAL PAY RISE FOR ALL
Everyone has a right to live and work with dignity. That means giving nurses, teachers and public sector workers an above-inflation pay rise, implementing a minimum wage of £15 per hour, banning zero-hours contracts and reversing cruel benefit sanctions.
DEMOCRATIC PUBLIC OWNERSHIP
As millions struggle to pay their energy bills, fossil fuel giants are taking home record profits. Private profiteering is ripping people off and destroying our planet. Alongside water, rail and mail, it’s time we put energy back where it belongs: in public hands.
Democratic public ownership will empower communities, bring prices down and kickstart a Green New Deal that invests in clean energy.
HOUSING FOR THE MANY
Housing is a human right, not a commodity – everyone deserves a decent, safe, warm and affordable place to live.
We need an immediate rent freeze and reduction, an end to no-fault evictions and an urgent mass council home building programme.
TAX THE RICH TO SAVE THE NHS
After years of austerity and privatisation, our NHS is on its knees. It’s time to end outsourcing, invest in a fully public system of universal healthcare and build a National Care Service.
The government says there’s no more money for our NHS – but they’re wrong. We can give our public services the money they need by introducing a wealth tax, raising income tax on the top five per cent of earners and making corporations pay their fair share.
WELCOME REFUGEES AND A WORLD FREE FROM WAR
Refugees are being scapegoated for an economic crisis they didn’t create. We must work towards a world of peace, free from nuclear weapons where conflicts are resolved through diplomacy and negotiation. We need a humane migration system based on dignity, compassion and care, which gives asylum seekers the right to work, healthcare and housing.
The refugees of today are our doctors, teachers and neighbours of tomorrow.
As we face the starkest cost-of-living crisis in a generation, we cannot afford to be timid. We need to offer a clearer alternative to the Tories’ failed economic experiment. As striking workers in Trafalgar Square demonstrated, there is an appetite for something different.
The manifesto [Labour] put forward in 2017 and 2019 gave hope to millions around the country – and now we must continue to build [a] radical alternative vision for our country. You can find out more about these demands in my article in the Morning Star.
We must unite, organise and build our vision for a fairer world. I hope you will join me in demanding and campaigning for these policies, and sign up to support them here.
Fair enough?
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Rishi Sunak: why doesn’t the richest man in the UK pay a tax rate comparable to the rest of us?
Yesterday This Site discussed the fact that Rishi Sunak pays an extremely low effective tax rate – lower than the majority of working people in the UK.
Here’s a bit of evidence that I got my sums right:
#KayBurley – Rishi Sunak's effective tax rate is 22%… I'm sure I pay more tax than that?
Dan Neidle(tax policy association) – "You probably pay twice as much as that… Sunak benefits from that low rate, but he's the man that has the power to change it."#BBCBreakfastpic.twitter.com/deGk1tXz6b
I don’t mean, how is it calculated – we went through that yesterday. I mean, what is the thinking behind ensuring that the UK’s richest man does not pay an equal proportion of his wealth, in taxes, to the average worker?
The answer is easy: In order to starve the beast.
The beast being, in this case, public services.
Look at France. That country is on fire because its government wants to ease the tax burden on its richest people by raising the pension age.
Here, rich people don’t have that burden because they pay low taxes. This makes it possible for a rich person’s government to argue that keeping the pension-age at 65 for men and 60 for women (or even at 65 for both) would increase the tax burden unreasonably.
What they don’t tell you is that, if they operated a truly fair, progressive system, that burden would fall on them and their rich fellows who simply aren’t paying their fair share now.
Rishi Sunak should be paying the average tax rate – certainly by 2025-26 when it is predicted that the rest of us will be paying 35 per cent.
Don’t you agree?
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Rishi Sunak and money: as the richest man in the UK, isn’t he keeping a little too much of his cash away from his own government’s Treasury?
Let me get this right: Rishi Sunak pays 45 per cent in income tax and 20 per cent in capital gains tax.
He made £1,970,992 in income and capital gains last year. We may take it as a rule of thumb that this was split between his prime ministerial salary of £164,951 and capital gains that presumably totalled £1,806,041.
His total tax payment was £432,493, which is less than he might be expected to pay, so we may also conclude that he did not claim his full salary.
Add to that his two per cent National Insurance of 3,299 and we get total deductions of £435,792 (or thereabouts, depending on how much of his salary he claimed).
That about 22 per cent of his total earnings. It’s as near to the percentage a person earning the lowest amount possible to still be paying tax – £12,570 – as makes no odds.
So, for example, a nurse earning the average wage for her profession (£35,000 per year) pays £7,814 in income tax and National Insurance. That is also about 22 per cent of their total earnings – but in fact is a little more than the percentage Sunak pays.
Doesn’t it seem a little strange that, in a country that has supposedly progressive tax rates, the richest man in the country pays only the same proportion as the average in a profession that has been on strike due to low pay?
If I were a nurse, I’d be up in arms about this.
Come to that, if I were a higher-earner who actually pays anything more than 22 per cent on my total earnings for the 2021-22 tax year, I’d be up in arms too. Wouldn’t you?
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