Tag Archives: Income Tax

A quick thought about the Conservative ‘tax lock’ silliness

Anyone who thinks David Cameron’s promise of a five-year ‘tax lock’ is a good idea must need psychiatric help.

Cameron promised to introduce a law banning income tax, VAT or national insurance increases in the next parliament if the Conservative Party is elected back into office, clearly in the belief that anybody on average wages or less is too stupid to know what this means.

We know better, don’t we?

We know that taxes are set according to each income group’s ability to pay. This means that people in the lowest taxable bracket pay the lowest amount, as they need most of the money they earn in order to pay their way. The amount of tax then increases by increments up to the highest earners – who take home considerably more than they need to survive, and who can therefore afford to contribute a much larger amount with no impact on their quality of life.

We also know that a five-year ‘tax lock’ will not affect the lowest-earning people at all. Nobody earning up to £10,600 pays any tax at the moment, so a freeze on nothing is still nothing.

What will it do to the people in the highest tax bracket? Well, it depends what they earn and how fast their pay increases, doesn’t it? Let’s have a look at the handy guide to average UK pay rises, created by fellow blogger Tom Pride last November:

141112average-uk-pay-risesTomPride

So the director of a FTSE 100 company, paid the average amount of a mere £2.4 million, would have contributed 45 per cent in tax, or £1.08 million in the 2014-15 tax year. Over a five-year period, if that person’s income continued to rise at 14 per cent, then by 2020 – at a 45 per cent tax rate – they would pay a total of £8,138,360 in tax over the years until 2020. That’s certainly a respectable figure.

But Labour has proposed an increase in the top rate of tax, back to 50 per cent. Under the same conditions, this would mean FTSE 100 directors earning £2.4 million in the tax year 2014-15 would pay £9,042,623.

That’s a difference of £904,263; nearly a million pounds each.

This writer doesn’t have current figures for banker salaries and cannot, therefore, work out how much tax they would pay – but you can see for yourself that the difference between the two scenarios is likely to come to several million pounds per top banker.

Those people don’t need that amount of money in order to survive. The cost of living in the UK is less than 1/50 of what the FTSE directors take home, let alone the bankers. But David Cameron wants them to keep that money.

Meanwhile the UK Treasury goes without millions of pounds that could be used to help balance the national deficit, pay off the national debt, and boost the economy.

We’re back to ‘Starve the Beast’ economics again. The nation’s finances can go to Hell, as far as Cameron is concerned. He wants to starve the Treasury with tax cuts for the rich – either actual cuts or de facto cuts like his ‘tax lock’ – and then claim that public services cost too much and will have to be scrapped or sold off to rich corporations in return for donations to the Conservative Party – as we have seen in the years of the Coalition Government (most obviously in the case of the NHS).

Unless you are a banker, an FTSE100 director, or a member of Parliament, you would be mad to support such a wasteful and selfish plan.

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Advance warning: Here’s what Cameron will be saying in the leader debate

150402torydebatepoints

Vox Political is grateful to the spy who provided the above information on Cameron’s talking-points for the televised leader debate this evening.

From 8pm, he’ll be trying to present these as facts – but are they? Let’s see:

Firstly, governments don’t create jobs. Ideally, they create the conditions in which employers create jobs and in that respect, Cameron’s effort has been lousy. We have 800,000 more zero-hours jobs than in 2010 – a total of 1,800,000 people with no job security, who cannot claim holiday pay or sick pay. That’s brilliant for employers like Duncan Bannatyne and the other goons who put their name to CCHQ’s letter in yesterday’s Torygraph – and a living hell for you.

Next, the claim that the deficit has been halved was only ever accurate as a percentage of GDP, which has been increasing through no design of the Conservative Party’s. It seems our economy hit its lowest point somewhere in 2013 and then started bouncing back in the right direction of its own accord. That’s what the economic cycle does, you see. So what happens if we hit another downturn? Well, then the deficit grows and the claim that it has been halved can no longer be made. In numerical terms, it hasn’t happened at all; George Osborne inherited a deficit of around £130-140 billion and cut it to around £90-100 billion.

Capping benefits is no way to ensure that work always pays. Increasing wages is the way to do that. Cutting income tax helps the rich more than the poor. Tories don’t like you to think about that, though – they want you to concentrate on the slight improvement to your pittance.

The claim that Labour will create more taxes and more debt has been debunked – comprehensively and in a most damning fashion – by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. It is foolish nonsense. And why is Cameron keen to talk about Labour’s plans? Is it because he refuses to explain where the Conservatives will make £12 billion in cuts to benefit payments?

The claim that Labour will ally with the SNP is a dream shared by David Cameron and Nicola Sturgeon. Labour currently has no intention of making any such alliance. Why is David Cameron keen to discuss what Labour will do in a Hung Parliament, rather than what the Conservatives will do? The polls currently indicate he has no hope of achieving a Parliamentary majority and this writer would rather know how David Cameron intends to stay in office – not how he thinks Ed Miliband would take over.

Finally, the question of a referendum on membership of the European Union is a non-starter with most of the electorate. UKIP has made a lot of noise, but less than one-fifth of the voting public want anything to do with that party. Cameron wants a referendum because it will keep the Eurosceptics in his own party quiet – that’s all. It’s nothing to do with what you want.

And that’s all he has to offer today. Not a lot, is it?

Let’s see how many he manages to mention – and how the others shoot him down.

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Not tartan Tories, but the SNP have learned from ‘divide and conquer’ Tory tactics

scots2

Look at this – the Tories are proposing that Scottish MPs will not have the power to set Income Tax rates outside of Scotland, as part of devolution. This means Scottish MPs won’t be able to set any Income Tax rates at all, as Scottish taxes will be set by the Scottish Parliament.

This is an annoying complication for the system, created by the Tories in response to the plans for Scottish devolution. It is divisive on many levels. People in Scotland and the rest of the UK will be watching rates in each other’s territories like hawks, ready to complain at the slightest sign that they are getting a worse deal. Scottish MPs will effectively have less power than their counterparts in England, Wales and NI – will they be happy about that? The Welsh and Northern Irish will be pushing for similar powers, that would give their own MPs less power than those in England. People in England might just be unhappy that their Income Tax rates will be set by Conservatives, who hold more seats in England than anyone else. And Conservative MPs are already saying that Scottish MPs will still have too much influence.

Resentments will grow – but isn’t this what the Scottish National Party wants? Hasn’t it learned that the best way to have its way is to divide the opposition?

Isn’t that why SNP adherents have been spreading lies about the Labour Party north of the border? Claims about pensions, the Vow, working with the Tories and who knows what else are always made as bald statements because there is no evidence to support them, other than that they don’t lead to a fully independent Scotland.

Divide and rule – it’s an age-old Tory tactic. We all know that super-rich bankers caused the crash that provided George Osborne with his excuse to impose austerity on us all. But the Tory lie is that the previous Labour government overspent, and the Tory tactic has been to victimise claimants of unemployment and disability benefits under the pretext that they are skivers and scroungers. They’re not – these benefits are correctly claimed in 99.3 per cent of cases.

And pensioners have all this to come from 2016, if the Tories retain office in May!

Note that the measures proposed by William Hague today fall short of the English Parliament that many people wanted. The Tories know what they’re doing, you see – they want to spread resentment against the Scots. It’s the “Us” and “Them” mentality.

Note that Labour wants a cross-party investigation into the matter. No doubt the ScotsNats will call that “weak” if they get the chance.

So why this strategy by the ScotsNats?

Are they trying to irritate the rest of us so much – by their own admission they don’t think they have any influence on national politics, so this must mean they can only be an irritant – that, sick and tired of their nonsense, we end up declaring, in Cromwellian tones, “In the name of God, go”?

How would Scottish citizens who haven’t been seeking independence, and who haven’t been causing such annoyance, feel about being cut adrift with the rest of them?

And how would the rest of the world treat an independent Scotland whose leaders (and their supporters) had been shown to have been acting in such a childish way?

It seems to this writer that this divide-and-rule strategy marks the Scottish Nationalists as far too similar to the Tories than either would care to admit.

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Rachel Reeves could single-handedly lose the election for Labour

Rachel Reeves: So stupid she'll cost Labour the election.

Rachel Reeves: This photo is a rare occasion in which she doesn’t have her foot in her mouth.

I’ll say it if nobody else will – Rachel Reeves is so stupid she could lose Labour the election.

Work and Pensions is a gaping policy open-goal for the Tories but Ms Reeves can’t see this and wants the world to know she’ll out-cut them on the Benefit Cap.

“Labour supports a cap on benefits. We will ask an independent commission to look at whether the cap should be lower in some areas,” are her actual words.

What stupidity. One can only imagine she is basing these comments on the fact that wages are lower in some areas than others. But prices are just as high!

Sure, it’s an important point that David Cameron’s government “has spent £25bn more than planned on welfare because of his failure to tackle the low pay that leaves millions dependent on benefits to make ends meet”. And her comments about apprenticeships may be accurate as well.

But what about all the deaths caused by Iain Duncan Smith’s homicidal benefits regime?

What about the huge numbers of people who have simply disappeared from the benefit system rather than face another round of humiliation and sanction on possibly fraudulent grounds?

What about workfare?

What about zero-hours contracts, part-time and temporary work, and all the dodges employers are using to get out of paying for holidays, sickness and the like?

What about the scandal of our low-wage economy, that keeps people on in-work benefits and denies the Treasury the Income Tax money it needs to pay off the deficit and debt?

What about the many other legitimate grounds for laying into the Coalition government?

This is utterly unacceptable – and in the run-up to an election.

What is Ed Miliband thinking, letting her keep the Work and Pensions brief?

He must get rid of her – not just for our sakes, but for his own party’s electoral chances.

Road to ruin: Tories’ campaign poster is electoral suicide

150102youmeanthisisntthenewtoryposter

The Tories have fired the first shot in the 2015 general election campaign – and it’s a dud.

Their brand-new campaign poster shows a road stretching out through the (presumably British) countryside, and bears the slogan, “Let’s Stay on the Road to a Stronger Economy”. It’s eerily reminiscent of the poster for the 1978 movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind – and there’s about as much chance of our economic chances improving under the Tories as there is of alien visitation.

150102torypostercloseencounters

Perhaps the Tories are trying to evoke another image from popular culture:

150102toryposteryellowbrickroad

Either way, they are definitely trying to promote a fantasy.

For comparison’s sake, here’s the actual poster:

150102toryposter

The claims beneath the slogan are questionable at best; at worst, outright lies.

“1.75 million more people in work.” Are they? Is that just the number thrown off Jobseekers’ Allowance? Or is it the number of people claiming to be self-employed and claiming tax credits, rather than go through the sanctions minefield that is a JSA claim under the Tory-led Coalition government? Is it the number of people in part-time or zero-hours work?

How many of these people are actually able to pay Income Tax – and thereby contribute to the Coalition’s stated main aim of deficit reduction – as a result of their employment?

“760,000 more businesses.” Are there? As above, how many are people claiming to be self-employed in order to receive tax credits rather than claim JSA? And how many businesses have been ruined over the course of the current, Tory-led, Parliament? Here’s a clue:

150102businesses

That doesn’t look too good, does it?

(Admittedly this graph only runs until 2013 but if one considers the number of new self-employed enterprises – 408,000 in the year to August 2014 alone – and the fact that self-employed income has dropped by 22 per cent since 2008-9, it is possible to work out the facts behind the Tory spin).

“The deficit halved.” Even the BBC have had a go at this! Radio 4’s Six O’clock News contained a segment in which this claim was examined and found wanting, in strict mathematical terms. This is because the deficit stood at around £150 billion when the Tory-led Coalition took over, and is likely to be around £100 billion on election day, May 7. This suggests that just one-third of the deficit has been eliminated.

But even this isn’t the whole story. Michael Meacher MP will happily tell you that the policies of the last Labour government account for around £38 billion of the eliminated deficit leaving George Osborne responsible for around £12 billion of savings. Looking at the number of benefit-related deaths caused by his colleague Iain Duncan Smith’s policies alone (more than 10,000 but the DWP still won’t release the figures), we have to ask: Was it worth it?

The claim that the deficit has been halved is justified with reference to economic growth; because the economy has grown, the deficit as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is smaller. But this means the Tories have used a fallacious argument to make their point; having referred to the deficit in money terms for the last four and a half years, they have had to try ‘moving the goalposts’ (that’s the actual name for this fallacy) in order to make it seem that they have achieved more.

Releasing this poster on an unsuspecting population at a launch in Halifax, David Cameron made it clear that he wanted the Conservatives to be judged on their economic performance. Perhaps he is forgetting that the Tories’ economic performance has been absolutely awful.

Together with George Osborne, he promised in 2010 that the Coalition would eliminate the deficit within its term of office. That time is almost up and it is clear that any government formed after the election will inherit a deficit of at least £80 billion. This government has failed to keep its promise.

Not only that, they promised that the national debt would begin to reduce by the end of the current Parliamentary term, and this has not happened. The national debt is still rising. It currently stands at more than twice its level when the Coalition took office. Mr Osborne is responsible for more debt than every Labour chancellor in history – put together.

And the national debt is still rising!

In fact, all the financial pain endured by ordinary people over the years since May 2010 has been for nothing. Most working households have suffered a real-terms income drop of £1,600 per year – increasing beyond £3,000 per year for those on benefits.

But life has improved for some, hasn’t it?

The richest people in the UK have doubled their wealth since 2009. They have enjoyed huge tax cuts – both in Income Tax and Corporation Tax – the tax companies pay on their profits – while changes made by Osborne to tax law have opened up huge new tax loopholes, allowing them to turn the UK into another tax haven and – again – pay fewer taxes. As pointed out on Charlie Brooker’s ‘2014 Wipe’ (and visible in the video posted on Vox Political yesterday), the current Parliament has seen a transfer of money from the poor to the rich, the like of which is unprecedented in recent years.

That’s right – rich UK citizens have benefited from the Conservatives’ policies. Debt reduction hasn’t had much to do with their plans.

This blog has argued in the past that the current government has been about selling off state assets to private enterprises, in order to create gratitude to the government of the time that is expressed in the form of donations to party funds. The Conservative Party has certainly benefited from this, and has a huge ‘war chest’ of cash to spend on the upcoming election as a result.

And we must also consider the number of millionaires in Cameron’s cabinet, and the Conservatives’ wider circle of acquaintances. Have you ever heard of a kleptocracy?

It’s a form of political corruption where the government exists to increase the personal wealth and political power of its officials and the ruling class at the expense of the wider population, often with the pretense of honest service. Doesn’t that remind you of the Conservative-led Coalition government?

Voting for the Conservatives is the last thing anyone would do, if they want a more prosperous United Kingdom.

And one last thought: Who wants the Tory version of a stronger economy at the cost of human lives? It’s only money, but more than 10,000 people have died because of Tory policies aimed at enriching their friends. It is a price that nobody should be forced to pay.

This writer got all of the above from the Tories’ new election poster.

David Cameron said it was “firing the starting gun” for the election.

It was the political equivalent of shooting himself in the head.

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Osborne’s ‘banana republic’ plan for the UK

As he will be remembered: George Osborne.

As he will be remembered: George Osborne [Image: Steve Bright for Channel 4].

If The Guardian had its way, George Osborne would have been giving a Twilight Statement, rather than an Autumn one – as in “Twilight of his career”.

“The choice confronting the country was, [Osborne] said, whether to stick the course of a ‘long-term economic plan’ which was working, or whether instead to hand power back to a Labour party that would ‘squander the economic security’ he had painstakingly built,” mocked the paper’s editorial column, “through cavalier decisions on borrowing and public spending” [Italics mine].

Cavalier decisions, according to any dictionary, are those offhand choices that show a lack of proper concern. The Boy hasn’t been taking his job seriously.

“That proclaimed long-term plan… turned out to need a short-term rewrite,” the column continued. ”

“The resolute Mr Osborne of 2010 stated that the national debt would by now be falling, from a maximum of just below 70% of GDP, but instead it continues to march towards a peak which he now concedes will be over 80%.

“He was, he said then, on course to ‘meet our fiscal mandate to eliminate the structural current budget deficit one year early, in 2014-15’, something he now accepts will not be done until well into the next parliament.

“And the headline measure of the government overdraft, which the ‘long-term plan’ had initially pencilled in as £40bn this year, was on Wednesday revised up to £91.3bn, which represents slippage of well over 100%.”

Over 100 per cent! That should be a sacking offence – and voters should bear that in mind next May.

“Much of the shortfall in revenues can be traced back to the great stagnation of 2011 and 2012, for which Mr Osborne and his premature retrenchment bear considerable responsibility,” the article continues. “With its mandate still fresh, the coalition timetabled front-loaded cuts for political reasons, hoping to create room for giveaways later, as 2015’s date with the voters moved on to the horizon. But with decidedly unserious [cavalier?] disregard for the frailty of the economy of the time, it virtually snuffed out growth.”

How refreshing to see a representative of the mainstream press openly stating what we’ve all known for years!

“Indeed, GDP only began bouncing back in earnest after Mr Osborne silently conceded defeat on plan A, by incrementally postponing ever-more of the austerity into the next parliament.”

Interesting. Here at Vox Political the belief has been that he conceded defeat on plan A by concocting an apparent attempt at Keynsianism in his ‘Help to Buy’ scheme, that in fact proved to be another housing price bubble of the kind that caused the recession – and one that has yet to burst. Turning to Keynesian economics represented the failure of his neoliberal policies, you see, but he never openly conceded the point – even though he was clearly interfering with the markets.

“He is, reportedly, confecting a parliamentary vote this week to lock the next parliament into the same sort of fixed timetable that he failed to deliver the first time around, and to close off the same flexibility which ultimately saved his bacon. The purpose is, we must presume, to confront the opposition with an awkward dilemma, between offending its anti-austerity base and exposing itself as profligate. Such game-playing surely doesn’t qualify as serious economics.”

Certainly not – and it won’t work in any case. The next government – if not Tory, can simply disregard such a decision as no Parliament may bind the next.

Measures announced in the Autumn Statement were intended to indicate a “Tory tax-cutting route… that can, supposedly, leave everyone better off”. But this is “an illusion.

“Mr Osborne is boosting tax allowances for higher-rate taxpayers, while freezing the amount poor workers can earn before their universal credit is reduced.

“And after next year’s election… Messrs Cameron and Osborne are pretending that there will be no need for any tax rises, and that further spending cuts can do all the work… There is no serious way that this can be done.

“The OBR’s tables state that, under current plans, the day-to-day funding for all services beyond the NHS and state schools will now have to fall from £3,020 per head at the end of the last Labour government, to £1,290 by the decade’s end. That is a real-terms decline of more than half [57 per cent plus change], the bulk of which is still in prospect, for policing, justice, local government, culture and everything else besides.”

Most of the savings so far have come from cutting pay – a safe bet when private wages are stagnant, according to the article, and probably one of the reasons Osborne was embarrassed by collapsing Income Tax receipts. Nevertheless, he is raising the tax-free allowance (the amount you can earn before having to pay Income Tax) from £10,000 to £10,600 per year. Clearly he intends to have even less in the kitty next year, so the cuts can go on and on and the UK can be ultimately reduced in stature to its position in the 1930s, before the NHS and the welfare state, the only difference being we would be utterly in hock to the bankers.

His would be the first government to voluntarily turn its country into a banana monarchy. (Well, we’re not a republic, are we?)

The result? “Recruitment difficulties…malfunctioning courts, unruly jails, boarded-up youth clubs, overgrown parks, shuttered museums, perhaps even rubbish piled up on the streets.”

Mention of rubbish on the streets is a deliberate reference to the ‘Winter of Discontent’ (1978) that sounded the death-knell of the Labour government of the day and paved the way for 35 years of neoliberalism. How humiliating for Osborne if he became the Tory chancellor who demonstrated that the ideology his party has so slavishly followed, since Thatcher first slammed Hayek’s book down on her lectern and yelled “This is what we believe now”, had achieved nothing but the same result.

But then, as the article concludes, Osborne is “not nearly as serious as he likes to pretend”.

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Is Iain Duncan Smith legalising breach of contract?

Iain 'Daftie' Duncan Smith before a previous hearing of the Work and Pensions committee.

Iain ‘Daftie’ Duncan Smith before a previous hearing of the Work and Pensions committee.

Here’s something mentioned during Iain Duncan Smith’s session before the Commons Work and Pensions committee last week, that doesn’t seem to have enjoyed enough attention: It seems Daftie Duncan Smith wants to legalise breach of contract.

He reckons part-time workers should be sanctioned off their top-up benefits if they refuse extra hours offered by their employer.

The sanctions would apply under the Universal Credit system – which is never going to work anyway – so perhaps this is an inconsequential matter, but it is disturbing that the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions understands so little about contracts of employment that he thinks this is a reasonable way to behave.

He told the Work and Pensions committee: “That is being investigated, as to whether we can now work to in-work sanctions – in other words, conditionality – so people get an opportunity to move up the hours if they can, and if they don’t wish to do that, we will see whether or not that system of conditionality works.”

Perhaps he doesn’t realise that some people are only able to work a certain number of hours per week, and that any increase means they will not be able to continue in the job. Perhaps he doesn’t realise that this will make them unemployed, and his “conditionality” prank means that they would be sanctioned off being able to claim benefits for a period of time after that, meaning they would be doubly punished for a situation that was not their fault.

Perhaps he doesn’t care. Yes, that seems more likely.

He certainly doesn’t understand contract law. When two parties enter into a contract of employment, it is a binding agreement on both of them – and if it is not honoured by either party – for example, if the employer tells the employee that their hours of work will be extended, rather than negotiating a change in the contract that is agreeable to both – then that party is said to be in breach of that contract.

And does this not open HM Revenue and Customs up to a potential explosion of Income Tax and National Insurance fraud?

Look at the situation Vox Political reported recently, in which a JSA claimant interviewed for a job lasting 22.5 hours per week and then had to turn it down when managers tried to increase the hours to 40; the employer told the Job Centre and he was sanctioned.

He had his benefit reinstated when he reported the employer for potential tax evasion and then told JSA decision makers what he had done, making it clear that he did not see why his benefit should be docked for refusing to take part in an illegal act.

Did Daftie consider this? Or did he think it would be okay because his government wants to reduce the amount of Income Tax it receives anyway, in order to justify cutting public services or selling them off to fatcat tax-avoiding businesspeople?

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This is how the ‘annual tax statement’ SHOULD have appeared!

We all owe a debt of thanks to Richard Murphy, over at Tax Research UK. He has broken down the information in George Osborne’s misleading ‘annual tax statement’ into its component parts and then put a new version together, under categories that more accurately describe the spending concerned.

Then he turned the information into a handy pie chart – similar to Osborne’s but with one major change:

This version is accurate.

Here it is:

141105richardmurphy1

Let’s just compare it with Osborne’s…

141105osbornetaxsummary

Big difference!

The most interesting to Vox Political is the perception gap between Mr Murphy’s calculation of the total proportion of tax spent on unemployment benefits – 0.67 per cent – and Osborne’s ‘Welfare’ heading, which constitutes 24 per cent of spending.

Talk to most people about ‘Welfare’ and they’ll think you mean unemployment benefits – so the Osborne chart will make them think that government spending on the unemployed is no less than 36 times as much as is in fact the case.

When a government minister exaggerates the facts by that much, he might as well come out and admit that he’s lying to the people.

Mr Murphy wrote: “This is the statement George Osborne would not want you to see because it makes clear that subsidies, allowances and reliefs extend right across the UK economy. And they do not, by any means, appear to go to those who necessarily need them most. The view he has presented on this issue has been partial, to say the least, and frankly deeply misleading at best.”

He wrote: “Add together the cost of subsidies to banks, the subsidy to pensions and the subsidy to savings (call them together the subsidy to the City of London) and they cost £103.4bn a year – more than the cost of education in the UK.

“It’s also no wonder house prices are so distorted when the implicit tax subsidy for home ownership is £12.6 billion a year.”

He also pointed out that unemployment benefits cost only half the amount used to subsidise personal savings and investments.

For full details of Mr Murphy’s calculations, visit his article on the Tax Research UK site.

Mr Murphy tweeted yesterday: “Almost every commentator now agrees that Osborne is going to spend a fortune sending out tax statements that are wrong. Why not cancel now?”

He won’t unless he’s forced to; he has a political agenda to follow.

That is why Vox Political launched a petition to achieve just that.

If you haven’t already, please visit the petition on the Change.org website, sign it, and share it with your friends.

While you’re at it, feel free to share the infographic, created to support the petition:

ztaxleaflets

Please also read yesterday’s Vox Political article on Osborne’s ‘annual tax summaries’, if you haven’t already.

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Sign our petition to kill Osborne’s ‘tax statement’ propaganda sheet

141104taxleaflet2

[Image: Daily Mirror.]

Remember when the Transparency of Lobbying, Third-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Act (otherwise known as the Gagging Act) was passed, in January this year? Vox Political warned that it marked the end of free speech and free protest in the UK.

The article showed that the new law means you may no longer link up with others to protest government actions in any meaningful way – as such action may breach Liberal Democrat and Tory government-imposed spending limits. Your personal complaints will be deemed unrepresentative of the people.

In that article, this blog asked why the government has launched its attack on free speech and free protest, and suggested the following: Perhaps it wants to control the information you receive, on which you base your voting intentions?

This week we received confirmation of that theory – or at least, some of us did.

The ‘tax statements’ being sent out to Income Taxpayers by the Treasury – on the orders of George Osborne – are nothing less than party political electioneering, being carried out using those taxpayers’ own money rather than the Tory Party’s funds. The leaflet is worded in a very carefully-chosen way that betrays a clear intention to mislead readers – most particularly about the amount of our Income Tax that is spent on ‘welfare’.

To illustrate the extent of the problem: We cannot say this is the same as social security, as – according to the terms of the leaflet – it isn’t. Apparently a quarter of our money is spent on ‘welfare’, which is then broken down into bizarre categories like ‘social protection’ – including, alongside social security, personal care services which nobody has defined as ‘welfare’ until know, and the pensions of retired mandarins, colonels and lowlier public servants who will be appalled to hear their hard-earned retirement provision re-labelled as ‘welfare’, according to The Guardian‘s editorial on the subject. David Cameron’s pension would be defined as ‘welfare’, according to this categorisation.

Meanwhile, state pensions have been defined as being paid from an entirely different source (they aren’t), in order to safeguard the Grey vote from the indignation that – clearly – this piece of politically-prompted propaganda is intended to stoke.

The fact is that – as the Mirror points out – Income Taxpayers put a lot more than 12p in every pound towards pensions, and a lot less than 24p in every pound towards working-age benefits.

Here are another couple of tricks – possibly the nastiest of the lot: Firstly, the leaflet does not make it clear that ‘welfare’ payments are made to people who have a right to them “because of family or medical circumstance, or indeed a record of national insurance contributions”. The impression foisted on the reader is of “unearned handouts to the poor”, according to the Guardian editorial.

Secondly, the leaflet as a whole does not mention the contribution of VAT payments to the national purse. This is because the government has cut Income Tax (irrationally – it has a huge deficit and debt to pay off but has reduced its own income). The thinking behind this is that people will think they have been allowed to keep more of the money they have earned. But the same government has increased VAT, meaning that – in fact – people are being taxed more heavily!

What is the intended result of all this deception? It is as Vox Political described, back in January:

“You would be led to believe that the governments policies are working, exactly the way the government says they are working.

“You would not have any reason to believe that the government is lying to you on a daily basis.

“You would be tranquillised.

“Anaesthetised.

“Compliant.”

What a relief that nobody believes that filthy liar Osborne – even his own backbenchers!

This is how they see him – offering empty promises as a ‘carrot’ to encourage voters to support the Tories.

Osborne’s behaviour is so appalling that this blog has started a petition, calling on the government to withdraw these propaganda sheets that pretend to be official government information – and apologise for ever releasing them in the first place.

It is on the Change.org website, please sign it by clicking here.

Other blogs on the ‘tax summaries’ are available from Virtual Gherkin and Same Difference.

We must not allow this abuse of public authority – and public funds – to take place.

Follow me on Twitter: @MidWalesMike

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Another Cameron bungle – on spending cuts

Money: David Cameron's tool of oppression.

Money: David Cameron’s tool of oppression.

David Cameron can’t get anything right, can he?

The Guardian has announced that he has been trying to mislead the public on the proportion of his planned austerity-led spending cuts that he has already enacted, in order to make it seem that the worst is over.

The newspaper put it a little more diplomatically than that, saying he “got his sums wrong” (and this is the party that most people trust to look after the economy? People are strange) – but we know that Cameron is perfectly aware of where his cuts programme stands and what it is doing, don’t we?

The report has it that Cameron reckons he’ll have imposed four-fifths of the cuts on us by the general election – but the Institute for Fiscal Studies, having examined the figures, said he has not imposed even half of what he has planned.

Cameron said he’ll have made £100 billion worth of “savings” – the IFS says this is hugely inaccurate, and it is more likely that just £23 billion has been cut.

More interestingly, Cameron said the next Parliament (if the Tories are elected) will see a further £25 billion of “savings”. In fact, according to the IFS, he means a further £28 billion of cuts.

Let’s pause for a moment to get our terminology right. Cameron wants us to think he is making “savings” because that implies that services are unaffected – but we know that this is not true. The more accurate description is “cuts”, because he is reducing the services provided using taxpayers’ money wherever he can. Look at your local council and the cuts it is making; those are being dictated by David Cameron. Look at the restrictions that have been imposed on taxpayer-funded social security benefits – both in terms of eligibility and the amount being provided; they are also being dictated by Cameron. He is cutting – not saving.

Now consider the drastic effects of the cuts that have been imposed so far – the way social housing tenants have been terrorised with the Bedroom Tax; the persecution of the physically and mentally ill with the humiliating work capability assessment; the humbling of the English health service that has fallen from its highest satisfaction ratings ever to closed Accident & Emergency departments, inaccessible GPs and faceless Clinical Commissioning Groups who refuse to fund basic medicines for patients.

Tens of thousands of people are dead now, who would have been alive if David Cameron had never become prime minister.

And he wants to increase the agony by more than double.

Oh, but look – here’s why it’s all right: He has cut income tax by £10.5 billion! So we’re all better-off, then. Right?

Wrong. The national debt has nearly doubled since Cameron came to office and the deficit is rising, due to the Tories’ incompetent mishandling of the economy.

Most people are £1,600 worse-off per year. It is only the very rich who are better-off. Their incomes have doubled since Cameron came to office. Does anybody remember him saying he would spread the burden of austerity equally? Another lie.

If you take the average income as £26,000, then £1,600 is around 6.1 per cent of it. That’s what we have lost, every year, on average. The richest one per cent of the population has enjoyed an income increase of 50 per cent.

To my way of thinking, that means these people owe the UK 56.1 per cent of their incomes over the past five years, to bring them into line with the rest of us.

Is Cameron going to make them pay? The proposition seems doubtful. Is he going to make up the shortfall from his own fortune, then?

As British citizens, we are owed that money. It won’t bring back the dead, but it might help stop any more money-driven fatalities.

And we need it now.

Follow me on Twitter: @MidWalesMike

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