Tag Archives: inflation

Want to know the real reason for inflation? TAX

HMRC: if you’re rich, you don’t have to pay your taxes and probably won’t be investigated for it – but if you’re poor you can guarantee they’ll come after you for the tiniest amounts.

Does the UK have the worst tax collection system in the world?

It would explain our recent inflation problem – with huge amounts of public money going to the rich (for nothing), who aren’t paying tax back on it.

Taxation limits inflation by taking money out of the economy to balance the amounts being put in by government spending plans every year.

If HM Revenue and Customs doesn’t bother to tax the people who pay the largest amounts, then the economy is flooded with too much money and inflation rises. Right?

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Now we find that HM Revenue and Customs aren’t even bothing to investigate rich tax dodgers any more:

This is from the Guardian article:

The number of civil investigation cases opened by a HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) fraud unit investigating offshore, corporate and wealthy taxpayers has fallen by more than half in five years, figures reveal.

The Observer reported last month that HMRC has not charged a single company under landmark legislation to crack down on tax evasion. Campaigners warned that HMRC was undermining its own deterrents by failing to use its criminal enforcement powers.

The new figures, obtained by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, suggest that the tax authority’s civil enforcement in its fraud investigation service has also declined alongside its use of criminal powers.

Civil investigations opened by the offshore, corporate and wealthy unit, part of HMRC’s fraud investigation service, fell from 1,417 in 2018-19 to 627 in 2022-23.

Civil inquiries and investigations declined sharply in 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic interrupted HMRC’s enforcement activity. But despite a significant rise last year, the number of cases remains well below pre-pandemic levels.

The number of civil cases that were formally opened by the fraud investigation service, which can examine the tax affairs of any taxpayer, fell by 28% in the same period, from 17,424 from 2018/19 to 12,585 in 2022/23.

The article also states that HMRC says its fraud investigation service is focusing on the highest-value tax fraud and the figures do not take account of overall compliance activity, with 300,000 compliance “interventions” opened in 2022-23, securing £34bn in additional tax revenue.

HMRC says that since 2018-19 it has opened more than 1.5m compliance interventions, securing £136bn. HMRC says work is continuing on estimating figures for the offshore tax gap.

But here’s the catch: the vast bulk of this “compliance activity” is focused on the poor, not the rich – because if you’re poor, you’re easy pickings and won’t put up much of a fight when money is taken off you by the government. Am I right?

Is it good government? Or is it gangsterism?


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What really caused the inflation crisis? Here’s Gary to explain why rich people have your money

The real cause of inflation: the super-rich sucked up government cash that was given out to keep working- and middle-class people alive during the Covid crisis – by being the providers of the services and supplies everybody else needed. But that was a crisis and it should be time to normalise the situation. Why won’t politicians do it?

According to Gary Stevenson, governments like those in the UK and US caused the post-Covid inflation crisis by giving away thousands of pounds to keep us all going when the economy was locked down.

The problem was that those of us who normally work for a living had to then use that money to pay our bills (that’s not including This Writer; I just carried on writing Vox Political all the way through and lived on the money I earned from it, plus savings – those were happier days) while the rich, who issue the bills that we have to pay, just sucked up all the cash.

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They then started using that cash to buy what they could – not luxury items, because they were forbidden from doing it due to the shutdown of the economy, but so-called economic assets like houses. This stopped the rest of us from being able to buy them by keeping prices high – as Gary has discussed in previous clips.

Notice: he doesn’t say there was anything wrong with governments spending the money in the way they did; people needed cash to survive and it was inevitable that providing it to them from the Treasury, rather than the economy, would increase the national debt and massively increase wealth inequality between the poor who spent the cash and the rich who received it.

But because the circumstances were extraordinary, and the result was an unbalanced economy (increased inequality), the government should then have taken action to re-balance the economy by using the levers available to it to re-distribute the wealth.

It should have taxed the money back off the rich. Logically, the government could have got away with calling it a windfall tax because that’s what it would have been.

That hasn’t happened.

And neither of the ‘Big Two’ political parties – Labour and the Conservatives – are even considering such a rebalancing of the economy. Instead, they are both planning to bake it into our lives for a long time to come.

So we can say that Labour and the Tories both intend to increase wealth for the richest and poverty and debt for everybody else – and that includes those of you who are middle-class, sitting there smugly thinking you’ll be all right (you won’t).

There’s only one answer, but This Writer doubts many people will take it up.

You have to think for yourself.

That’s right; you have to get details of the political plans of every candidate standing in your constituency in the general election and you have to work out which of them – if any – intend to re-balance the economy to prevent us all falling into this debt trap.

How do you fancy that?

And politicians? Here’s a challenge for you:

Are you going to produce manifesto commitments to tax the money back off the super-rich – who don’t need it, remember – and re-balance the economy or are you too scared of them to dare upsetting them?


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Here’s why you think you’re getting richer when in fact you’re getting poorer

Relative values: older people think the young are richer than them because they’re paid in pounds rather than pennies – but inflation means those pounds don’t pay for as much as the pennies did and, in real terms, younger people are paid less than their senior counterparts were at the same age.

Here’s why you think you’re getting richer when in fact you’re getting poorer – as laid out in simple terms by Gary Stevenson.

He has released a video clip explaining why older generations are mistaken in claiming younger people “never had it so good”, to quote Harold Macmillan.

While it is true that young people may start their working lives earning more money – in pounds and pence – than older people did, the simple fact of inflation means the pounds they are paid simply doesn’t go as far as the pennies their elders received.

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But the fact that – on paper – they are receiving more means employers can pay them less in real terms and claim they’re being over-generous – and get away with it because people look at the simple numbers rather than the real-terms value.

Here’s Gary:

The theory Gary puts forward is proved by the fact that, after World War II, a single earner was able to buy the mortgage on a house and pay the living costs of everybody living in it – no matter how big the family, and now everybody of working age has to be slaving away all the hours they can work, and still can’t make ends meet.

But the UK as a nation is not getting poorer – either in money terms or real terms.

This means the cash that would have gone to working people in the post-war era is now going somewhere else. Gary says it’s going to the rich and that makes perfect sense because rich people own the companies that employ working people and can therefore dictate how their firms’ profits are divided.

It is these rich people who are impoverishing the vast majority of us in the UK – and getting away with it by lying that we are actually getting richer, generation by generation, when in fact the action of inflation and the wage stagnation they inflict on us mean that we are actually getting poorer.

The answer is for government to tax the rich so that these pay policies make them no better-off, or to impose laws that demand a maximum ratio between the highest-paid and lowest-paid in any business.

Neither of the main political parties seem interested in this. We may speculate about the reasons for this – is big business holding politicians to ransom: “Keep our salaries high and wages low or there’ll be no cushy job waiting for you after you get voted out”? – but it won’t make any real difference. It is what it is.

We see that in Labour’s new ‘campaigning bible’, that is full of soundbites and empty of initiative.

From what This Writer has seen, it contains nothing that could possibly induce a member of the voting public to conclude that a Labour government will improve their standard of living.

The reason for that is simple: it doesn’t address the issues facing us – like the illusion of improvement that Gary has identified.


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Politicians are hell-bent on pushing us to fascism. Let Gary explain how to stop it.

After a six month hiatus, Gary Stevenson is back with a video clip discussing what has happened in the UK during that period. And it isn’t good.

Inflation is down. He explains why the Tories should take no credit for it.

Interest rates will start to fall, following inflation.

House prices, after rising during the Covid crisis, have not come down again – and Gary explains that this is because the rich have accumulated an enormous amount of money over the period since early 2020. They have used it to buy houses without mortgages, which is why prices have not fallen. And with high interest rates, their savings accounts are growing massively.

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As interest rates fall, rich people will invest their savings in buying houses, and this means prices will rise again.

Living standards have fallen with the rapid rise of inequality that came with the transfer of huge amounts of cash to the rich. Rents, the price of goods and the price of holidays will also increase. Young people will be very strongly harmed by these developments.

With living standards falling, and no political party in the UK serious about reducing inequality, people will be dissatisfied – whichever party is in office. People will want an alternative, and the populist far right is poised to promise them anything they want. This is why it is so terrifying that the Tory with the safest seat is Kemi Badenoch.

This risk is increased by the fact that the economy is failing – no matter what Rishi Sunak and his spokespeople say.

An accelerated shift towards fascism is inevitable unless a positive alternative can be presented.

Increasing equality will improve living standards and stave off the fall into fascism.

The challenge for us now is to encourage public opinion to support such measures.


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Right-wing rag attacks junior doctors as winter viruses surge

Striking doctors: they’re being blamed for the expected effects of increases in “winter viruses” – but won’t those increases be due to the stupidity of the people spreading them? And will they be spread as far, if Tory inflation means people haven’t been able to afford to go out as much this year?

How nice of the Tory-supporting rags to blame junior doctors for pressure on the NHS caused by the so-called “winter viruses” – flu, norovirus and Covid-19.

Junior doctors are set to walk out for six consecutive days next week, in the latest part of their long-running dispute with the government over pay.

So media outlets like The Times are blaming them for any increased suffering that may happen during that time – ignoring the fact that this, and the 974,000 missed appointments alleged to have happened so far, could have been avoided if the Tories had simply paid them the appropriate wage.

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The Times reported,

In the week to Christmas Eve, there were an average of 942 patients with flu in hospital each day, including 48 in critical care. It is almost six times higher than the 160 average four weeks ago. Meanwhile 452 hospital patients on average were there because of norovirus symptoms, which include diarrhoea and vomiting, and 3,620 patients had Covid-19 — up by over a half from the month before.

And it quoted Sir Stephen Powis, NHS national medical director, who said the impact of care was likely to be

“much more severe next week with six days of industrial action planned by junior doctors, the longest in NHS history, at a time when hospitals usually experience the most pressure with high demand and higher levels of virus admissions”.

Covid cases were expected to rise to a peak around December 30, in the aftermath of Christmas gatherings. Here‘s the i:

Covid cases are expected to have risen sharply as JN.1, the new highly-contagious dominant subvariant, spreads rapidly – increasing its share of new UK infections to 48 per cent on December 23rd, making it the biggest strain in the country.

In the aftermath of Christmas, where people have spent prolonged periods together indoors, cases are expected to keep rising for at least the next few days, according to Professor Karl Friston, a virus modeller at University College London.

It is common for illnesses to increase around the Christmas period as people socialise more and cold conditions help viruses to thrive, at the same time as weakening our resistance to them.

There are also concerns about waning immunity to Covid … As a result, scientists fear that a higher proportion of those cases could become severe this year than last year.

The increased chance of serious illness also pushes up the risk of a person going on to develop long Covid because serious cases are more likely to lead to that condition.

This is all perfectly plausible – but it omits one important factor in the spread of any disease: human stupidity.

If sick people have been infecting others at Christmas gatherings, what possessed them to go there? If they were feeling flu-ey (or whatever), why didn’t they do the decent thing and stay at home?

In This Writer’s own family, Mrs Mike’s mother had to stay away from our family gathering this year because her boyfriend (I know it’s weird to talk about them like that when they’re in their late 70s, but what other word is there?) visited her, despite having Covid.

He ended up having to self-isolate – and is now in hospital because of complications that may have arisen because of the Covid – and she agreed that she should stay away, to avoid the possibility of infecting the rest of us.

So that was a couple of people’s Christmas ruined; worse than the one that it could have been if he’d stayed away, but better than spreading it among the rest of us.

Conversely, the dire economic effects of having a Tory government might have worked in our favour: I visited my local pub yesterday evening for the first time in a fortnight and it was very quiet indeed.

My friendly neighbourhood bartender told me it had been like that all the way through the Festive Season so far, and we agreed that, what with the higher cost of food this year because of Tory inflation, together with the strain of buying presents, people probably didn’t have any cash left with which to go out.

It harms the economy – if money can’t be spread around as much as it was before, then some businesses will suffer and may even go under.

But that’s Tory politics for you. Their aim is always to concentrate all the cash – and therefore all the power – among a few people at the top.

It may lead to lower-than-expected “winter virus” infections this year – I’d like to hope so and we’ll have to monitor the results carefully – but that’s an unintended consequence.

And the full extent of harm to the economy may not become clear for some time to come.

Source: Winter viruses surge before longest junior doctors’ strike


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‘Rampant profiteering’(?) as pre-Christmas food inflation remains at 9.2%

Pricey: and the problem is that the cost of food is being artificially inflated to boost the profits of producers and retailers, at a time when wages are being squeezed.

This is a little annoying; the article refers to “rampant profiteering” but doesn’t lay blame.

We may suggest it’s the supermarket chains that are profiteering – artificially inflating the price of food – because that’s where most of us buy it.

The fact is that our food costs too much – especially with pay being as brutally depressed as it has been by the Tories.

There are no solutions suggested here. What is the answer?

Official figures showed food inflation remains at a painfully high 9.2 per cent in the run-up to Christmas.

Unite general secretary Sharon Graham said… “Even the competition regulator now admits what Unite has said all along: that firms have been exploiting the cost-of-living crisis to raise prices excessively.

“It’s time the government and Bank of England tackled the rampant profiteering in our economy to get inflation under control.”

Source: Unions call for end of ‘rampant profiteering’ as pre-Christmas food inflation remains at 9.2% | Morning Star

Greedflation: study shows prices ‘significantly’ bloated by profiteering

French stormed the Paris stock exchange in protest at greedflation: the British just put up with it like sheep.

Remember when the Tories were telling us we couldn’t have pay rises because that would push inflation up – and This Site (among others) said it was a lie?

Turns out we were right:

Profiteering has played a significant role in boosting inflation during 2022, according to a report that calls for a global corporation tax to curb excess profits.

Analysis of the financial accounts of many of the UK’s biggest businesses found that profits far outpaced increases in costs, helping to push up inflation last year to levels not seen since the early 1980s.

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The report from the IPPR and Common Wealth thinktanks found that business profits rose by 30% among UK-listed firms, driven by just 11% of firms that made super-profits based on their ability to push through stellar price increases – often dubbed greedflation.

The article lists the worst offenders and explains why they got away with it:

Among the companies that increased their profits most from the pre-pandemic average were:

  • ExxonMobil: profits of £15bn increased to £53bn

  • Shell: £16bn up to £44bn

  • Glencore: £1.9 bn up to £14.8bn

  • Archer-Daniels-Midland: £1.4bn up to £3.16bn

  • Kraft Heinz: £265m up to £1.8bn

Four food companies – the listed suppliers Archer-Daniels-Midland and Bunge, plus the privately owned Cargill and Dreyfus – control an estimated 70%–90% of the world grain market.

Instead of doing something to curb this rampant profiteering – at huge expense to you, remember – your politicians shrugged and told you your demand for higher pay to cope with these price increases would cause them to rise even more.

Remember that, at the next election. Or are you happy to be hammered in the same way for another five years? Nobody could be that stupid, could they?

Source: Greedflation: corporate profiteering ‘significantly’ boosted global prices, study shows | Inflation | The Guardian


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Tories announce ‘biggest cut in net migration’ and we’re punching holes in their plan

Rishi Sunak and his priorities: who would have thought that stopping the boats would contradict his plan to reduce inflation?

The following is misleading.

If you’re announcing a plan to cut net migration into the UK, then it hasn’t happened yet. The following tweet is therefore misleading.

There’s no way of telling whether these measures will actually bring inward migration down.

Also, there’s the issue of unforeseen consequences.

First, here’s another misleading message from Rishi Sunak. See my response to understand why it’s wrong:

Again, to remind you: The treaty with Rwanda that James Cleverly was sent to sign has nothing to do with stopping criminal gangs from transporting refugees (or whoever) across the English Channel.

It is merely an attempt to bypass the Supreme Court’s ruling that Rwanda is not a safe place to send them once they have arrived in the UK.

Now, about those unforeseen consequences…

When Sunak says he will “end abuse via the Health and Care Visa, he means he will prevent care workers moving to the UK for employment from bringing their families. This will also apply to overseas students.

This will turn away expertise that the UK needs.

Tory voices like that of Brendan Clarke-Smith are already whispering that foreign workers will still come, because the UK is “a fantastic country”:

Is it?

It seems unlikely that highly-qualified people, who could earn a better living anywhere else in the world, would willingly give up their kith and kin to work in a country that will not appreciate their efforts and that – certainly in the case of health and care – treats its own people so badly.

No worries, though! Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick reckons workers from the UK will fill the gaps:

He said UK businesses would no longer have the option of hiring cheap labour from overseas, meaning they would have to “invest in the domestic workforce”.

Why should they?

Big businesses are more likely to preserve their profits by moving out of the UK altogether and hiring all that cheap foreign labour abroad, where it’s still cheap.

And small or medium-sized enterprises are not likely to be able to afford the kind of investment Jenrick is suggesting.

He went on to appear on Sky News, supporting the remaining point in the five-point plan – ensuring that people sponsoring dependents, who do come with them to the UK, can support them financially:

So the overall implication of this plan is that it is an attempt to nudge businesses into paying higher salaries to people working in the UK.

This appears to be an attempt to steal a policy from Reform UK, whose leader Richard Tice had already spoken in favour of higher wages and investment in people:

Opinion polls have suggested that right-wing voters are, themselves, migrating – from the Tories to Reform UK. This anti-immigration policy may be an attempt to woo them back.

But – perhaps crucially – this is a policy turnaround for the Tories, who have previously argued that increased pay for working people is inflationary:

TL;DR: this supposedly anti-immigration policy seems to be intended more as a way of stemming the flow of voters to Reform UK. Its stated aim of increasing pay contradicts Tory policy on inflation and is more likely to move businesses out of the UK than bring investment in.

Tories say they’ve halved inflation. They haven’t

Grinning idiots: Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt, who falsely claimed that cutting inflation is cutting tax and giving people more money to spend, are now falsely claiming that they have managed to cut inflation down to their target. They did nothing.

A friend of This Writer emailed me today to forward a communication he had received from the Conservative government – saying it has achieved its aim of halving inflation.

It hasn’t.

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Inflation was always going to come down – and some have pointed it out, although I’m not sure where the community note on ‘X’ has gone, that is mentioned in the following post:

[Additional – November 16, 2023: I’ve found a post with the community note added to it and have added it into the article immediately below.]

Not only that, but halving inflation is not the huge help to the public that Rishi Sunak and his cadre claim it is:

The example in the TUC’s post is informative because food inflation is still higher than 10 per cent. Gareth Davies, Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, was called out on it by Susanna Reid on Good Morning Britain:

The verdict:

The Tories are trumpeting a change they have done nothing to achieve, that is not helping you at all. Don’t be fooled.


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Lies, DAMNED lies and truth bombs: little Rishi’s BIG conference speech [VIDEO]

This is going to be part one of a series because Rishi Sunak turned out to be very long-winded, for such a short guy.

I was hoping to be able to run a quick video summary of his speech at the Conservative Propaganda Carnival – I mean, Party Conference, but… well, watch the clip and you’ll see me explain.

And please bookmark this article, or the clip on YouTube, so you can come back to it and check what he has said against what he does.

Here’s the clip (a new version; the original turned out to have a technical fault):


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