Rishi Sunak: “Oh no! The public have seen through my cunning wheeze!” Too right, mate.
Does this require any elaboration at all?
In a week full of Tory corruption, this should come as no surprise.
In case you missed it with the other Conservative corruption news around this week…
A banker gave £450,000 to the Tories and got a £7.6 million tax cut in return. Donating to the Tory party is clearly a very sound investment decision for bankers.https://t.co/Ysw0Ad2Rq4
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On the day most of us learned that billionaire Conservative donors have been squirrelling away trillions of pounds in tax havens rather than paying their fair share…
$11.3 trillion in wealth is held offshore while billions of people across the world have been plunged deeper into poverty during the pandemic.
It’s obscene.
Trickle down economics = wealth streaming offshore.
12 million leaked documents known as the Pandora Papers reveal that world leaders are engaging in widespread tax avoidance and money laundering with the UK at the epicentre. This will come as a huge shock to anyone with the memory of goldfish…https://t.co/g1XDqB84NO
… until poor people like This Writer (and, no doubt, yourself) have paid off the costs racked up by his government in coping with Covid-19…
In Tory Britain, working people face an unfair tax hike of hundreds of pounds a year, but a landlord renting out dozens of properties won’t pay a penny more.
… most of which went to Conservative donors who, after avoiding the tendering process by using a fast-track system for friends of the Tories, then provided absolutely nothing in return.
So, after the billionaires have kept public tax money for themselves and taken public cash under false pretences, they now say they’re paying too much tax and want the poor to cover any costs they have incurred. And Sunak is apologising to them for not doing this.
This looks like misappropriation of funds on a global scale.
And Sunak’s offer to cut taxes after the nonexistent bill is paid makes no sense at all, for an obvious reason:
The money of the rich disappears into offshore accounts – cut their taxes and more money disappears it does not trickle down.
Tax the rich and the money received can be invested in young people, climate justice, tackling inequality, health and poverty.
Sunak and his forerunners should have closed all tax avoidance loopholes in the 11 years since they have been in office but they haven’t. Is that because they have benefited from millions of pounds in donations from the people we now see have avoided paying trillions of pounds in tax?
£3.1 million of Tory Donations linked to 36 Tory MPs have now been from people named in the Pandora Papers.
He tried to cover it up by focusing on Brexit, saying that we’ll see the mythical benefits of leaving the European Union in the long term.
Rishi Sunak – "I was proud to back brexit… because in the long term the agility, flexibility & freedom provided by brexit would be more valuable… than proximity to a market"
I don't remember brexiteers telling us that the sunny uplands would be in the "long term" pic.twitter.com/XjuU9cTTDW
I think we all know what Brexit was really about – don’t we?
We probably shouldn't forget the reason we had Brexit was to enable the level of tax avoidance we're seeing in the Pandora Papers x
— Laura Kuenssberg Translator (@BBCPropagandist) October 4, 2021
Weirdly, the same Chancellor who has immorally handed billions to Tory donors via failed Covid schemes, and trillions to them by allowing tax avoidance, thinks such actions are perfectly reasonable.
To him, it would be immoral to take cash from them – that they want to lend – in order to fund, say, an anti-poverty strategy:
Rishi Sunak says it would be immoral to borrow to pay to keep children out of poverty. The first problem is he needs some lessons in what morality. Second, he needs to realise people (the wealthy) are queuing up to lend money to the government. Why is he refusing them the chance?
No – he thinks poorly-paid workers should simply get better jobs, as though that is the easiest thing in the world. Clearly he has never had to try to do it himself. And he conveniently forgets an enormous hole in his own logic:
If as Rishi Sunak suggests , a care worker who can’t manage on her wages simply retrain and get a better paid job , who is taking her place in an already short staffed care sector ?
Oh but – he said – the UK economy is recovering faster than anywhere else in the world!
But there’s a reason for that, isn’t there?
We have faster recovery than anyone else in the world for just one reason – we went lower than anyone else. If I was Sunak I would not be shouting about that.
Sunak wasn’t discussing serious plans to deal with current economic issues – he was auditioning to replace Boris Johnson as prime minister.
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Keir Starmer: someone recently said he’d run out of Brylcreem long before he ever gets to run the UK and on the basis of this failure, that is just as well.
This is a shocking indictment of the man who pretends to be the Labour Party’s leader.
Keir Starmer had to be told to oppose the Conservative plan to increase National Insurance that poor people pay – increasing poverty – under the pretext that it is to fund social care.
National Insurance rates are 12% on weekly earnings of between £162 and £892, and 2% on weekly earnings above £892. And only paid if you are an employee. It's a tax on poor people with a job that rich people don't pay, which is why the Tories want to increase it by 2%.
It’s worse than that – it is class warfare, and a class war in which Starmer seems firmly on the side of the rich few against the masses who made him Labour leader.
Firstly, let’s address the elephant in the room: nobody has to be taxed to pay for social care. The government owns the magic money tree and can simply create the cash.
The principal reason we talk about people being taxed to pay for such measures is because taxation is needed to control inflation – but inflation hasn’t been a problem whenever the Tory government has created money for itself and its friends over the last 11 years, so it doesn’t seem a problem.
If we accept that improving social care may cause inflation, then there are better ways to tax that problem away. For a start, there is a very rich part of society that isn’t taxed nearly enough – and won’t be forced into starvation or onto the streets if they are asked to pay a little more:
Social care should be modelled on the NHS: Free at the point of use, accessible to everyone who needs it.
That should be funded by tax rises on the super-rich and big businesses, not by raising taxes on the working class.
The issue with Starmer that this has revealed is the fact that he had to be told – in fact, it seems he is resisting calls for him to support this commonsense policy. And people are calling him out on it:
“Pressure grows on Starmer to back tax on rich to pay for social care”. Really!! If @Keir_Starmer needs pressure to make him see this, then he is definitely in the wrong job! Not representing the working class! And has the establishment’s interest over ours! Time to go Keith!! pic.twitter.com/yObq9BnbqY
— Emz The Socialist #OrdinaryLeft ✊❤️ (@EmzTheSocialist) September 4, 2021
Even Tory ministers are coming out against the government plan – before Starmer:
When I read the quote in this picture I was like oh great Labour are finally getting their shit together and giving proper attack lines.
(Sorry but I don’t know who @philbc3 is or what that person may have said about it. Blame Grace, not me.)
The worst part of this is that previous Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn had a perfectly good policy for funding social care – and Starmer hasn’t even had the wit to mention it. Fortunately Corbyn’s shadow chancellor is on hand to remind us all:
Just a gentle reminder of what was in our document “Funding Real Change” explaining the funding of Labour’s Manifesto, which included funds for social care. “Labour will tax capital gains at the same level as income tax.” Looks like the idea is catching on https://t.co/jmLfZclgVQ
This last comment is perhaps the most incisive – and the most damning against Starmer:
Can we have a war against poverty instead of a war against those suffering it please?
— 🇵🇸Sir Norman of Darcy Lever, KBE 💚🏴☠️ (@Normanjam671) September 5, 2021
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Rishi Sunak: after his boss Boris Johnson tried to backpedal on the Brexit trade deal, he’s trying to get out of the G7 tax deal. Pretty soon, nobody will want to deal with these Tories at all.
This is the Northern Ireland protocol of the Brexit trade deal all over again.
Boris Johnson merrily signed up to that without reading it because he wanted the UK out of the European Union by January 1 this year.
Now Rishi Sunak is trying to back the City of London out of a historic global tax change agreed by G7 finance ministers last weekend.
The aim is to ensure that the world’s top 100 businesses pay an appropriate amount of tax in the country where they base their operations, rather than moving their profits around to countries where they can pay the least.
Having agreed to it, Sunak is now trying to get an exemption – but only for the City of London, the super-rich business hub that has recently been losing business to Amsterdam because of – guess what? – Brexit.
He claims that he doesn’t want the UK’s banks to end up paying a grossly higher rate – but research suggests that this will not happen.
So the question arises: why does he really want an exemption? Is it to get all these juicy fat companies to pay their taxes in the UK, even if the amount is minimal?
And, topically:
Doesn’t this prove what we all believed after the Tories tried to back out of the Northern Ireland protocol – that they can’t be trusted to honour any deal so, fairly soon, nobody will want to deal with them?
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Boris Johnson: he should hang his head in shame. Sadly, he doesn’t have the self-awareness – this shot is just of him checking his notes at a prime ministerial broadcast.
Boris Johnson’s claim that he arranged a tax break for James Dyson was impossible because he doesn’t have the power, according to former Attorney-General (the government’s top lawyer) Dominic Grieve.
Johnson defended himself during Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday (April 21) after evidence emerged that Dyson had contacted him by texting his personal telephone, asking for tax breaks so Dyson staff who had relocated to Singapore after Brexit could return to the UK and build ventilators to tackle Covid-19 without paying tax penalties.
His responses in PMQs were that he refused to accept criticism for doing everything he could to ensure that the UK had the equipment it needed to fight the Covid crisis.
(This is risible when we remember that successive Conservative governments including Johnson’s had systematically weakened the nation’s ability to respond to a pandemic crisis, including selling PPE to China.)
In the end, Dyson provided no ventilators at all.
On the BBC’s Newsnight, former A-G Dominic Grieve made the legal situation abundantly clear:
..The idea tha the PM can grant assurance that somebody wont be subject to tax
..When tax is entirely a matter for the inland revenue
So either Boris Johnson corruptly and illegally influenced the tax system so this industrialist, who campaigned for Brexit and then scarpered abroad to escape the consequences, could profit from a crisis…
… or everything he can do to secure help for the UK in a crisis is in fact nothing at all.
Major Corruption has shot himself in the foot, it seems.
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Boris Johnson and James Dyson: could any of us have won tax breaks from the prime minister, if only we’d had his personal phone number?
Boris Johnson offered to “fix” the tax status of Dyson staff so they could work in the UK to provide ventilators in last year’s Covid-19 crisis – after Dyson sent a text message to the prime minister’s personal phone.
Dyson went on to provide absolutely no ventilators at all. Did his employees still get preferential tax status?
That is just one of the important questions that Johnson didn’t answer during Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday.
The revelation is the latest development in the lobbying-related corruption scandal that began when former PM David Cameron’s activities on behalf of now-collapsed financier Greensill Capital came to light.
The BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg reported that
the PM assured businessman Sir James Dyson that his employees would not have to pay extra tax if they came to the UK to make ventilators during the pandemic.
Sir James, whose firm is now based in Singapore, wrote to the Treasury to ask for no change in tax status for staff.
But the BBC has seen text messages sent in March 2020 that show Sir James then went directly to the PM, with Mr Johnson replying: “I will fix it.”
She added, in an opinion piece on the subject,
There are thousands of different circumstances in which having those discussions is perfectly valid.
What about however, when the most powerful politician in the country sends a direct message to an influential businessman promising: “I will fix it tomo”?
A good question – and one that Johnson was asked (if not in so many words) by Keir Starmer shortly after midday yesterday (April 21).
He asked: “What is the right thing to do if he receives a text from a billionaire Conservative supporter asking him to fix tax rules.”
Johnson replied: “I make absolutely no apology for doing everything I could to secure ventilators for the people of this country.”
The trouble is, of course, that he didn’t secure any ventilators, despite having fixed tax rules for his supporter.
He said he had done “everything I could” so we may conclude that he did change the rules for Dyson employees.
But – I reiterate – Dyson did not provide any ventilators:
Hang on a minute!#Dyson didn't actually supply any ventilators 🤔
So we need to know what Dyson did with the tax breaks his firm received and whether he still benefits from them now, despite not having done what he promised to do.
Or did Johnson lie about doing “everything” he could?
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Think before voting: the Conservatives are promising to freeze council taxes in Wales if they take control of the Assembly – but this will benefit the rich far more than working-class people.
The Welsh Conservatives have said they will freeze council tax for at least two years if they take control of the Welsh Assembly after the local elections in May – but this is a threat, not a promise.
The party has said it will fund a council tax freeze, but there is no guarantee that it will follow through on any such pledge. Even if it does, this only means that it will maintain services as they are.
So what happens when events demand spending beyond that level?
Answer: we won’t see it – they’ll say there isn’t enough money (which is a lie).
Also: who benefits most from a council tax freeze? The rich.
Taxation is a way of redistributing wealth, ensuring that poorer people are able to enjoy publicly-funded services for all, rather than those services being restricted only to those who can afford to pay for them out of their own pocket.
It also ensures that funding is available for projects that would not otherwise receive support from private individuals.
By freezing council taxes, then, the Conservatives are pledging to let rich people keep more of their money while depriving the poor of the services they need to get by.
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They all do this: but the way Rishi Sunak held the red box indicated there wasn’t much in it. And there wasn’t.
Rishi Sunak’s budget has shown he is a diehard Tory, with concessions for businesses while those of us in need can go whistle.
He has claimed his hands are tied by huge Covid-19-related debts – but we all know that he has already paid them off, by the simple means of creating the money needed to do so.
And his big plans for the future were pathetic: new ‘free ports’ that have always been a bad idea, and an investment bank to replace the one a previous Tory government sold off a few years ago.
We are ruled by intellectual pygmies – and that is being harsh on the pygmies.
I watched the budget speech and commentated on it on Twitter, so I can provide a first-hand account of the announcements – but first, I’d like to go straight to what wasn’t announced, with comments from people who were reading at the time:
Given the number of disability benefit related deaths under the Tories I'm not surprised.
— The Cider Socialist (@SocialistCider) March 3, 2021
The Tories don't want our children educated. They need a poorly educated population to not rock the Tory boat & for the third world economy they're building
— Sue Barnish 💙 Save Lives – Wear a Mask 😷 (@SueBarnish) March 3, 2021
Well they killed over 100,000 potential customers what more do you want?
So the people who did all the hard work during the Covid-19 crisis will receive no reward for their sacrifices at all – even though many of them sacrificed their lives, contracting the virus and dying because Matt Hancock couldn’t be bothered to supply proper personal protective equipment (PPE) at the right time.
People with disabilities who did not receive the £20 benefit uplift because they are on so-called “legacy” benefits will still receive nothing more, even though the uplift will remain in place until September. After then, it seems people who lost their jobs because of Covid-19 will fall over a so-called “cliff edge”, with the uplift cancelled, forcing them to live on much less.
The Tories have made a major issue of education in the crisis, demanding that our children must go back to school as soon as possible in order to catch up on what they have missed – but Rishi Sunak has provided no extra facilities for this in his budget. It seems it was all talk and – in fact – the plan is to reopen a major vector for transmission of Covid and hope that the increase in infections – and deaths – won’t be noticed amid the falling numbers triggered by the vaccination programme.
And after years of promising to fix problems in the social care system – that became hugely pronounced when 30,000 people died in care homes because of Tory stupidity – Sunak is breaking that promise by offering nothing.
Meanwhile, those who profited hugely from the pandemic – either by being perfectly situated to continue selling goods to people in lockdown or by receiving government Covid-related contracts to provide services at hugely-inflated costs (many of which were not actually provided because the contractors were not qualified to do so) are to get off scot-free because Sunak has backed away from calls to impose a wealth tax.
So, what has he done?
Well, he carped on a lot about borrowing a huge amount of money to pay for Covid-19. That was a stream of lies from start to finish, as I pointed out:
"We have borrowed a record amount." This is a lie. The government CREATED that money – without fear that it would cause inflation as there wasn't any other money going through the economy worth mentioning. #BudgetSpeech2021#UKPolitics#PoliticsLive#VoxPolitical
"It's going to be the work of many decades to pay it back," (the amount he borrowed). But he hasn't borrowed anything. Sunak is saddling the UK with heavy repayments of a debt that doesn't exist. #BudgetSpeech2021#UKPolitics#PoliticsLive#VoxPolitical
Tax thresholds are being frozen. To be honest, that might be a good thing after the BBC started flying kites suggesting that people who don't pay Income Tax shouldn't be allowed to vote! #BudgetSpeech2021#UKPolitics#PoliticsLive#VoxPolitical
The refers to income tax, National Insurance and VAT. However – and this is indeed a ‘however’:
Tax thresholds are being frozen. To be honest, that might be a good thing after the BBC started flying kites suggesting that people who don't pay Income Tax shouldn't be allowed to vote! #BudgetSpeech2021#UKPolitics#PoliticsLive#VoxPolitical
This is the amount you earn before you start paying tax, or before you start paying it at a higher rate. Because these thresholds are frozen, it seems more people will pay at a higher rate due to wage inflation, so there will be a de facto increase in taxes. But this depends on people receiving pay rises to cover their costs and Tory policy over the last 11 years has been to discourage that – it’s the reason real take-home pay has fallen by thousands of pounds per year since 2010.
Corporation tax to go up to 25 per cent – but in 2023. He's giving time for businesses to recover before making them pay. And it's still the lowest of the big world economies (for no good reason). No incentives for them to invest in employment though. #BudgetSpeech2021
This was the only increase in taxation, and it is only on a tax on profits. So firms that pay corporation tax can avoid it by ensuring that they make no profit from 2023. The best way to do that is to invest in infrastructure and wages (by employing more people, perhaps).
It would be wrong to say that Sunak’s budget does nothing for ordinary people – but it’s all based around existing Covid-related schemes:
Support for the self-employed to continue. I've never sought this because the system seemed flawed from the start and people were likely to fall victim to those flaws. #BudgetSpeech2021#UKPolitics#PoliticsLive#VoxPolitical
Looking at all these holidays from taxes, support schemes etc – I think either the government is using more of the money it created to pay for Covid, or it will create some more. Otherwise there won't be much flowing through the economy. #BudgetSpeech2021#PoliticsLive
Sunak went on to announce plans for government investment. The main points were:
New £12bn infrastructure bank – there's a big argument between Johnson and Starmer over whether this is a Tory or Labour idea. Tories are in power and get to make it happen. But who will benefit? Covid shows investment goes to Tory cronies over experts. #BudgetSpeech2021
Oh for crying out loud. Now Sunak is banging on about 'free ports' – which we had already and didn't bring much money in. This may very well be an utter disaster. #BudgetSpeech2021#UKPolitics#PoliticsLive#VoxPolitical
But “free ports” are not new, nor are they likely to help:
Freeports are coming. #Sleazeports is a better description. What we really needed were a host of new tax havens within this country, with a massive risk of new regulatory abuse as well as new customs borders right across the country #Budget2021
Policies Rishi Sunak has borrowed from John McDonnell:
– Increasing corporation tax. – National Infrastructure Bank. – Treasury HQ in the North. – Rewriting investment rules to end London bias. https://t.co/CwGYqbiBAs
Sunak steals my rhetoric but no substance. Working people hit by income tax rise as thresholds frozen, council tax rise, pay freeze for public sector workers, cliff edge cut in Universal Credit in months, nothing for disabled on legacy benefits and over 2 million still excluded.
— John McDonnell MP (@johnmcdonnellMP) March 3, 2021
There was also some muttering about policies that give a nod to the environment but if you blinked, you missed them – and This Writer blinked. They certainly don’t constitute a “Green Industrial Revolution”!
As Tory budgets go, this is not the disaster for working-class people that it could have been – although the main hits have been offset, so it may be a few months or years until we can know the effects for sure.
The lack of any hard taxes or austerity measures suggests a tacit admission that Covid-19 really is bought and paid-for, and there won’t be any real need to pay for it again.
So This Writer is left with a huge sense of anticlimax. I was expecting to be fearful after today; instead I feel let down.
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I bet certain commentators will be doing their best to muddy this issue so let’s make it clear:
There are moves to increase Corporation Tax, forcing companies to pay more when they could be investing that money in (for example) employment of people who desperately need a regular paycheque. This is a bad idea.
There are also moves to levy a windfall tax on firms and individuals who have profited from the Covid-19 pandemic – such as Amazon and all those Tory cronies who won huge Covid-related contracts. This is a good idea and is supported by 70 per cent of the population, according to a Survation poll.
Keir Starmer and his Zombie Labour party oppose any increase in taxation for businesses.
Support or oppose a windfall tax on the pandemic profits of large companies such as Amazon?
There will be voters who are shocked that anybody claiming to be a Labour Party representative should plead against taxing corporations, and while there are good reasons for leaving Corporation Tax low at the moment, although it is likely that firms will need further incentives to keep them on the straight and narrow, there is no reason at all to back away from a windfall tax.
This decision is spitting in the faces of the voters – at a time when Starmer desperately needs to get them on-side.
Labour is falling increasingly further behind, at a time when – we were told – the party should be at least 20 points ahead of anybody else, having dumped Jeremy Corbyn.
Is it time his supporters’ club admitted that this wasn’t true and Starmer is a non-starter?
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Labour leader Keir Starmer seems to have provoked another attack on his tattered left-wing credentials, after he opposed plans to levy taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals who have made a fortune from the Covid-19 pandemic, when Tory Chancellor Rishi Sunak announces his spring Budget.
But is he right?
On corporation taxes, it seems he isn’t. Here’s Tax Research UK’s Richard Murphy, speaking last year but applying his words to this year too:
Okay, but how about wealth taxes?
The argument on taxing businesses is clear – it would discourage them from taking on (or retaining) staff at a time when we need people to keep their jobs, and it would take money out of the economy.
But wealth is kept in (very large) bank accounts and is not attached to employment.
So why not tax the people who have made (or increased) fortunes from the suffering of the rest of us?
At the very least, it might blunt the (fake) Tory argument that we all need to pay back the cost of the Covid crisis (that they’ve already paid anyway, by creating money).
This Writer would therefore tend to support it – but I’m ready to be corrected if you have a better argument.
Starmer’s alternative to taxing the rich is – as perhaps we should have expected – a neoliberal nightmare: he wants ordinary people to give any money we’ve managed to save during the Covid crisis to a new national investment bank. Why should we? If we back businesses, who would get the profit? And what if those businesses failed?
No Holding Back, a campaign group of socialist MPs, has said that Starmer seems to have his priorities wrong and Labour “needs a partnership with society, paid for by taxation,” not a “partnership with business, paid for by society”.
So it’s looking bad for Starmer.
But the outlook for the nation is looking worse. With no direction from either main political party, it seems the UK is drifting into economic shipwreck.
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