Transfer of wealth

*Warning* – lefty politics ahead (as in left-wing, not left-handed, that would be a bit surreal).

This week we got the news that a former Swiss banker, Rudolf Elmer, has passed information pertaining to the financial operations of 40 international corporations to Wikileaks. Once the information is verified, it will be publically disclosed. Of course the details of this information isn’t yet known, but since Elmer worked in the Swiss banking sector, a well-known tax haven, I think it’s fair to say that the leak will relate to tax-dodging activities.

Now Dylan Ratigan is a very prominent liberal voice in the American media, and he invited Johann Hari of the Independent to come on and talk about this issue. The interview has an oddly American nationalist taste to it (as far as I know, the companies involved aren’t specifically American, and I have to wonder if the whole ‘Wikileaks=AntiAmerican’ narrative has become so prominent that it’s difficult to escape), but the message as a whole is good. Here’s the video:

Ratigan and Hari make an excellent point in this video, and it’s one that I wholly agree with. Through not paying their taxes, wealthy individuals and big corporations are passing the burden of paying for public services onto those who are less able to afford it, and governments seem only too happy to let them get away with it. This represents a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, the exact opposite of a progressive system. A reverse Robin Hood system, if you will.

But this is just one way that wealth is transferred upwards instead of downwards (remember the trickle-down effect? What a joke that is now…). Look at the way governments past and present have run advertising campaigns against benefit fraud. Who do the adverts target? It’s always some guy with a market stall, or a builder who get paid under the table or something like that. Here’s an example from 2006 – under the party that supposedly represents the working class.

Do you know how much money is lost through benefit fraud each year? It’s £1.5bn. Not a small sum of money, but not exactly outrageous when you consider that £3.7bn is lost through error (ie. someone in the office ticking the wrong box). And really not that outrageous when you consider that lots of money (between £4bn and £8bn according to estimates) is saved because the system is so complicated that people aren’t necessarily receiving the full amounts they’re entitled to (that’s deliberate if you ask me). Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of people are being harrassed about their benefits claims when they’ve done nothing wrong.

But all of this seems Liliputian compared to the massive amount that is lost each year in tax evasion. Estimates vary as to how much this is, but even by HMRC’s own figures, it’s more than £70bn. So why isn’t the government putting more resources towards that? Instead, this present government in particular seems more intent on letting corporations get away with it.

How else is the government deciding to tackle the deficit? It has cut corporation tax, it has introduced a bank levy (which is effectively a tax cut because it is raises less revenue from the banks than the tax it replaces, and because the effects are wiped out by the corporation tax cut), and it has refused to tackle bankers’ bonuses. No problems for them then – who was it who caused the recession again?

Meanwhile it has raised the rate of VAT to 20%, so that when people go and buy things, it costs more. George Osbourne calls this progressive, but I call him a liar. Everyone pays VAT on things they buy. It is a tax shared by rich and poor alike. But the money raised from VAT will be used to cover a tax gap left by the rich through tax avoidance, and through the tax cuts for the rich. So the poor are left paying more than their fair share. A real progressive tax system would be based on direct taxation, not indirect taxation.

How else is the government attacking the poor? Through the cuts! Let’s start with benefits. Child benefit has been frozen for at least the next 3 years, effectively a cut due to inflation. Job Seekers’ Allowance has been cut, housing benefits have been capped (which even Boris Johnson referred to as “Kosovo-style social cleansing“). Perhaps most worryingly, Disability Living Allowance claimants will be subject to new medical tests, the only object of which will be to reduce the number of claimants. Why is the government choosing to reduce the deficit by making the poorest and most vulnerable pay more?

Other cuts will also have a big impact. It seems strange to me that whilst they’re trying to save money by cutting job benefits, they’re also sending more people onto the dole queue, cutting public sector jobs left, right and centre. Doesn’t sound like a very consistent system to me. Councils will be cutting lots of their public services like libraries and community centres. Staff numbers in the NHS and police are being cut down. The Education budget is being slashed by 25%. Higher education funding is being massively cut and the costs are being passed onto students, meaning that people from poorer backgrounds, where there is a culture of staying out of debt, find it harder to go to university.

Public services are used much more by poor people than they are by rich people, and they are more valuble to poor people too. Quite simply, rich people can afford to do things privately whereas poor people rely on things that the state provides. That’s why cuts to public services disproportionately affects poor people. The extra money being raised to help reduce the deficit is coming 77% from public service cuts, and 23% from higher taxes. When you consider that poor people are also affected significantly by the higher tax rates, and that actually there’s a huge hole in taxes left by the rich anyway, it’s obvious that this government is determined to attack the poor. It is ideological.

As the placard slogan goes, ‘they only call it a class war when we fight back’, which leads me to wonder: what is it the rest of the time? A class massacre?

Rectorial Elections

None of you are probably interested in this but I just spent over an hour tolerating George Galloway’s opinions and I’m determined to make sure it wasn’t in vain.

So here’s the background to the story. Stuart mentioned ages and ages ago at a pub night that George Galloway is a creationist, mentioning vaguely an article written by Johann Hari, writer for The Independent. Now George Galloway is standing for the position of Rector at the University, so I checked it out, made sure for myself the allegation had been made, and mentioned it briefly whilst commenting on the Student Newspaper website (that link), which consequently got published in the paper copy the next week.

Anywho during the pub night tonight, one of our members Alex got a phonecall saying that Galloway was over in Frankenstein’s. Turns out he was just showing his face at a Debating Union event on sex tourism, but we approached him outside whilst he was having a smoke just before the event. After Stuart saluted his strength, his courage and his indefatigability, I shook his hand and asked him whether the allegation that he’s a creationist is true or not. He looked me straight in the eye and denied it, saying he’s not a creationist and he’s never been a creationist. I told him I’d read a transcript of a radio show he’d presented and he said that it was not a transcript. I began to wonder if Johann Hari had been lying, since I had nothing but his word to go on. Stuart then asked him to repeat on a recorder what he’d just said, and he said something along the lines of “I believe evolution to be a scientific fact. But I also believe that, since God created everything, he also created evolution.”

Well I wasn’t really satisfied, so I decided to check for myself. I correlated the date of Hari’s accusation with Galloway’s radio shows, which are handily archived on his website, and decided that if he said it, it would’ve been on the 1st December [Edit: 2007]. So I put in my headphones and listened to the show instead of going to bed and forgetting about it like most people probably would have. 56 minutes in, an atheist calls up (one of the themes of the show was ‘militant atheism’) and says that if God did create us, evolution isn’t the best way to do it because it involves so much death and destruction. George Galloway then said this, which I’ve taken from Hari’s original allegation linked above, but I checked against the recording and is correct. You have the details, you can listen for yourself:

“I was looking at my little six month old baby today beginning to take his first steps crawling across the hall of the Methodist Central Hall today, and it doesn’t look like an accident to me. He doesn’t look like an accident of evolutionary chance to me. I’m not really prepared to believe that from the bottom-dwelling slugs of the pond came the voice of Pavarotti. I’m not really prepared to believe that Albert Einstein and a spider are really the same thing, that they just took a different evolutionary path.”

The lying get. He’s not getting my vote (not that he would’ve anyway).