If you read any other paper than the Guardian, you will have noted some days ago a generously-covered story about the enormous ‘lifetime tax bill’ faced by British families. The ‘average UK household’ in 2014-15 was estimated to pay £826,000 in direct and indirect taxes over their working life, while the top 20% ‘will pay £1,686,970’ – a curiously exact figure for an estimate, and a claimed rise of 4.3% over the previous year.
The story had no reference to any benefits that flowed back to taxpayers in return for this drain on their income: education for children (£180,000 per child or more in the private sector between 3 and 18), health care (say £100,000 per person, incurred most heavily in the last two years of life), and post-retirement benefits (state pensions of £6-9000 a year over 10-20 years, bus passes, etc.), not to mention contributions to all the public goods that make civilised living comfortable: policing, roads and railways, external security, welfare, market support and regulation. The reader is intended to understand tax almost as theft, rather than a worthwhile contribution to services received.Stories like this come from the TaxPayers Alliance, possibly the most influential think tank in Britain at present: an organization at the centre of a network of right-wing bodies with close links to the Conservative Party – and across the Atlantic to right-wing think tanks in the USA.
Matthew Elliott, the founder of the TaxPayers Alliance, took leave to run the No2AV referendum campaign, and has led the Leave campaign in the Euro-Referendum – using the populist promise of ‘Let’s spend the money on the NHS instead’ in both campaigns, in contradiction to the TPA’s opposition to public spending on health as much as on other services. The TPA’s campaign’s director, Robert Oxley, has just entered government as special adviser to Priti Patel: switching from campaigning against aid to advising the secretary of state on managing DfID. The Times, the Telegraph and the Mail carry TPA stories as often as they follow press releases from Migration Watch.
The TPA shares a building in Tufton Street, behind Westminster Abbey and close to Parliament, with other libertarian right-wing groups: the climate-change sceptic Global Warming Policy Foundation, Business for Britain, Big Brother Watch, Civitas, the European Foundation and Global Vision. The building is owned by defence companies run by Richard Smith, a businessman who is an active member of the Midlands Industrial Council with ties both to the Conservatives and UKIP. Their offices are apparently provided rent-free; we cannot discover which other rich British or American right-wingers fund it, since the TPA does not publish its list of donors. There are close links with Washington libertarian think-tanks. The TPA itself was modelled on Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, which campaigns to cut tax overall, including abolition of income and inheritance taxes. Norquist’s most-quoted statement is “I’m not in favor of abolishing the government. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”
You might think that the Guardian would have drawn public attention to this coalition of right-wing lobbies, their links to the libertarian anarchists of the Republican Party and the corporations that fund them; but it’s too busy plotting the factional disputes within the Labour Party. So we need to challenge the steady drip of anti-tax stories that appear in our media ourselves. The Observer analysis, on September 11th, of the different ‘tribes’ of British politics flagged up the cross-tribe consensus that supports lower taxes, apparently without linking that to deteriorating public services. Sadly, we know that decent public services have to be decently funded. No government has dared to declare itself in favour of higher taxes since the 1970s; the only party which has risked addressing the issue was the Liberal Democrat promise of ‘a penny on income tax’ for education in our 1997 manifesto.
So how do we raise the question of higher taxation, without upsetting the mass of voters who want good public services but think that others should pay for them, and who hardly turn an eye when successive Chancellors suggest that Chinese investors will pay for the Northern Powerhouse or that more state assets should be sold off to fund current spending? A vigorous attack on corporate and personal tax avoidance will not bring in enough extra revenue; beyond that, taxes need to rise rather than fall to give our children a sustainable state and society. The TPA and its libertarian allies want instead to shrink the state and slash or privatise public services: Matthew Elliott’s pretended commitment to increase NHS funding was one of the most transparent lies of both referendum campaigns. Its success in undermining public support for state spending, however, has made our task in defending fair taxes and justifying public spending a harder sell on the doorstep.
* William Wallace is Liberal Democrat spokesman on constitutional issues in the Lords.
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43 Comments
Good article.
While Westminster wastes £5bn on refurbishing itself, £35bn on recent wars that were mostly failures and arguably illegal and up to £205bn on Trident, it will always be difficult to justify higher taxes to pay for neglected public services when people are seeing their money spent on such egregious sources of waste.
Westminster’s record is one of waste, neglect and failure.
I endorse Al’s position except I would substitute ‘all’ for Al’s ‘mostly’ and ‘inarguably’ for ‘arguably’.
We are suffering a government (in all its branches) of gross misjudgement and incompetence and if Lord Wallace wants to lead a movement to change that I will listen but is difficult to heed calls for more tax from a voice sitting comfortably on a tax payer funded red leather bench with a wallet full of tax payer cash.
“Vote LibDem – Pay more tax” may, or may not, get the nation behind us.
Being Liberal means leaving people to live their own lives with least government interference. In turn this means small government.
The Liberal party has had a policy of small government since the time of Gladstone and was refreshed by the Orange group of Lib Dems.
Also Lib Dems are no more anti right wing than anti left wing. If Lib Dems are to be described as being on any wing then it would be right wing on economics and left wing on social issues.
However, we are best pidgeon holed as anti authoritarian rather than being left or right. More government means being more authoritarian. Less government means being more liberal.
Actually, the articles misses the point. £800k of income tax and sales tax paid in a working life by an ordinary person is a huge burden. What Liberals need to formulate is a taxation system moving away from taxes on income to taxes on capital, land value and pollution
You do not need to pay inheritance tax, it is paid by your heirs.
As someone self-employed and in tax debt because I didn’t earn as much as I thought and rent was too expensive in London it is important that Lib Dems don’t become a high tax party. Basic rate tax paying sole traders who incorporated Limited Companies don’t get a personal tax free allowance, so it is important to not think that policy alone will alleviate concerns.
I think there is another issue were people who are not in public life gain the rewards from their work by money and not public praise or celebrity, so non-politicians may be more money motivated than politicians.
Finally we should also thank the NHS and other public services that have helped us in our time of need regardless of how much money we have.
People like David Evershed should seriously ask themselves if they are in the right party. We are not a party of small government. We are a party of wide-ranging and high quality public services. That means we are against “reducing taxes” for its own sake and we must accept that taxes in this country may now be already dangerous low.
We can debate which taxes are the fairest, most efficient and most appropriate, and what is the best level for each one, but the fundamental issue is that they are necessary.
If you do not agree with this, perhaps you should have a good hard read of the party constitution.
@ DavidEvershed: that is an important and useful line of argument. But there is also a Liberal tradition going back to Lloyd George of recognising that it is not enough to give people freedom if they are too poor to take advantage. “Man cannot live by bread alone, but he cannot live without bread” to quote L-G.
There is a danger in your approach of assuming that less government is automatically better government. The extreme of authoritarian government and it’s evils can be represented in Saddam’s Iraq or Assad’s Syria, but those two countries demonstrate that the total destruction of government is if anything even worse. This can be true even at a less extreme level than outright civil war. Shrinking the state does not necessarily liberate the individual, it can just as easily empower corporations or highly wealthy individuals over their less wealthy fellow citizens.
Liberals understand the virtues of moderation. We should aim, not for the smallest government per se, but for the least government necessary to achieve the most security and opportunity; and both government expenditure and government interference in the lives of citizens needs to be objectively justified in every case. To quote another great Liberal (J M Keynes) “The important thing for government is not to do things which individuals are doing already, and to do them a little better or a little worse; but to do those things which at present are not done at all.”
We should also remember that the “Allowance” which members of the House of Lords receive is tax free, so if you want to tackle the anti taxi movement you could always start with yourselves.
The Independent did a story about the occupants of 55 Tufton St in 2010!
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/eu-referendum-eurosceptics-climate-change-sceptics-55-tufton-street-westminster-a6866021.html
These include the think tank Civitas described as “Classical Liberal” and Big Brother Watch which campaigns against surveillance and threats to civil liberties. Currently campaigning against the Investigatory Powers Bill, it too sounds “Classical Liberal”.
The others, admittedly cover the usual Libdem betes noires.
But if you are concerned with the activities of the TPA and their cohorts, why not retaliate with a campaign showing what good value for money taxpayers receive. Good luck with that.
Sure, it’s easy to win votes for the policy of planting a magic money tree and harvesting the national wealth from that. It’s much harder to enthuse voters with the idea of paying their taxes. But hey, what are we bothering to do politics for at all, if we don’t do it responsibly?
Contrary to David Evershed, Liberals have never been anti-tax or pro small government. Until Marx made economics ideological (by using it as an instrument of class war) all parties were fairly pragmatic about economics – which policy to follow depended (for Labour of Tories) which would benefit their electoral client base, and for Liberals how ecomomics can achieve our values of a free, fair and open society’ in which ‘none shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity’. To free people from poverty in such an unequal society requires spending on redistribution and intervention to enable opportunities and freedom from ignorance requires spending on education. It is on the point of conformity where there could be less government, but spending on legal aid is essential if people are to enforce their rights and fight injustice. In a capitalist society, if you have no money, you have no freedom to access the things that cost money.
The Tax Payers’ Alliance is an organisation that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
(Courtesy of Oscar Wilde!)
@David Evershed “If Lib Dems are to be described as being on any wing then it would be right wing on economics and left wing on social issues.”
This is a very important issue that has confused me since 2010, and which, from the outside, appears to be at the heart of a significant divide within the party.
Some Lib Dems attempt to paper over the crack by labelling themselves as centrist, but it often appears that this is simply because each Lib Dem has a different collection of left-ish and right-ish views which average out in the middle but leave them in strong disagreement with each other over specific policies. The “social left” / “economic right” dilemma is surely the largest of these dividing lines and I think that being in Coalition shone a spotlight on this problem since the party could no longer appear as all things to all people.
I accept that left and right is not always a helpful classification, and that it is subjective and relatively moderate for Lib Dems, but I believe that it is vital for the party to define itself in this context with more clarity, with more consistency, and with more unity.
David Evershed – ought to read some history. Gladstone, whatever his rhetoric, oversaw a huge expansion of the state, this was followed by an evolving Liberal philosophy and politics that had an enabling role for the state. Unlike the Laws chapter from the Orange book, it was also electorally popular, from old age pension to National Insurance. The Liberals are inherently left wing – Conservative and Liberal are opposites. Being right wing economically and left wing socially is a contradiction.
We are not living in Victorian Britain, the policies and principles have moved on. The constant attempts to appropriate the word Liberal when people mean Libertarian (a form of Conservativism) are incredibly dull
William Wallace
The reader is intended to understand tax almost as theft, rather than a worthwhile contribution to services received.
Indeed.
We are in this terrible situation where debates on taxation are separate firm debates on public services, as if the two are not linked.
We need to shift political debate so that it centres on:
“What do you want provided as a public service?”
“How much does it cost?”
“How would you want it to be paid for?”
We need to be honest about actual amounts of costs and how much money can be raised, an end to all this vague hand-waving.
For example:
“Do you want university tuition to be provided free of direct charge?”
Answer from the public was “Yes”.
But why was it not followed up by “OK, this is how much it costs” and then “This is how much income tax would have to rise to being in that amount of money” or “OK, if you don’t like that, this is how much inheritance tax would have to rise to bring in that amount of money”? Or even “OK, this is how much Trident costs, would you prefer to scrap it as another way of raising money?”.
Mostly people have no idea of real amounts, and so are easily fooled, they can point to something that costs the state millions and honestly thin scrapping it will pay for something that costs billions. Er, no, a million is one-thousandth of a billion.
The Tories have got away for years with the idea that there is always wasteful bureaucracy in public services that can be scrapped to pay for things. After decades of using that line, is there really still? I think the bloated private sector bureaucracy called the “finance industry” dwarfs that, and Tory privatisation just means handing control to that lot.
The other Tory line is, to paraphrase “Put more workplace stress on public service workers, that’ll make them work harder and so we don’t need to raise more money”. Er, evidence suggests workplace stress in public services thanks to that attitude is now costing us billions, and destroying morale and hence quality of service.
A thoughtful contribution from Lord Wallace, put in a very definite way , it nonetheless makes us think ! And debate…
I do think , however,we can hand the arguments over to other parties, and have those debates herein instead. There is a profound difference.
It i regrettable that while Lord Greaves is perfectly entitled to take issue with what David Evershed says , above , or any other colleague , he immediately resorts to the default position of bitter feeling , suggesting David should consider leaving us ,for another party, so he says , presumably for the Conservatives. I have regularly read David on here , he is a Liberal Democrat. I am to the left of him on economics , but his view is compatible with our party , whether his Lordship thinks so or not . How would he like it , if , even as a peer for our party , we , any , who might be a little to the right of Lord Greaves on some issues, and I would suggest that includes very many of us , suggested he should join Corbun in Labour , where he might better fit ?! It is the sort of devisive , sloppy politics that ultimately has more in common with the “Red Tory ,” jibes of the Momentum fanatics in the new old Labour !
We should remember what the HMRC said in adverts , “!
It did not go through as written , so to continue:
We should remember what HMRC said in adverts , “tax does not have to be taxing “!
Are we not already seeing a new form of taxation emerging.?
The financial system has already begun dipping its toe into the experiment of negative rates for savers, pensioners and some SME businesses. Ever since 08, when ‘financial experts’ created the lunacy of QE,.. personal savings have become … so last year.? Such is the madness of these high priests of ~ free money from thin air, that few seem to have noticed that capital, capitalism and GDP, has become like a global snake devouring its own tail.?
Un-payable global debt has become ‘the new black’, an savings and capital, become the new evil. And if you are of the old fashioned type, and minded to keep personal savings,.. be assured,.. negative interest rates are the new and innovative set of taxes, which are coming to find you.
Lorenzo,
Well said. Peers should not be shouting down party members and demanding they leave the party. They have caused enough problems with their Transmit/Receive buttons stuck on Transmit.
A party that noisily creates a reputation for big state – big tax may find it harder to go back to the electorate and nuance it a bit later.
I would prefer constructive and respectful debate rather than angry denunciations.
Caracatus continues the themes I allude to but with better manners.
The phrase right wing is a very broad one , as is left wing. You most certainly can be both centre right on economics and centre left on social issues, half or more of the parties of Liberal International could be described as that if using certain definitions, and many younger members of our own party today , who have little or no time for state industry or stifling of enterprise culture , because of the era of self employment , sharing economy ideas and job insecurity they understand or experience.
But it really does depend on the for or against , with regard to a range of other aspects. So for free markets, against impersonal bureaucracy, for transparency, against unnecessary regulations, for free trade, against protectionism, for enterprise , against monopoly, etc.
Some of this , being in support of the individual and small business, as much or more, than for corporations and big business, is in countries that have known horrifying dictatorships , sometimes of the far right, more often of the far left , and or governments that have run the whole show , and nationalised industries and destroyed initiative, and this advocacy for a certain kind of economic liberalism is thus often itself quite radical , and seen as that , and considered a flowering of freedoms we take for granted, or which here have got out of hand.
In such society , these views go hand in hand with the rule of law , and , especially its being enshrined in human rights protection, and are a part of the Liberalism that is advocated.
In the US on many such things , Liberalism is indeed seen as mainly left wing , but here the history is mixed , and certainly an evolving one that sees government as a friend not an enemy , but is suspicious of too much power wherever it is , and , indeed , here , that is often with the biggest businesses too .
Our attitudes to taxation should be like they should be to our colleagues and fellow liberals or Liberals , we are democrats and Democrats , we should discuss, and keep an open mind , with policies, like our history and philosophy , that evolve.
To hate taxation is indeed illiberal, as is to insult our colleagues intelligence or views.
Some history about Gladstone from Wikipedia
“Gladstonian liberalism is a political doctrine named after the British Victorian Prime Minister and leader of the Liberal Party,
William Ewart Gladstone. Gladstonian liberalism consisted of limited government expenditure and low taxation whilst making sure government had balanced budgets and the classical liberal stress on self-help and freedom of choice. Gladstonian liberalism also emphasised free trade, little government intervention in the economy and equality of opportunity through institutional reform. ”
Don’t worry Lorenzo, I am not about to leave the party nor intimidated by the aristocracy. 🙂
Ahh, the Noble Lord Greaves shouting down any dissent again.
Just like old times.
@ David Evershed I find your attachment to Gladstone quite quaint although you obviously don’t understand all that he stood for. I think you’ll find, to take one example, the Forster Education Act in 1870 cost a few bob in public expenditure. He wasn’t called ‘The People’s William’ for nothing. What he didn’t want to do was to spend a fortune on Colonial Wars (the equivalent of Trident ?).
I think you’ll find the history and evolution of the Liberal Party didn’t stop when Gladstone retired in 1895. You really ought to move on by ten years to see what Campbell-Bannerman, Asquith and Lloyd George got up to and to read the works of Hobhouse and Green. The Fabians started out as Liberals.
I love the idea of Tony as an aristocrat. The nearest he got was Bradford Grammar School and Queen Elizabeth’s in Wakefield – on which basis that makes me half an aristocrat too.
.
@ Master D. Evershed
PS. Any student who uses Wikipedia as a reliable source would be in big trouble.
“The reader is intended to understand tax almost as theft, rather than a worthwhile contribution to services received.”
Interesting but flawed. Where you can choose whether to receive a private service and select from private suppliers, you have no choice about taxes and whether you want or need the servics on offer. Is Trident renewal a service I want? What about Hinkley Point and its subsidies? Or NHS fertility treatment for those who don’t want or need it? Or the House of Lords? We all pay for services we don’t want and if we refuse then the State will come and take away goods to the value. Taxes are not theft but a necessary evil only sometimes worthwhile, often wasted, occasionally grossly misused, and have been used to subsidise nefarious practices surrounding second homes for wayward Parliamentarians.
“So how do we raise the question of higher taxation”
Depends on what you want it for. There’s a dearth of detail. If you lay out a shopping list manifesto that involves increasing taxes I would expect you to provide full costings and equality impacts.
I like William Wallace’s analysis of the anti-tax movement. It states coherently what I have felt for many years.
Two other points:
Lifetime figures may ignore the effects of inflation. I wonder what the figure would have been in the mid-1960s, at the beginning of my working life, when my wife and I were earning about £1500 each, had just bought a 3-bedroomed semi for £4175 and the standard rate of income tax was 41.75%. And should we be multiplying it by about 12 to compare with the present figure?
The whole anti-tax story was used to great effect in the Euro referendum campaign. I’ve quite aware that I pay taxes to the four layers of government I live under – Borough, GLA, Westminster and the EU. And all four of them give me good things in return. It doesn’t stop me from supporting campaigns that would change the way each layer does its work (by implication sometimes increasing its tax take). We need also to see taxes as something that we may ‘overpay’ at some stages in our lives and to benefit from disproportionately at other times.
Charles Kennedy had it right – a penny on tax for the NHS.
Thanks for comments. We can’t campaign for lower taxes unless we explain – as Liberals committed to reasoned politics – what cuts in public spending that will mean. We have an ageing population, which is the major source of pressure on the welfare budget and the NHS. We try to fund our infrastructure through inviting foreign investment, which means our children will go on paying dividends (across our balance of payments) for decades. So we need to promote an intelligent debate about taxation, public investment, and public services. Do any Liberal Democrats want to cut spending on education and training, or on health, or to attempt major cuts in our welfare budget?
The problem we have is that it is impossible to be Right wing on economics and Left wing on social policy because the sums just don’t add up. Austerity has shown us that governments spending less impacts the poor, the sick, the disabled and the elderly most of all and these are the people that as Lib Dems we wish to protect by our social policies. We therefore have to come up with an alternative to Thatcherite economic policy which has held sway for nearly 40 years if we want a Lib Dem society. Marxist ideology doesn’t work but his analysis in which he puts economics as the driver of society is accepted by everyone now.
I believe the privatisation dogma is leading us into some dangerous territory. Quite apart from environmental reasons, the Hinkley Point go ahead means that China will be financing our nuclear power industry and the next one in the pipeline will be designed by the Chinese. Do we really want to give this Communist regime the power to hold us to ransom by threatening to cut off our supplies? Or worse threaten nuclear disaster by some kink in the design system which they can control? This is a vast country with an enormous population that looks set to become the dominant world power in my children’s and grandchildren’s lifetime, shouldn’t we be keeping ourselves independent? Otherwise what is the point of Trident?
I think this argument would resonate with the take back control brigade and even convince many that taxation is a necessary evil. This anti tax talk has been going on since taxes were first paid and it’s influence is insidious. It goes something like this. I pay for my children’s education and for our healthcare so I don’t get any benefit from those taxes so why should I be expected to pay for others health and education? If I’ve saved by working hard (they have always worked hard) I’ve already paid taxes on that money so why should I pay twice through inheritance tax?
I think we have to look at all the ways tax is avoided and close down the loopholes like Trust funds as part of any new tax proposals we may have to fund our social policy.
Everyone can agree with bearing down on tax avoidance and maximising properly due tax receipts. Gordon Brown and then Danny Alexander did a lot good work putting tax assessment and collection on line and working internationally to control tax havens. More needs to be done: the Bahamas’ role as a tax haven is a scandal.
“Do any Liberal Democrats want to cut spending on education and training, or on health”
Yes I do. I had to go to A&E about 6 weeks ago for a minor procedure my GP couldn’t be bothered to do, and the walk-in centre also refused. The A&E process was fully paper based and 20 minutes out of 40 in the cubicles was wasted on repetitive form filling. I’ve been working with some public bodies on administrative waste reduction recently and the potential is significant. So don’t ask me to pay more taxes until the waste issues in the NHS, and in government at all levels has been eliminated.
Sue Sutherland
If I’ve saved by working hard (they have always worked hard) I’ve already paid taxes on that money so why should I pay twice through inheritance tax?
Why should someone who has worked hard for years to earn £100,000 pay a large amount of tax on it, whereas someone who gets that amount just from having the right parents and inheriting it pays no tax on it?
Tax is paid when money is passed from one person to another. Inheritance is just that. I’ve just paid my gardener £80, from money I earned and it was taxed, and my gardener will have to pay tax on that. I can’t say “Oh, that £80 was already taxed, so my gardener should not have to pay income tax”.
In any case, are you sure inherited money is all made by “working hard”? What is the person who inherits it is dead lazy, but it’s enough to buy houses they can rent out and make money from? What if that person passes it to the next generation? Must we still reward people for the how hard their great great great great grandparents worked? In any case, what if a house was bought for £3000, and sold for £300,000 (typical for London right now)? Is the £297,000 extra from “working hard” even if one allows for inflation?
Stevan Rose
Yes I do. I had to go to A&E about 6 weeks ago for a minor procedure my GP couldn’t be bothered to do, and the walk-in centre also refused. The A&E process was fully paper based and 20 minutes out of 40 in the cubicles was wasted on repetitive form filling.
May well be due to spending cuts. Thanks to cuts, the GP and walk-in centre may be too overloaded with work to do it, so it ends up going to A&E who can’t refuse. The paperwork in A&E may be because thanks to cuts they can’t afford the investment to computerise it.
This is the problem: many of the cuts made have adverse long-term effects. But if they are forced from top-down with the line “Oh, you must be wasting money, just cut something”, that’s what happens.
If everything could be done easily-peasily cheaper, as you claim, how come private medicine is so expensive? And private education? If there were obvious cuts that could be made in public services, as you claim, the private equivalent would be cheaper than the costs when they are provided publicly. But they aren’t.
Stevan Rose
Where you can choose whether to receive a private service and select from private suppliers, you have no choice about taxes and whether you want or need the servics on offer.
Well, look at what we did with universities. Instead of forcing people to pay tax in order to pay for others to go to universities, we made the people who go to universities pay for it themselves, or they could choose not to go to university and so not pay.
How well did that go down?
According to what you say, people should have been cheering us on for bringing in that.
We should stop describing the TPA and other groups of that ilk as think tanks. It lends them an air of intellectual rigour and independence which they do not posses. They are lobby groups, secretive about their funding and entirely opaque about whose interests they are representing.
We should also question why the BBC gives them so much airtime. Should the BBC be giving a platform to any group that is so secretive about their sources of funding?
Matthew Huntbach. I’m sorry I gave you the impression that I agreed with the anti tax argument. I was trying to set out their arguments as I’ve heard them do themselves. I don’t agree with them at all so I obviously didn’t make myself clear.
Sue Sutherland – ok, sorry that I didn’t get the point you were making there.
Inheritance tax always seems to be the hardest one to argue for, I’ve very often come across people who are happy to accept the argument for other taxes, bur fiercely resist the idea of increasing inheritance tax. Yet it seems to me to be in some ways the fairest tax.
Also the way inheritance of houses is pushing up house prices in a vicious upwards spiral just has to be stopped. We are reaching the point where the only way anyone can buy a house is to use inherited money, which itself is derived from house prices. The price of a house is determined by what people can pay for it, so if people cam pay more because of inherited money from higher house prices it pushes up house prices even higher.
I agree Mathew.
Sorry, Matthew
Is the TPA in any way connected to the Koch brothers and their influence on the Republican party of the last twenty years – the idea that the state should be cut and and particularly taxes for the rich. In the West the first 30 years after the War saw a very great increase in prosperity and well-being of the population with the creation of welfare states, large scale public investment, huge debt (but the Marshal plan). Income taxes were very high – 90% marginal tax in America for the first 20 years then 80% for the next 10. The end came with OPEC putting up the price of oil, the consequent very high inflation, and robber baron unions and this undermined the validity of the whole approach. But tax was still 60% under Mrs Thatcher. Cutting the state and our public institutions does not improved things – even if you don’t have children Youth Centers are surely good for us all, and privatisation has meant that we subsidise the railways by four times as much as we did British Rail, though it admittedly was very underinvested. We had to borrow? share ? an aircraft carrier for Lybia from the French and the Foreign Office, always rather a small department cut by 30%, has been hollowed out and no longer has enough people to deal with the 160 countries, international organisations, and now Brexit. It even cut the language department, though apparently that has been restored.
When France, with a particularly good but expensive health service, thought of privatisation a study found that state was cheaper. Natural monopolies like water mean we are in the hands of private companies – there is no choice.
“Thanks to cuts, the GP and walk-in centre may be too overloaded with work to do it”
Not in this case. If you want to see my GP you can walk in and be ushered straight through. Walk-in centre is also empty on a Saturday night at 11pm. Not typical of the NHS in many areas. There’s a great district nurse network that could have treated me. They are not overloaded either. As to investment in technology, it’s backward thinking as each clinician would be able to treat 50% more patients. It isn’t expensive technology. Overall it’s down to dreadful Trust management. When asked for cuts too many public organisations take an easy route of just removing posts rather than critically examining processes.
“According to what you say, people should have been cheering us on for bringing in that.”
Then you didn’t read what I said. I simply pointed out that not all tax is a worthwhile contribution to services received. You will need to consider your own situation and views to decide what services you consider you have received and which are worthwhile even if not personally received. I don’t want the service provided by the House of Lords and I don’t want to pay for it. There will be others like Lord Farmer who think the state should pay more for peers, and like Baroness D’Souza who thinks it was right for us to pay £4000 for fresh flowers in her office. That £4000 could have paid for 800 half hour sessions at a Dementia Cafe or 2000 mosquito nets for kids in Africa.
As regards university education I would 100% fund scholarships for 20% of students covering eligible courses for occupations in demand paid for by a tax on private employers that profit from the state training their workforce. Alternatively employers can sponsor students, and I’m working with a company that does just that.