The financial news is dire, the reports on the cut backs in support for the disabled, the disadvantaged or the abused are fairly brutal and sadly predictable.
The cutbacks in public services might not make an obvious impact to many of us right away, but when your local swimming pool closes, when the local library is boarded up I suppose some people will start to go, “oh, right, that’s a shame.”
There is a small group in our society who truly won’t notice. They rarely use public services like hospitals or state schools. The top 1% of our nation are richer now in comparative terms than they ever have been in the history of our entire settlement on these small islands. They don’t need public services and as we all now know, they don’t pay for them either.
This is not really news, the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) released a report last year showing that the UK had the gap between the richest and poorest expanding faster than anywhere else on earth.
Way hey, Britain in the lead for once.
It’s not so much the middle or even upper middle income homes, it’s the gap between the hyper rich and the rest of us that has expanded so dramatically.
This gap is most easily defined as the people who pay tax on their income and the people who don’t. The hyper rich don’t pay tax.
This phenomenon was brought into the spotlight recently when reports of record sales and profits for an iconic British company were released.
The company is called Rolls Royce and they make rather expensive cars. Anywhere from £120,000 to half a million. Rolls Royce have never sold as many cars in their history as they have since the announcement of ‘the global economic meltdown.’
So is the global economic meltdown a myth? Maybe it’s not as bad as the lefty newspapers and the BBC would have us believe. (See how I cleverly grouped them together, I’m learning) Is this another one of my mad cap socialist inspired conspiracy myths?
The report on Rolls Royce was in The Telegraph, ( http://bit.ly/dW77le) a well known pro Tory newspaper.
I do believe this country is in massive, overbearing debt. I don’t believe this debt is due to illegal Romanian immigrants sponging off the state, or hoodies in Macclesfield who won’t get a job. They cost this country diddly squit.
The people who took all our money are the top 1%, we all know this and yet is that supposed to be okay?
Is it that we don’t want to criticise them because we believe there’s nothing wrong with making money? We believe there’s nothing wrong with being rich and there’s nothing wrong with being successful. I’m not saying this to make some twisted Marxist point, that is what I believe. I would love to be rich and successful, from reading some of the comments on this page there are people think I am rich and successful and therefore hypocritical and double standard’ed and just, just unfair!
However, I am also very aware that I live in a society (I know M Thatcher said there is no such thing) and I live with other people, some of whom are more successful and richer than I’ll ever be, some who are less so.
I drive on our roads, rely on our hospitals, my children go to our doctors when they’re sick and they attend our schools. I am protected by our police, (I have had very positive dealings with the police and I support their incredibly difficult job) and I flush my toilet into our sewers. (Okay, my house has a septic tank but you get my drift)
I am part of our society and I’m proud of that, as we all should be. I don’t see the society I live in as some kind of ‘enemy’ out there trying to do me down. I see it as part of me, and me part of it. There’s plenty wrong with it, some of the things wrong with it are my fault, but so are some of the good things.
My experience with the hyper rich, the less than 1% is that they do not see themselves as part of our society. Most of them don’t pay tax, I don’t mean they don’t pay enough tax, I mean they don’t pay any, not a cent. They are prepared to spend a lot of time and money not paying tax. They employ a lot of accountants and lawyers which allow them not to pay any tax. I’m not saying this because I read a blog about it on an Anarchist website, these are people I know personally, people who have told me how they do it and told me with pride.
Well, why should they pay tax? They don’t use the public services scum like us use. Well, okay, they do still use the roads we pay for, they certainly don’t use the schools we pay for, their children will attend private schools. They do still use the water and sewer infrastructure we all pay for, but they don’t use the national health service. Except they rely on the doctors we’ve all paid to train, because obviously the private medical companies don’t want to waste profits training their own doctors.
But that’s just a handful of individuals, maybe 50 or 60,000 who are in the multi million £ earning sector and pay little or no income tax. If they did all pay their fair share of income tax, it still wouldn’t amount to anything near enough to avoid the cutbacks.
However, I am of course forgetting the corporations, the corporations who are governed in the large part by the hyper rich, the corporations who have gone to great lengths to glean massive profits from this country and pay nothing in tax. It is cruel to pick on any individual company, I cited both Vodafone and Top Shop in a recent YouTube rant. That is grossly unfair on them, they are just two who’s tax affairs reached the public gaze thanks to those crazy rioting students.
As soon as you look into it, they are all doing it, and of course they are all doing it with the direct connivance and encouragement of the present government, essentially because it’s all pretty much the same group of people. Tory MP, CEO of massive retail chain. Same job, sometimes even done at the same time by the same person.
And just because that last paragraph is critical of the current administration, that doesn’t mean I let the previous lot of no-hopers off the hook. They bailed out the wretched, stupid, short sighted and greedy bankers. ( Isn’t it ridiculous that I can term them thus and very very few people would disagree) The last lot in power gave the banks 60 billion pounds of our money because they stuffed up. I didn’t gamble my savings, bankers did.
And if I’m a crazy, doo lally lefty with no grasp of the realities of the markets and global financial structures, I leave you with a quote from someone who is an architect of free market capitalism, someone with their hand on the tiller.
"If banks take the upside, but we, the general public, take the downside, there is something fundamentally wrong with capitalism. "
Paul Tucker, Deputy Governor of the Bank of England
Nuff said. Right, where’s the keys to my Roller?