29th November 2014

Tendring Topics……..on line

'That’s the way the money goes…….'

        .  I was mildly surprised last week to get a communication from H.M. Revenue and Customs telling me, in some detail, how much money I had paid to the government in income tax during the last financial year and how that money had been spent. To make sure that I read it, the document announced in bold print This is for your information.  You do not need to contact us as this is not a demand for payment.   That was quite a relief.   

          It really was an admirable, easily readable and enlightening document and I understand that all income-tax payers will get one every future year.  On the one side was a summary of my taxable income during that year (state pension plus public service pension), how much of it was subject to income tax at the basic rate (20 percent), how much had been deducted from my total income and how much was left.

            On the other side was an estimate of how my contribution had been divided among fifteen sources of public spending.  The biggest was Welfare to which I had, so it seems contributed £513 and the very least (which must come as a surprise to Ukippers) was £24 for overseas aid and just £16 towards the UK’s contribution to the EU budget.  I don’t grudge a penny of it because I know that I’m extremely fortunate to have an income large enough to be liable for income tax.  By its very nature the payment of income tax, which is a relatively small percentage of total income, never has, nor ever could, result in homelessness or serious deprivation to anyone.

            But, of course, income tax is by no means the only way in which the government extracts money from our bank accounts, wallets and purses.  During the Thatcher years and continued by New Labour there was a shift from ‘direct taxation’ – income tax and death duties – to indirect taxation (they’re called ‘stealth taxes’ by political parties when in opposition!) such as VAT and customs duties.  They are regarded as ‘fairer’ by the wealthy because they do not depend on ability to pay.  The ‘rich man in his castle’ pays exactly the same amount of VAT on most goods or services and exactly the same customs duties on his petrol or bottle of Scotch as ‘the poor man at his gate’.  It will, of course, be a much larger percentage of the poor man’s income than that of the rich man – but that’s just his tough luck.

            Often we’re hardly aware that we’re paying 20 percent more on our bills for goods or services and that that 20 percent is going to the government in Value Added Tax (VAT).  When it’s a big bill though, we become aware of it.  A couple of years ago, for instance, I had to replace my existing central heating boiler with a new one.  Taking out the old boiler and fitting the new one cost £3,000.  Twenty percent of £3,000 is quite a lot of money and I bitterly resented having to pay the government for having carried out essential work on my home.  It would, of course, have been exactly the same had I paid for mending a leaking roof or repaired a car or a bike needed for work!  That extra 20 percent is just petty cash to the millionaire banker with his Rolls.  It’s a lot more than that to the workman with his car or bike

VAT is the most obvious indirect, or ‘stealth’ tax, but it is by no means the only one.  We contribute to the government’s coffers whenever  we fill up our car with petrol, buy a packet of cigarettes, some cigars or some tobacco, buy a glass, bottle or can of beer, cider, wine, whisky or any other alcoholic drink,  take a flight in an aircraft whether on holiday or for business, or are silly enough to buy a lottery ticket or a scratch card in the vain hope of winning the fortune that we know we’ll never acquire by hard work.  That’s how it is that someone who pays little or no income tax may in fact pay a bigger percentage of his or her meagre income back to the government than does a fat-cat higher-rate income tax payer.  I am not a teetotaller but I no longer drive a car and no longer fly away on holiday.  I don’t smoke and I have never bought, nor do I intend ever to buy, either a scratch card or a lottery ticket.  I don’t avoid indirect taxes altogether (that must be really difficult!) but I have reduced my payments to a bare minimum.  

Indirect taxation barely gets a mention in the Annual Tax Summary that I have received.  I am advised ‘For more information or for a list of indirect taxes such as VAT go to our web site; www.gov.uk/annual-tax-summary.  That yields little more information that the fact that VAT is currently 20 percent but that there is a lower rate for some items and other items, of food for instance, are VAT exempt.

One small piece of information on the Annual Tax Summary that particularly interested me is that the amount that I paid in income tax during the year was just 10 percent of my taxable income, so that for every £1 of taxable income I paid 10p in income tax.   That’s a tenth (or as they used to say ‘a tithe’) of my income – and that’s the proportion of everyone’s income that the medieval church expected to receive from from its members.  It is interesting to reflect on the fact that the medieval church then undertook many of the responsibilities that we now consider are those of the government – education, helping the poor, the provision of hospital services for instance – as well as, so it was believed, holding the keys of Heaven and Hell.

I reckon that today, if everyone (including Richard Branson, Lord Sugar and the like) paid a tenth of their income to the government as I do, George Osborne would find that ‘deficit’ that causes him so many headaches, disappearing without the need to penalise the poor and the disabled.  I believe very strongly that all adults, rich and poor alike, should pay the same proportion of their income to the government as a universal tax (or annual subscription for citizenship of the United Kingdom).  Furthermore that tax should be levied on gross income, before the taxpayer has a chance to channel it into offshore accounts or charitable trusts or some other tax avoidance dodge.

It should also be levied on all state benefits and allowances.  Currently the state retirement pension is taxable but other state benefits like children’s allowances, winter fuel allowances for pensioners, the cost of free tv licences, an estimate of the cost of free prescriptions, attendance allowances, job seekers allowances and so on are all tax free.  Under the present system, if these benefits became taxable those who pay no income tax would continue to get all those services free and unchanged, while those who do pay income tax would pay just a little bit more – but certainly not enough to cause serious deprivation.  I personally would have to pay extra tax amounting to one tenth of my winter fuel allowance, my free prescriptions, my tv licence and the attendance allowance I get for my very limited mobility.  None of that would distress me if I could be assured that top bankers and their equivalent in other fields of activity were paying the same proportion of their gross incomes as I was.

Ideally, I’d like to see every British adult – the wealthiest and the very poorest – paying this universal tax of the same proportion of their income.   This would mean that the minimum wage, job seekers allowance and other subsistence allowances would need to be increased so that recipients could pay their proportion without their being rendered either homeless or hungry.

Then that shameful gap between the wealthiest and poorest in the land would be seriously reduced, we would be a true ‘commonwealth’ and we could truly claim, to quote George Osborne,  to be all in this together.  Yes, I know I have said all this before – and I’ll no doubt say it again because it is so important for Britain’s future, if Britain is to have a worth-while future.

'What's in a name?  That which we call 'a rose' by any other name would smell as sweet'

      So asked the love-lorn Juliet in one of Shakespeare's best-known tragedies.  Her family, the Capulets, thoroughly detested that of Romeo, the Montagues.  I am quite sure that neither family, dislike each other as they did, ever thought for a moment of sneering at them as 'Plebs'

I am astonished at the importance that has attached itself to the word 'pleb' in the long-running 'Plebgate saga'.  My trade is words.  The only real skill I have ever possessed is that of stringing words together to create a readable narrative. I thought too that, thanks to seven years as a gunner in the Royal Artillery including three as a POW in Italy and Germany, I was familiar with every word of abuse in the English language, and quite a few in Italian, German and Russian. I feel almost ashamed to admit that until I learned of the heated exchange between the government's then chief whip and the policeman on duty at the gates in Downing Street, I had never heard the word Pleb used by anyone.  It is presumably short for Plebeian the name given to the underclass in Ancient Rome; not much of an insult really.  After all, it was those Roman plebs who did all the hard work and the fighting that made Rome great.

Perhaps I'm just showing my age by suggesting that I would have expected one of the Eton-and-Oxbridge 'upper class' to display his anger and contempt for someone he regarded as of the ignorant lower classes by referring to or addressing him as 'an oafish Oick!'    Now had I been that affronted copper, that is a phrase that might have found me searching my mental vocabulary for an appropriately insulting response!

But 'pleb'?   Mr Mitchel really used much more offensive words than that during his fit of bad temper, but it's his use of 'pleb' that has cost him his job, lost him his libel action and is - according to press reports - going to cost him millions of pounds in legal fees!  In the 21st century there can be more 'in a name' than 16th century Juliet Capulet could ever have imagined possible.

!

           

           

Week 40 2014

 Tendring Topics…….on line

‘Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer, we’ll keep the red flag……

          …….tucked away safely out of sight’.   That seems to be the message of Ed Balls, Labour’s shadow chancellor, at the Labour Party Conference.  Mr Balls appears to be determined to demonstrate that he’ll behave ‘responsibly’ with public money if Labour wins next year’s General Election.  He proposes to do this by emulating the policies of George Osborne with just one or two differences.  He is just as obsessed with reducing ‘the deficit’ as Mr Osborne and just as determined ‘to reduce government expenditure to do so’. 

 No, the government expenditure he has in mind is not the £100 billion pounds ring-fenced for those totally useless and vastly expensive Trident submarines pointlessly patrolling the high seas.  He is going to freeze increases in children’s allowances and, to prove that he really is the friend of working people, he’s going to remove the entitlement to winter fuel allowance of the wealthiest pensioners, reinstate the tiny tax increase on the incomes of the very highest earners, and impose a ‘mansion tax’ on the owners of stately homes valued in excess of £2 million!  Oh yes – he’s also going to pursue those who avoid paying their due amount of income tax; but (while they’re out of office) they all say that don’t they?

 Both Labour, and the Greens (with whom I agree about most things), seem determined to tax the wealthy simply because that’s what they are.  The Green Party promises that in the unlikely event of their forming a government they’ll impose a special ‘wealth tax’ to relieve the wealthy of some of their fortune.  Everybody also seems to imagine that by raising the tax threshold of liability for income tax and taking increasing numbers of low-paid workers ‘out of the tax system altogether’, they are doing the poor a service. Raising that tax threshold helps all income taxpayers.  The only folk it doesn’t help are those whose income is so little that they are already outside the income tax system. Freeing more people from income tax liability reinforces the myth that there’s a large tax-free underclass supported by hard-working tax payers!  In fact every one of us pays taxes in VAT or customs duties virtually every time we buy goods or services, especially when we buy tobacco, alcohol, or petrol, and every time we buy lottery tickets. That’s one of the reasons why I have never bought a lottery ticket or scratch card!    People not liable to pay income tax, may pay a larger proportion of their income through these indirect taxes, than do some income tax payers.

 I believe that income tax should be regarded by every adult as his or her annual membership fee for the very considerable privilege of being a citizen of the United Kingdom. It should be paid by the very wealthiest and the very poorest.  What’s more, paying that subscription should impose exactly the same burden on each one of us.  This could be achieved by making it an equal percentage of every adult’s gross income (before any of it can be salted away in ‘charitable trusts’ or overseas investments).   I reckon that a tax (membership fee) of 20 percent of every adult’s gross income would probably meet virtually all the government’s financial needs.   The actual percentage could be calculated each year.

Obviously 20 percent of a billionaire’s income would be a considerable sum while 20 percent of the minimum wage or the job-seekers’ allowance would be very little.   That minimum wage or allowance would need to be raised, to enable even the poorest of us to pay the ‘membership subscription’ without being reduced to starvation or homelessness.  Then everyone, rich and poor alike, would have a stake in our country’s future and get rid of the myth that hard-working tax payers support an ‘idle poor’. ‘The rich man in his castle and the poor man at his gate’ would be making an equal sacrifice.

Basing taxation on a percentage of total income may seem revolutionary but there’s nothing really original about it.  The Church at one time demanded ‘a tithe’ (one tenth, or 10 percent) of everyone’s gross income. That was quite reasonable in an age when the Church provided many of the services (education, relief of the poor and so on) that are now considered the responsibility of the State. In the public services negotiated pay increases are always a percentage of the existing salary.  Thus, the Chief Executive and the junior clerk get the same percentage salary increase though, in pounds and pence, the former gets many times more than the latter!  

Percentage taxation isn’t going to happen overnight or even in my lifetime; probably not in my sons’ or my grandchildren’s lifetimes either.  There’s one obvious measure that could be introduced here and now to reduce that deficit without causing hardship to anyone. It would also, at a stroke, reduce the anomaly of the wealthy receiving benefits that they don’t need, without the need to submit claimants to always-hated ‘means testing’. 

This would be to make all state ‘benefits’ taxable.  Our state retirement pension is added to any other income we may have and is subject to income tax.  Why on earth should other benefits be tax-free?  Other benefits that could be made taxable include winter fuel allowance, free tv licences, social security payments, attendance allowance  (I receive that because of my poor and deteriorating mobility), children’s allowances and so on.

Even with our present income tax system it would be much fairer to both poor and wealthy than at present.  Those whose total income, even with the benefit, came to less than the threshold of the lower tax rate would continue to pay no income tax.  They would be unaffected by benefit becoming taxable.  Those of us who are better off would pay according to our income but no one would have to pay more than the appropriate rate on their taxable income.  Income tax never resulted, nor ever can result, in either starvation or homelessness – no-one has to pay more than he or she can afford to pay. Of course, it would be much fairer if the threshold for the highest rate of income tax were to be lowered or if, as I have suggested, everyone paid income tax as a percentage of their gross income.

But that, at present, no political party is prepared to endorse.

‘The tongue is an unruly member’

Says St James in his New Testament Epistle.  I certainly agree with that. It has been my over-active tongue that has got me into trouble in the past.  There was the time when I was Tendring Council’s public relations officer and I told the Chairman of the Council that……………..  No I won’t reveal the extent of my idiocy, and it was a long time ago!  Their tongues have brought embarrassment to people much more important than me.   Only last week they did so to both the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition. I think that the Prime Minister really should have known better.  

On the occasion of a meeting of business men and women in New York, he was overheard remarking to a former mayor of that city that H.M. the Queen had ‘purred’ when he had phoned her with the result of the Scottish referendum, and that she had shown great relief at the fact that Scotland would not separate from the remainder of the UK.  One of the reasons why the British monarchy has survived among a sea of republics is that the Sovereign, as head of state, never expresses a political opinion.  She is the confidante of Prime Ministers and can advise them in the light of her much greater experience of the national scene – but the content of any conversation with her Prime Minister, of whatever political persuasion, is never revealed by her and should never be revealed by the Prime Minister.

It is true that the Prime Minister’s gaffe was part of a private conversation and never intended to become known by the general public. However, its content should never have been revealed to anyone, certainly not to a foreign politician.

Ed Miliband’s tongue’s failure was one of omission rather than commission. He gave a stirring ‘leader’s speech’ to the faithful gathered together at the Labour Party’s annual conference – the last such conference there’ll be before next year’s general election.  It was a speech all the more effective for the fact that he made it without notes. 

Now I’ve done quite a lot of public speaking (on much less important issues and to far smaller audiences) in my time and I have always tried to speak without notes.  There’s no doubt at all that it is the very best way to connect to, and hold, one’s audience.  Sadly, on my way home I’d often think ‘that went down well but – oh dear, I forgot to make this, that or the other point that was of particular importance’

I reckon that Ed Miliband must have been having very similar thoughts – possibly even before the applause had died away.   If there’s one thing that the public feel the Conservatives do better than their Labour opponents it’s managing the economy, in particular reducing that deficit – the gap between government expenditure and government income.  If there’s one issue that accounts for UKIP’s meteoric rise in public popularity it’s their strong opposition to overseas immigrants ‘pouring into this country, taking our jobs and bankrupting our public services’.   I think it likely that the Labour Party has policies on both these issues – but sadly Ed Miliband, perhaps carried away by his own rhetoric – had temporarily forgotten all about them.  They didn’t get a mention!

Ed Miliband’s error was surely much less culpable than that of David Cameron – but I think it likely that it will do him and his party more long-term harm.

  

 

Week 39 2013

Tendring Topics……….on line

The Kindness of Strangers

          The newspapers and the radio and tv news bulletins are full of stories of human folly and wickedness; of senseless slaughter in the Middle East (can either side of the conflict in Syria really believe that any possible ending will be worth the death, destruction and human misery that is taking place daily in that unhappy country?) of robbery, fraud, neglect and abuse of children and of the old and disabled. They record the triumph of selfishness and greed. It is easy for very old people like me to despair of humanity and to fear the future; not for ourselves but for our grandchildren and their grandchildren.

            I try to tell myself that it is the exception that makes the news; that the time to get really worried is when acts of kindness and generosity are so rare that they make the headlines in the press and the ‘lead story’ on the tv news bulletins. Just occasionally though, something happens that makes me realize that, despite the gloomy headlines and the news stories of violence, cruelty and greed, most people are not a bit like that.  They’re kind and helpful and generous.  They really do try to treat other people as they themselves would like to be treated. .

            I had such a moment on Monday of last week.  I had written a letter to a friend of mine in Brussels.  There were a couple of enclosures to go with it and I had no idea what it would cost to send.  The days when I could stroll along to the Post Office are long past.  Supported by my stick I took the half dozen steps to my shed, mounted my mobility scooter (my ‘Iron Horse’!) and drove the few hundred yards from my home to Magdalene Green Post Office.  There I dismounted, retrieved my stick from its holster and stepped inside.  I had forgotten that Monday was ‘benefits day’.   There was a queue.  I took my place and slowly shuffled forward.  The queue was being dealt with very efficiently and I don’t suppose that I had queued for longer than fifteen minutes before I realized that I had stood for as long as I was able to. I had to sit down or collapse! There was a chair nearby and three people ahead of me in the queue; a youngish woman with a toddler, a middle-aged man with several parcels and an elderly lady who was, I thought, probably drawing her pension.  I told them that I wasn’t trying to jump the queue but would they mind if I sat in the chair until it was my turn to be served? They agreed and I thought it likely that I’d have about another ten or fifteen minutes to wait.

I was totally astonished when the counter clerk became available and called for the next customer.  All three of those who were before me in the queue urged me to take their place and go first. My business at the counter took no more than two minutes. It had been a spontaneous act of kindness and thoughtfulness towards an old man with walking stick whom none of them knew – but it really was deeply appreciated.   There were tears in my eyes as I thanked them for their kindness.

We humans aren’t just half-trained animals, motivated only by greed and self-interest as politicians seem to imagine.   There really is – as we Quakers maintain – a divine spark deep within the personality of each one of us, just waiting to be transformed into a warm, friendly and generous flame.

‘Out of the Tax system?’

I don’t grudge Nick Clegg his minor triumph over the provision of free school meals for all children in the first three classes of primary schools.

It was only to be expected that some would complain about having to help pay to feed other people’s kids – many of those other people being much better off than they are.  Young people, struggling to bring up a family, might equally complain about having to pay for the benefits enjoyed by well-off pensioners.  I can see the difficulties and injustices that would arise if every benefit were to be means-tested.  Pride would prevent some needy folk from applying.  Poor children getting free school meals would be stigmatised by their fellows. Children can be cruel to each other. But there is one ‘means test’ to which we are all subjected – our income tax assessment.  The state retirement pension is taxable. Those pensioners who, like me, have a supplementary pension from former employment, or some other source of income, know that the state retirement pension is added to it and becomes taxable income.

I can see no reason why all universal benefits – children’s allowance, job seekers’ allowance, winter fuel allowance, free tv licence, housing benefit, attendance allowance and so on, should not be similarly taxable.  The really poor would continue to get their full benefit.  The better off would pay back some of it in tax and the really wealthy would pay the highest rate of tax on it.  Even with our tax system as it is at present it would bring some welcome cash back into the Treasury (to help with that deficit!)  It would be fairer than the current system and no-one would suffer real hardship. Income tax has never yet made anyone hungry or homeless. I am surprised that this idea hasn’t already been embraced by our cash-hungry chancellor.

If, of course, the income tax system were to be reformed so that we all – rich and poor alike – paid an equal percentage of our gross income (before thousands are siphoned off into charitable trusts, tax havens and the like!) as income tax or – as I prefer to think of it – as our annual membership fee for British citizenship, the system would be fairer still.  What’s more, I believe that the indirect taxes (VAT, customs duties and so on) that disproportionately penalise the less-well-off could be reduced or even eliminated.  

I very much deplore Nick Clegg’s claiming that the coalition government has benefited low earners by raising the level of income at which income tax becomes payable ‘and taking millions out of the tax system altogether!’ This perpetuates - or tries to perpetuate – the myth, fostered by much of the press, that the only really burdensome tax is income tax.  It divides society into two antagonistic classes – the taxpayers, whose hard work and enterprise keep a parasitic underclass of non-taxpayers in comfort and, in many cases so they claim, in idleness.

Raising the level at which income tax is payable is often presented as helping only the very poorest in society. It isn’t. Raising that level affects and benefits every income tax payer from those who only just become liable for income tax, to the seriously wealthy with an income (I hesitate to say ‘earnings’!) of a million pounds or more a year.  Nor is it true that those who are not liable for income tax pay no taxes to the government.  Since the Thatcher years there has been a shift from direct taxation (income tax, death duties and so on) to indirect taxes such as VAT and customs duties.  The tax is the same for rich and poor alike but the VAT payable on, for instance, a repair to the family car or essential maintenance to the home, makes a far greater dent in the budget of someone with a low income than it does on those of the wealthy.

There’s one source of revenue for the government that comes almost exclusively from the poor.  That is the quite small amount that goes with the purchase of every lottery ticket and every scratch card.  Lots and lots of tiny payments come to a very considerable sum of money.  Even the very poor feel able, as I once heard a Government Minister put it, ‘to have fun on the lottery’.  It is their one, albeit very very remote, chance of gaining a fortune and escaping from grinding poverty.  You’ll look in vain for stockbrokers, merchant bankers or payday money lenders in the queue for lottery tickets and scratch cards.  They prefer to gamble much more profitably and preferably with other people’s money, on the stock exchange!

I wait, probably in vain, for one of the political parties to include in their programme the reform of the income tax system to ensure that every adult citizen, rich and poor alike, pays the same percentage of his of her income to the Inland Revenue as their annual  membership fee as British citizens.  This reform would be the first step towards narrowing the vast gap that at present exists between the incomes of the very rich and the very poor and the transformation of the United Kingdom into a United Common Wealth in the future of which every citizen would have a stake and a responsibility.

'I shall not cease from mental fight,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,

Till I have built Jerusalem

In England's green and pleasant land'.

Lord Hanningfield’s Legacy

          When the Police decided to take no other action with regard to Lord Hanningfield’s use of his County Council credit card to spend nearly £300,000 on business trips abroad, expensive meals and hospitality, I commented in this blog that there must have been sighs of relief from some of his colleagues at County Hall. .  Certainly his downfall seems to have heralded a new era of thrift there.

            The daily Gazette reports that Ms. Joanna Killian, the County Council’s Chief Executive appointed in 2006, spent £4,700 on her County Council credit card including a team-building exercise for five members of the council’s staff that included a trip to Colchester Zoo, various expenses during a weeklong trip to Jamestown, Virginia where she and a number of councillors took part in their 400^th anniversary celebrations.  These included ‘a meal for 23 at the Old Original Bookbinders Restaurant that set taxpayers back £1,152.16 and a four-night stay for seven at Jamestown’s Berkeley Hotel that cost £3,436.59’   The purpose of the transatlantic excursion was to ‘create new trade and business links between Essex and Virginia’ ;. and did it, I wonder?   For Christmas 2007 Ms Killian paid Kingsmead Publications £331.35 for personalised corporate Christmas cards.

            That was then.  Now, we have a somewhat different story.  Since 2010 Ms Killian has used the card only seven times – six times for train journeys and once for the renewal of a subscription to the Local Government Chronicle. In 2011 her expenses amounted to just £259.   It seems that we have at least something for which to be grateful for Lord Hanningfield’s example!

Week 30 2013

Tendring Topics………on line

Helping the taxpayers! (but, who are the Taxpayers?)

         

Last week I heard Work and Pensions Minister Iain Duncan Smith defending the Government’s cuts in benefits for the needy and, in particular, the £20,000 ‘cap’ on benefits to any family.   It is clearly unfair, he said, that anyone on benefit should be financially better off than those who are working. He also claimed (without any firm evidence, as a BBC interviewer pointed out) that in pilot areas where the benefit cap had already been introduced, thousands of folk who had been living on benefit had been encouraged back to work.

Obviously, everybody who is able to work should be encouraged to do so – but where are they to find a job when, as in this area for instance, there are twenty applicants for every job vacancy?  Does Iain Duncan Smith really believe that anything other than a tiny minority of the two and a half million unemployed people in the UK prefer to live on ‘benefit’.  Like the tax avoiders and tax evaders, that tiny minority should be exposed and penalised.  Whatever the feature writers of the tabloid press may say, their lives must be pretty miserable, especially when much of that ‘benefit’ isn’t retained by the recipient but is handed over directly to a rapacious private landlord..  But you’d hardly expect a government that includes seventeen millionaires to appreciate that!

Over and over again Mr Iain Duncan Smith claimed that he had to balance the reasonable interests of ‘the taxpayers’ against the cost to the nation of benefit payments.  By the taxpayers he clearly meant those (like me!) who are fortunate enough to have an income high enough to be liable for income tax. But we are by no means the only taxpayers, nor is income tax the only way in which we contribute to the government’s finances   During the Thatcher years (‘the avaricious eighties') there was a deliberate policy of reducing ‘direct taxation’ such as income tax, corporation tax and death duties, and compensating for this by increasing ‘indirect taxation’  (referred to as ‘stealth taxes’ by the tabloid press when imposed by a government that they oppose!) These are VAT, taxes on insurance, gambling and air travel, and customs and excise charges – on, for instance, fuel oil, tobacco products and alcoholic drinks.

This policy was continued by New Labour under Tony Blair and his successors. Indirect taxes are levied equally on rich and poor alike (we’re all in this together’) but, of course, they have a much bigger impact on the incomes of the poor than they do on the rich.

The poor make a contribution to Government’s Inland Revenue whenever they have their cars or motor bikes (often vital for their work or seeking work) repaired, serviced or filled with petrol or diesel; every time they buy a packet of cigarettes or a pint of beer, and every time they buy a lottery ticket in the hope (almost certainly in vain!) of escaping from a life of poverty.

In the Biblical parable ‘the widow’s mite’ was one hundred percent of her wealth, a far greater personal contribution than even hundreds of the shekels of a wealthy Pharisee. Today, as a result of indirect taxation, the working and unemployed poor pay a higher percentage of their income to the Inland Revenue than those in the highest income brackets.

  Pay rises to public servants and to many employees in the private sector are

 always a percentage of their existing income.   When, for instance, all the staff of a local authority get a 2 percent pay rise, Chief Executive Officers can claim that they get exactly the same pay increase as the humblest clerical officer, despite the fact that the CEO is getting 2 percent of perhaps £150,000 and the junior employee 2 percent of less than £20,000!  I wonder if they would continue to equate their loss with that of junior officers if they were compelled to suffer a ten percent pay reduction!

           

I believe, very strongly, that the government’s principal source of revenue should be an income tax consisting, just like those pay rises, on an equal percentage of every adult’s existing income.  I believe too, that every British adult and everyone who lives and works in Britain, should pay that percentage of his or her income as an annual membership fee of the Society of British Citizenship – and that they should be proud and pleased to do so.    

 ‘The Lady’s not for Turning’

          That phrase,  parodying the title of a play of the late 1940s by Christopher Fry, is one of Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher’s best remembered sound-bites.  It was true too.  Mrs Thatcher was very strong-minded (opponents might have said ‘stubborn’ or even ‘pig headed’) and rarely, if ever, changed her mind on a matter of policy.

            The same can hardly be said about her successors in government today..  Their path is littered with the torn-up remains of policies that have either been abandoned or changed out of all recognition. Particularly blatant is their recent U-turn on a minimum price for alcoholic drinks, and the plain packaging of cigarettes.   It seems but yesterday that Prime Minister was making impassioned speeches about the benefits to public health that would result from both these policies and how preventing the sale of cheap alcohol would reduce anti-social behaviour.

            Now, so it seems, the imposition of plain packaging for cigarettes is to await the result of a similar experiment on the other side of the world in Australia (and I thought the coalition government claimed that Britain led the world!) and the imposition of minimum prices for alcohol has been shelved indefinitely.  It is now being claimed that no-one will be discouraged by plain packaging from having ‘that first smoke’ that can begin an addiction.  If the tobacco manufacturers really believe that, then why do they oppose plain packaging.  It must surely be cheaper to produce than packaging currently in use.  This government U-turn will without question result in continued growth in alcohol fuelled  antisocial behaviour, additional cost to the NHS for the treatment of tobacco and alcohol related diseases, and the premature termination of thousands of promising young lives.

            Does the hope of a few extra votes in the no-longer-distant next general election or a few extra thousand pounds in the party war-chest really make all that worthwhile?

‘Council takes stock and turns clock back 30 years’

            That, last week, was the Clacton Gazette’s headline over a news story that gave me real satisfaction and raised by several notches my opinion of the present Tendring District Council.   For years now I have urged that the best solution to Britain’s housing problem – and the best way to get the building industry onto its feet and busy again – was to encourage local authorities to build or purchase houses for letting as they had done successfully for a century prior to Mrs Thatcher’s Right to Buy legislation of 1980.   This had compelled local authorities and Housing Associations (but not private landlords) to sell, at bargain basement prices, the homes that earlier generations had built to solve as they thought their community’s future housing problems.  Right to Buy was, in fact, a very effective means of buying votes with other people’s money.  Better still, those ‘other people’ were no longer around to protest!  They were those of earlier generations who had thought that they were building homes to ensure that no-one in their areas need ever be homeless, overcrowded or living in sub-standard conditions.

            Last year the coalition government made a bad situation even worse by compelling housing authorities to give tenants wishing to buy their homes even bigger discounts.   They also prevented ‘social housing’ from being offered to anyone other than the poorest of the poor, and required that all tenancies should be short term and should be terminated if the tenant’s income rose above the poverty level.  This they compounded with the ‘bedroom tax’ that charges social housing tenants extra rent for any spare bedroom!

            I was therefore delighted to see that, despite all the obstacles, Tendring Council was to go ahead and, for the first time in thirty years, buy homes for letting to needy housing applicants in our area.  They have set aside a million pounds for this purpose.  Their first purchase is to be of six flats in Victoria Road, Walton-on-the-Naze at a cost believed to be about £525,000.   They also have plans to build two council houses in Brightlingsea, and it is expected that more homes for letteing will be built in other towns.   They hope that they will thus raise the council’s existing housing stock to 3,227 homes.  It will, of course, take many years to rectify the effect of three decades of inaction.

              

            Council Leader Peter Halliday is reported as saying, ‘It is fair to say that most people don’t think a Conservative council would want council houses, let alone building or buying to add to housing stock………..We are determined to get local housing for local people, and the only way to do that is to do it ourselves’.

            Good for Councillor Halliday! It wasn’t always the case though that Conservative Councils didn’t want Council Houses.  I was Clacton Urban District Council’s Housing Manager in the early 1970s.  The council owned about 1,000 houses, bungalows and flats and had a building programme adding a few housing units every year.  Clacton Council had a Conservative Majority (though they certainly weren’t run on the parliamentary political lines that central government has forced on councils today) but resolutely refused to sell any of their council properties, though they encouraged and offered support to tenants who bought a house or bungalow in the private sector thereby releasing a council house for letting.

           

Myself as Clacton’s Housing Manager in 1973 or thereabouts. Oh dear, don’t I look every inch the Town Hall Bureaucrat!!

           

The Council's members, of all parties, were proud of their housing estates – and so was I.  Tenants were encouraged to cultivate their gardens and to keep the interiors of their homes spic and span. The knowledge that, provided they paid their rent regularly and complied with the other tenancy conditions, they had homes ‘for life’ encouraged this.   We had two and three bedroom houses and flats for families, specially adaptable bungalows for the disabled or elderly, and a few one-bedroom flats for singletons.   Thanks to the building programme and casual vacancies arising from deaths or tenants moving away, during my time as housing manager no family or individual ever, to my knowledge, ‘slept rough’ within the Clacton Urban District.  Nor did we ever have to resort to ‘bed and breakfast’ accommodation for homeless families.

        Later, when I was Tendring Council's Public Relations Officer, I remember showing with pride a visiting American studying British local government, round one of our Clacton housing estates.  He was deeply impressed.  ‘You wouldn’t find social housing like this in the States’, he told me. That was nearly forty years ago. I haven’t visited any of those estates recently but I have a feeling that nowadays he would find himself to be more ‘at home’.