‘Why don’t they eat cake?’
I do not recall ever before having heard quite such blatant rubbish on tv as that put forward to urge the abolition of the higher rate of income tax!
It is worth giving some thought to what this ‘higher rate’ actually amounts to, and who has to pay it. It applies only to those with a taxable income of £150,000 a year or more. That is a sum so large that it is all but meaningless to most of us. It works out at over £2,884 per week or, if you prefer, £12,500 per calendar month. Do you know anyone with that sort of an income? Probably you don’t, neither do I. Perhaps to members of a government that includes 17 millionaires it may seem pretty commonplace - middle of the road in fact. I don’t think though that I am even acquainted with anyone who wouldn’t consider those liable to the higher rate of income tax as being very wealthy. These fortunate people are required to pay back 50% of any income above £150,000 a year. Hardly, it might have been thought, likely to cause the ‘victims’ of the tax serious hardship!
The idea of abolishing that higher rate of income tax received a boost last Wednesday (7th Sept) when 20 top financial experts wrote an open letter to the Financial Times urging that course of action. The very rich should be charged only the standard rate of 40 percent that I, and a great many others of us, have to pay on at least part of our incomes. The removal of the higher band of income tax would, so they claim, remove a brake on Britain’s economic recovery and allow us to forge ahead into a golden future. Among the flood of protesting emails responding to this item on BBC Breakfast was at least one asking if any/many/perhaps all of those twenty financial experts were themselves in receipt of incomes in excess of £150,000 a year and therefore had a personal financial interest in the matter.
On that same Breakfast programme another financial expert explained that entrepreneurs from overseas were dissuaded from setting up small businesses in this country when they were expected to pay back half their incomes to the government. If the higher tax band were retained all those with the best brains would emigrate. In any case, few people actually paid that tax because they are astute enough to protect their wealth by putting it into off-shore accounts in tax havens or in retirement trusts and the like.
I have been trying to think of a small business that could be expected to provide its founder and owner with an income in excess of £150,000 – drug dealing, gambling, the arms trade, money lending, the sex trade, organised crime perhaps. They’re all that come to mind and they are all activities we can comfortably manage without. Every listener to that broadcast must surely have known that no one at all has to pay half his income in tax – half of any income in excess of £150,000 is a very different matter.
To even think of increasing the incomes of the wealthy in a time of growing unemployment – particularly youth unemployment - while cutting public services and benefits to the poor, the sick and the disabled, is an obscenity. In lack of sensitivity and human understanding it is comparable with the ill-fated Queen Marie Antoinette’s famous suggestion when told that the poor of Paris were clamouring for bread ‘Why don’t they eat cake?’
Let us hope that it doesn’t have similar consequences!
I am more than ever convinced that Britain’s hope of mending our ‘broken society’ and discovering our country’s true ‘greatness’, lies in narrowing, certainly not widening, the yawning gap between the wealthiest and the poorest of our nation. A good start could be made by reviewing our income tax system and, with the aim of eventually making it truly progressive, bringing the threshold of liability for the higher rate of tax down from £150,000 a year to £100,000, while simultaneously seeking out and closing those currently legal loopholes by means of which the seriously wealthy avoid carrying their fair share of the country’s financial burden.
‘Those who sup with the devil need a long spoon’
So says the proverb and I think it likely that some of our politicians and police officers wish that they had had a rather longer spoon when they fraternised with Rupert Murdoch and the top executives of News International.
James Murdoch, Rupert’s son and representative, and two former senior employees of News International have been recalled for further questioning by the House of Commons Select Committee. The evidence of the latter two absolutely contradicts that of James Murdoch. On which testimony, I wonder, will the Committee base its final report?
The Committee’s continuing activities have prompted our Prime Minister to comment that perhaps he had allowed himself to get a little too close to representatives of News International, but this had been because he had been eager to explain the Government’s policies to the top management of all the news media – not just the Murdoch Press.
I don’t really think that the proprietors of the Guardian, the Independent, and the Daily Mirror enjoyed quite the same measure of Prime Ministerial attention as did the owner of the Times, Sunday Times, News of the World and the Sun, either from our Prime Minister or most of his predecessors. I am sure that no-one would dream of criticising Mr Cameron for explaining government policy to any or all of them. What is a matter of concern though, is the extent to which our present, or any past, Prime Minister may have been prepared to bend or change the emphasis of government policy in order to ensure friendly headlines, news stories, and feature articles and reviews in a powerful section of the national press. Remember the Sun’s boast after a Thatcher electoral victory – ‘It was us wot done it!’
One recent Prime Minister, John Major declined to pay homage to Rupert Murdoch and News International. It was to his credit – but he didn’t remain very long in office did he? It is for this reason that I believe very strongly that no substantial part of the British news media should be under the ownership, influence and control of a single individual, certainly not of an individual who is not British and who owes no loyalty to Great Britain, or to British and European values and traditions.
Who is being subsidised?
The residents of ‘Middle England’, through the columns of their self-appointed mouthpieces in the press (I have in mind in particular the Express, the Mail and the Telegraph) constantly remind us that they, as hard-working, honest and respectable citizens, have to subsidise the life-styles of unemployed layabouts, single parent families, old folk who are no longer making a contribution to society, other people’s children’s care and education, public transport, a European Union that they wish they had never heard of and so on, and on ……and on.
I have just heard it confirmed that I, and quite a few mostly old folk like me, are quietly subsidising the comfortable lives of a great many devoted readers of those newspapers. We, the unwilling and unwitting benefactors of aspiring Middle Britain, are those who have paid off our mortgages and are truly home owners. We have since built up a few thousand pounds of savings in savings accounts in the Banks or Building Societies that had lent us the money with which we had purchased our homes. Those accumulated savings are month-by-month diminishing in value, as inflation at twice the rate originally forecast by the government, outstrips the meagre interest that they nowadays earn. They will continue to shrink while the Bank Rate fixed by the Bank of England remains at the record low level of half of one percent.
And who gets the benefit of the value creamed off our life savings? Why, the keen go-ahead young couples who probably describe themselves as home owners but are, in fact, home buyers. The real owners of their homes, as they’ll quickly find out if they default on their mortgage payments, are the banks or building societies that loaned them the purchase money and now hold the deeds of their homes.
The interest that home buyers are paying is at a record low level, kept there artificially by the continuing absurdly low bank rate. The idea is, no doubt, that this boost to their income will give them more cash in their pockets which will encourage them to go out and spend – and get the wheels of Britain’s economy moving again. It is, of course, simply robbing Peter to pay Paul and on this occasion I am one of the Peters. I’ll survive. My savings aren’t substantial enough to attract a great deal of interest even if the bank rate and mortgage interest payments rose. It must though be a severe blow to those elderly people depending upon the interest on their savings to finance their retirement.
‘Our Holiday Season is ending early, due to lack of interest ……..from Tendring Council’.
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| Camping beneath the pines in September sunshine |
I have noticed that a great many, particularly elderly or childless couples do the same thing. The September weather this year has so far been disappointing but, who knows, there could be an Indian summer towards the end of this month or even into October. Those who decide to visit the Essex Sunshine Coast a little outside the peak of holiday season this year are likely to be disappointed by the reception they receive.
Many of Tendring’s Tourist Information Centres closed and the Council-run beach patrols stopped operating on 1st September. John Halls, Walton-on-the-Naze Town Mayor is furious. He is reported in the Daily Gazette as saying that there are still people coming here and holidaymakers can often be seen here until October. ‘This town relies on the tourist trade and we are trying to extend the holiday season, not cut ii short as soon as we reach September………Not all children have even gone back to school yet, and people don’t feel safe on the beaches without a patrol there. They have done a lot of good this summer but if someone gets stuck on the rocks now they will not be there to help’.
Needless to say, Councillor Stephen Mayzes, Tendring’s Tourism Boss, has an answer. ‘It is considered to be the end of the season, the schools are going back and there are far fewer people around. We have got to look at how many people are actually going into the information centre. We did a study last year and worked out that it was costing us about £7.00 for every person who walked into the centre’. Mr Mayzes would like to see in the future a hi-tech replacement for the centre. He has in mind an interactive screen that would allow people to explore tourist information all year. I can’t imagine anything more likely to put people off Walton forever than having to consult a giant computer screen rather than a friendly and helpful information officer! A virtual information office for virtual people – real people, on holiday, won’t want to go near it!
I suppose I haven’t made a terrible error about the responsibilities of a District Council ‘Tourism boss’? I had the possibly silly idea that his task was to attract tourists and other holidaymakers to our Holiday Coast. Mr Mayzes response to a prestigious camping and caravanning club making use of the playing field of the Coastal Academy during the holiday period, and his action in prematurely closing Information Centres and ending Beach Patrols, makes me wonder if his task is the precise opposite – to discourage strangers from making their way here and to keep our golden sands and holiday facilities unsullied for the enjoyment of ‘natives only’. If so, he is doing very well!
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