Corruption
Badenoch’s spinning a totally fabricated yarn about the origins of the UK’s wealth
Kemi Badenoch was reported by the Guardian yesterday to have said:
It worries me when I hear people talk about wealth and success in the UK as being down to colonialism or imperialism or white privilege or whatever.
They added:
Instead, she said the Glorious Revolution of 1688 – which led to the development of the UK constitution and solidified the role of parliament – should be credited for providing the kind of economic certainty that paved the way for the Industrial Revolution.
As I said in the tweet that I issued in response:
There is nonsense, bullshit, fabrication and then whatever it is that Kemi Badenoch has to say on any subject.
If I failed to hide my contempt, I do not apologise.
I almost felt like asking on Twitter “Whatever did the Glorious Revolution do for you?“ Apart from the suppression of Catholicism, the creation of the Bank of England, the institution of the national debt, the imposition of a monarch who believed in the importance of the navy, largely as a weapon for imperialist, colonialist inspired territorial expansion, and who paved the way for the subjection of Scotland to the whim of the English, what did the Glorious Revolution do for you, after all?
The one thing I think we can say with confidence is that it did not deliver the industrial revolution.
It did however fuel demand for income to fund royal fantasies and foibles that most definitely required the exploitation of colonies in the USA, the Caribbean, West Africa and elsewhere.
So is Badenoch wrong? In my opinion, she is not just wrong, but is actively misrepresenting the truth.
Why would she do that? Partly because she does, for her own reasons, wish to deny Britain’s racist past, and present, because her denial of that racism is itself racist, in my opinion.
As significantly, she also wants to deny the role of monopoly-based rentier capitalism and exploitation as the common foundations of the wealth of this country.
She is, instead, pretending that entrepreneurial activity did deliver that wealth. But that is largely untrue. For example, those canal and coal pioneers who, if anyone did, started the industrial revolution later in the 18th century were able to do so on the basis of land ownership, wealth and property, all of which was supported by extraction of profits resulting from privilege, patronage, expropriation, rents and exploitation. Some of that undoubtedly would have been derived from colonial activity.
In that case Badenoch’s commentary does not just fail; it stinks because she is denying the truth and presenting a wholly false, politically inspired narrative that is unsupportable by evidence. But when did someone like her worry about things like that?
The UK’s missing companies
I posted this video on YouTube and elsewhere this morning:
In case the video does not show, the link is here.
The transcript is:
We do not know what at least half the companies in the UK are doing, which is absolutely staggering when those companies may exist to undertake fraud and abuse us.
Why is this possible? Well, because it is so easy to form companies in the UK. You don't even have to physically sign a form to pay £12, get Companies House to incorporate your company, and then you have what is in effect licensed identity theft, which you can hide behind to undertake fraudulent activity, collect money, trade without ever having any intention of telling the Revenue that you are, not pay your taxes, then throw your company away at the end of a year or so, and form a new one.
How do I know this is happening? Well, because, the data from Companies House shows it. There are 5.3 million companies in the UK at the time that I'm recording this. Of those, half a million are being got rid of at the moment – meaning nearly 10 per cent of all companies in the UK are currently in the course of being dissolved - many of them by Companies House because they've lost touch with the companies in question. Many more will be because they paid £10 to say they don't trade any more, and could they please be struck off? and please don't ask any questions because that's, in effect, what happens. We are literally letting these companies trade without telling HM Revenue and Customs.
How do I know that? Well, in the last year for which we've got data, HMRC only got corporation tax returns from three million companies of whom one quarter weren't trading. So that leaves only 2. 2 million or so companies which were actually declaring that they had positive income, of which only 1.5 million said they were actually making profits. About 160,000 said they were making losses, and the rest said they were getting other income like interest, rents, or dividends, for example as companies within groups. But what we do, therefore, know is that the majority of the companies in the UK aren't actually paying any tax at all, and you have to ask why they exist.
I know the answer to some extent. I've been a director of a company that never traded because it existed to protect the name of a website. So, yes, that's possible. But those companies should be filing tax returns. They should also be filing full accounts, which I admit Companies House is now beginning to address.
But they're not getting the data to HM Revenue and Customs. There are two ways to get around this. One is to make directors of companies that don't declare their tax liabilities personally responsible for the taxes they evade. It would be simple, straightforward, and fair to do that. After all, they're the people who are cheating.
Secondly, get our banks to tell HM Revenue and Customs every year which companies in this country they supply services to, who runs them, and tell HM Revenue and Customs how much they bank for that company and what the bank balance was at the end of the year. Then we'd know which companies who are not declaring their income need to be chased and who might be liable for the money that's owed.
We could do that.
If we did, we'd have fair competition, we'd have fairer taxation, and we'd stop this criminogenic environment existing which is undermining the fair trading of honest people in the UK. And we'd have a more vibrant economy as a result.
So why aren't we doing it? I just don't know because it would pay for a better society in every way that I can imagine.
There is much more on this in the Taxing Wealth Report 2024.
Share buybacks
Or what in the US is called ‘stock’ buybacks are, as Professor Robert Reich suggests below in this clip of just over two minutes, intimately involved in why Chief Executives are paid so much, and workers, so little: Indeed the evidence would seem to be that buybacks started first in the UK and the idea... Read more
Freeports are a threat to free markets and to the wellbeing of the populations of all countries in which they exist
The National newspaper in Scotland has been running what I think to be a very important series on the threats posed by freeports during the course of this week.
I have made my own contribution to this series in an article in which I describe freeports as having all the characteristics of tax havens. My argument is multifaceted, but does in the first instance address the economic fallacies that underpin the argument for freeports, saying:
The narratives that the proponents of [freeports] use is always alluring. They are, however, always based upon the idea that freedom from regulation and taxation is the foundation for prosperity. This is total nonsense.
It is not chance that the most taxed and regulated countries in the world are all also the most prosperous, but that is always the case, most especially if we take the more obvious tax havens like Luxembourg, Ireland, the Netherlands, and the Cayman Islands out of consideration.
It is also very obviously true, on the basis of even the most superficial observation, that those countries with low levels of taxation and regulation are almost always associated with high levels of crime, low levels of income for the population as a whole, unstable government, and corruption.
Regulation and the taxation that supports it are necessary. Without them, world trade competes without rules, and mayhem results.
A sporting analogy helps here. As we all know, every sport is dependent upon rules and regulations. Sporting competition only exists because there are umpires, referees, and others to monitor compliance with those rules.
Markets are the same. They, too, require regulation, but the whole logic of freeports is to pretend otherwise. They try to create artificial advantages for one team over all others as if your favourite team could always play with 12 people on the pitch when opponents were restricted to 11. Rigging the rules does not help competition. It destroys it.
One of the commonalities that I have always found present amongst those who have advanced tax haven activity is that, without exception, they say they want to promote free market activity whilst at the same time seeking to the undermine compliance with all the conditions that must apply if free market activity is to be beneficial to society as a whole, based upon the theories to which they say they subscribe.
The whole basis of a genuine belief in the virtue of markets is dependent upon those markets not being rigged, and upon the rules that they impose being complied with. Even in his more extreme moments, Milton Friedman always made this point.
The modern proponents of freeports and tax havens, and all other forms of regulatory abuse, have no interest in following Friedman’s suggestion. That is because they are not in the slightest way entrepreneurial, and have little or no understanding of what it really means to be free market operators. They are instead only interested in ways in which they can manipulate regulations to extract profits from markets at cost to society at large. That is the single reason for the existence of freeports and precisely why all governments should reject their existence since they represent a threat to their populations as a whole.
Gordon Brown’s answer to poverty in the UK is to appeal to charity. When Labour looks like it will have a massive majority soon that is pathetic.
Gordon Brown, the former Labour Prime Minister, had an article in the Guardian newspaper yesterday that plumbed new depths for the Labour Party.
Brown acknowledged that the UK has a poverty crisis, with vast numbers of people having insufficient income to meet their needs. As he noted, one million children now live in what might properly be called destitution, because absolute poverty does not seem an adequate description.
Having wrung his hands over this, and inevitably seeking to blame the Tories, he claimed to have a plan to address the issue.
There were two parts to this plan. In the first, he suggested a tiny pruning of the amount of interest paid by the Bank of England to the UK’s commercial banks each year on the deposits that they supposedly hold with our central bank. These sums actually represent the new money supply created by the Bank of England on behalf of the government during the 2008/09 financial crisis and 2020/21 Covid crisis, which the commercial banks did, as a result, do literally nothing to earn.
Approximately £40 billion will be paid in interest on these accounts this year. Brown suggested that between £1 billion and £3 billion of this sum might be redirected towards addressing extreme poverty in this country.
Having made this totally feeble gesture when the opportunity to do so much more with this wholly inappropriate enrichment of bankers was available to him, he then added his second suggestion. He did not, as any reasonable left-of-centre person might have expected, suggest that companies and people with higher levels of income might pay more tax to address the inequality that we now face as a country. Instead, he appealed to their charitable instincts and suggested that if only they donated a little more to food banks, the whole problem might be solved.
I have already suggested today that Labour’s frank admission that it does not intend to do anything about the power of the private sector, or the inevitable fact that the private sector does not allocate rewards appropriately within society, is recognition on its part of creeping fascism, about which it very obviously has no intention of doing anything.
Brown reinforces my opinion that Labour has altogether given up on challenging inequality, the power of the private sector, and the power of private, wealthy individuals within our society. Instead, it does now seem that it will tolerate any outcome that the market now dictates, however, undesirable that is for the people of the UK as a whole.
You could describe this as Labour giving up on its fundamental purpose, and you would be right to do so.
You could alternatively suggest that this is Labour tolerating the creep of fascism into our society, and again I think you would be right to do so, although I am sure that Labour itself would disagree. But, when it is doing nothing to stop that advance of fascism, what right have they got to do so?
As I have said before today, and will no doubt be saying many more times over the months and years to come, I have shown that none of this is necessary. The Taxing Wealth Report demonstrates that the money required to tackle the problem of poverty in the UK could be raised by simply reforming some of the existing taxes within this country. This would be easy, especially for a party in power possessed of a massive majority, which Labour is likely to have. Quite literally, nothing could stop them from reshaping the way in which rewards are shared within our society for the benefit of that society as a whole.
If Labour are not willing to do that with the power that they are likely to have then what are they for? Apart from enabling fascism, that is.
The NHS could be and should be, well funded so that it might deliver for the people of this country. That it does not do so is a result of Tory policy choice, not necessity
The NHS is under threat today, precisely because it is failing to deliver what the people of this country expect of it.
A report in the Guardian this morning says:
Just 24% of people across England, Scotland and Wales – the fewest on record – are satisfied with the [NHS], according to the latest British Social Attitudes research.
Satisfaction has plummeted by 29% since before Covid-19 emerged in early 2020 and by an enormous 46% from the highest-ever 70% recorded in 2010, when the Conservatives took power. It fell five points alone from 29% in 2022 to the 24% seen last year.
I am not surprised. Nor, I suspect, will any other long-term NHS observer be so. This is the inevitable outcome of Tory policy on the NHS.
That policy was predicted many years ago by Naom Chomsky, who said:
There is a standard technique of privatization, namely defund what you want to privatize. .... [F]irst thing to do is defund them, then they don't work and people get angry and [then] they want a change.
The Tories have now defunded the NHS sufficiently to leave it in a state of such chaos that it does not work for too many people, meaning that they are angry with it and are open to change. Bizarrely, the Tories have laid the groundwork for the NHS privatisation that Labour's Wes Streeting seems so desperate to deliver.
The important point to remember is that none of this was an accident. All of it was deliberate. All of it was policy. I explored these issues back in 2018. I think that very little has changed since. As I said then:
The NHS need not be under threat. The NHS could be and should be, well funded. It could be and should be the basis on which opportunity for new generations in need in this country could be built. But that requires a new generation of economists, politicians, healthcare professionals and others to believe, as some did in 1948, that they can make a more effective difference in people's lives through the provision of state-provided healthcare than they could by promoting a market-based system. Those who believed that in 1948 were right. The current threat to the NHS suggests that their vision is at risk. That vision of universal care for people who are, whatever their economic situation, considered to be of equal value, needs to be restored. Nothing else will tackle the threat to the NHS.
The profoundly worrying thing is that this does not appear to be a vision that Labour shares.
Can we really claim to be a democracy when the government very clearly does not care if people can vote?
This report was published last Thursday, but I missed it then and it is no less relevant this morning:
As many as eight million people face being disenfranchised at the next election due to an electoral registration system which is neither effective nor efficient, says the cross-party Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee in a report published today.
As they noted:
The report finds that the current state of the electoral registration system, which governs local elections in England and UK general elections, needs urgent review.
The report finds that there have been notable issues with the practical implementation of recent electoral registration reforms, including voter ID which left individuals without the right ID being prevented from voting and only a limited number of forms of ID being permitted. The report disagrees with the Government’s view on the adequacy of the list of accepted photo ID and believes it should be widened to include other forms, such as emergency services passes and non-London travel passes.
The report recognises that certain groups, such as young people, renters, ethnic minorities, and those in lower socio-economic groups are significantly less likely to be registered to vote. The Committee were also told that some disabled people do not feel supported to register to vote, particularly struggling with the lack of variety in communication channels.
The report recommends a series of steps to help tackle under-registration. … The report also calls for the Government to move towards an opt in automated voter registration system to help ensure that voters are not disenfranchised.
They add:
The report references the Electoral Commission's 2023 report, "Electoral registers in the UK”, which found that completeness of the registers in the UK is at 86%. ‘Accuracy’ looks at the number of false entries on the electoral registers and is currently at 88%. This means that potentially as many as eight million people were not correctly registered at their current address and people may be registered twice inadvertently. The completeness of the electoral registers in Great Britain is 86%. The Commission explained that " if a UK general election was called now, around 14% of the eligible population would not be able to vote."
That is approximately seven million people who are disenfranchised in the UK as a result of government indifference.and as the committee notes, this is not necessary. In a very similar situation to the UK, Canada had very much higher levels of voter registration.
Can we really claim to be a democracy when the government very clearly does not care if people can vote?
Genocide cannot be condoned, whoever does it
This post on Twitter was made yesterday by this person:
He is the director of the UN aid agency in Gaza. It is the only agency able to reach the people there.
He said this:
The Israeli government has begun to use famine as an instrument war.
Please do not ask me to condone, tolerate, or ignore this.
And please do not tell me it is anti-Semitic to condemn that government and its Zionism that motivated this, because it is not.
Like those Jews who condemn this government - and very large numbers do - I stand up for humanity. Zionism can never excuse its abuse.
And please also don’t tell me this is only reaction to Hamas and 7 October. I have condemned what they did then many times. But nothing excuses the war crimes the Netanyahu regime is committing now, or those who supply it with arms. Genocide cannot be condoned, whoever does it.
Has the time come for sanctions to be imposed on Israel?
Trump appears to have been shown in court to be a liar…
The Lincoln Project is admittedly a Republican group that opposes Trump, but it does seem rather difficult to see where Trump goes from here. He has been shown to lie about his wealth – he originally suggested he had $400million in liquid assets – yet nobody will support his $500m surety… It rather goes to... Read more
The Tories have gone nuclear
I liked this from Adam Payne at Politics Home this morning:
Many Conservative MPs will remember this "bleak" week as the moment when they truly gave up any hope of avoiding defeat to Labour at the next general election.
“Something has changed for me this week," said one veteran Conservative MP.
They added:
“We have done absolutely everything possible to lose the next election," they said. "We've gone nuclear.”
That seems about right.
Gove, Hester, Sunak, and total humiliation on all fronts. Their game is over.
We really do need a general election,