Corruption
We desperately need a Green New Deal and our power elites would rather ignore that fact
As the Guardian's morning comment newsletter says in its introduction this morning:
Houses in the UK are some of the oldest and least energy efficient in Europe. A new report by Friends of the Earth and the Institute of Health Equity found that 9.6m households are living in cold, poorly insulated homes. These households also have incomes below the minimum for a decent standard of living, meaning that they cannot afford to install double glazing or insulation, for example, to make their homes warmer. The analysis comes just weeks after the Labour party U-turned on a key climate proposal, which included a pledge to insulate millions of homes. Meanwhile, over the last 13 years the government has reversed plenty of policies designed to tackle the insulation problem in the UK.
It's now more than fifteen years since I co-authored the first Green New Deal report. In that report, we called for the release of a 'carbon army' of well-trained people who could insulate Britain, install solar power and build the transmission networks for a new economy. There would be long-term employment on offer as a result. The UK would go green. And energy poverty would be tackled. It was an all-round win.
It has not happened.
Labour has now turned its back on the idea.
But we need this solution more than ever.
And it could be done. The Taxing Wealth Report 2024 shows that the funding is available. All that is lacking is the will.
Rather than tackle gross tax, income and wealth inequality in the UK, both our leading political parties would rather balance the government's books, subject us to the desires of the City of London and maintain the existing hierarchies of financial power within our society, which leave millions in poverty whilst denying us a future.
Why do they do that? Because they crave to be part of the financial power elite, and that elite knows that and bribes them with its inducements as a result.
I would expect this of Tories.
But we have to conclude that Labour has now been totally corrupted.
That is what is frightening about where we are. Morals, ethics, principles and values have left Labour. All that is left is a vacuum desperately seeking power.
Starmer is high in the pantheon of charlatans who have sought high office in this country
The true story of what was behind yesterday's debacle in parliament is made clear in an article in The Guardian:
The reality is that Starmer will not condemn Isarael's action in Gaza and wants to perpetuate their right to collectively punish the Palestinian people of Gaza, contrary to international law.
The fact is that the vast majority of people in this country do not like what he is doing. They are protesting.
Labour MPs do not like the right to protest, as the Labour leadership has made very clear by offering its support to the government in crackdowns on the right to protest.
Worse still, the Labour leadership do not like protests aimed at them. They are most definitely, in the opinion, anti-democratic when the exact opposite is true.
So Starmer, rather than listen to the protests and realise that people are rightly angry that he is still supporting the right of Israel to commit genocide, demanded that Lindsay Hoyle break parliamentary procedure to supposedly let his MPs vote on a Labour motion calling for a faux-ceasefire, the conditions for which he knew could not be met.
He claimed his members were at risk. And that was his justification.
So, too, are the people of Gaza at risk. He, however, does not care about them. He only cares about Labour Party discipline when its policy offends all decent people.
And so we got yesterday's debacle. He'd rather undermine democracy than do the right thing for people suffering genocide.
That puts him high in the pantheon of charlatans who have sought high office in this country.
‘Breathtaking’
This chat about the ‘Breathtaking’ television drama contains powerful stuff from Dr Rachel Clarke, who, incidentally, actually discloses that she herself sought help for Covid crisis PTSD: Regrettably this is further proof that government doesn’t care for us or about us.. It should make, I hope, all of us voters, think about future government…... Read more
HMRC have deliberately taken tax collection out of our communities and the price that we are paying for that is very high
I am continuing to work on data from HM Revenue & Customs on its accounts, the tax gap and other issues related to its management of the UK's tax system.
When doing so, I created this chart based on data in section five of the data files on the 2023 tax gap report, downloadable from the HMRC website:
The tax gap is the difference between the tax that HMRC think should be collected each year and they amount that they actually get.
As will be apparent, since I and others began work on tax justice the large company corporation tax gap has fallen from about 8 per cent of revenues to around 2 per cent of revenues. There are, of course, issues I would disagree with on both estimates, but that this trend is correct is, I am sure, correct.
We brought pressure to bear on the government on the large company tax gap from 2005. I created country-by-country reporting that is now in use in about 80 countries, including the UK, to tackle this issue. Large company tax abuse is no longer the issue it was. Investing further effort in it is no longer a priority in the UK and many other countries. It really is time that the current misguided tax justice movement took note: they are barking up the wrong tree when this is just about the only issue that they are still willing to talk about.
The chart does, in itself, prove why. The small business tax gap has gone through the roof. As a proportion of the total UK corporate tax gap it has changed like this:
Small company non-payment of tax is now the issue in the UK corporate tax arena. HM Revenue & Customs do, I think, still seriously underestimate this tax gap and its ramifications by suggesting that it might be £8.4 billion a year. The large business tax gap is, in their estimate, just ten per cent of that.
But the question is, why is this? I am musing on there being one very obvious cause. Look at the inflexion point in the top chart. It is 2011/12. That is when HM Revenue & Customs began to close local tax offices, end on-site PAYE inspection, and, most especially, began the process of ending almost all on-site VAT inspections of small businesses.
If VAT is not paid, sales go unrecorded. If sales go unrecorded, so too does profit. So, too, incidentally, does PAYE on the money illicitly taken from the companies involved. The small business corporation tax losses since 2012 arising as a result might have amounted to £25 billion in my estimate. The other losses will have exceeded that sum, easily. And that is all because HMRC tried to save £1 billion, maybe, a year.
We are paying an enormous price for HM Revenue & Customs mismanagement in that case. They took HM Revenue & Customs out of the community and the price we are paying for that is very high.
Only a dishonest government has no money..
There is an interesting disclosure in today’s Sunday Times article suggesting that the Post Office Chairman, Henry Staunton, appointed only in December 2022 was given the sack by the Conservative government on the grounds of being responsible for the lack of resolution to the subpostmasters’ scandal, when the scandal was by last year into at... Read more
Minority Rule -OK?
The disasters that are the Rochdale and Hyndburn deselections are, I can attest, entirely demotivating to Labour supporters and campaigners. The demotivation comes from the fact that unlike their (I fear, less and less) esteemed leader, we hear the utter contempt on the doorstep. The effective destruction of Gaza is a moral issue and deeply... Read more
Why isn’t Labour interested in company fraud?
There was an article in the FT yesterday suggesting that the price of incorporating a company in the UK may be too low and that the reforms that the UK is introducing next month may be wholly inadequate to tackle the risks that the UK’s almost non-existent company law administration regime has created.
As they noted, the UK creates the largest number of red flag money laundering risks with regard to company incorporations in the world:
This is unsurprising. Because companies can be formed for next to nothing in the UK and the annual fee for retaining a company is just £13 a year, the resources made available to Companies House have been far too small for it to have had any chance of administering the more than 5 million companies that exist in this country, which figure is way an excess of any reasonable needs as indicated by comparison with other equivalent countries in Europe, as well as in the USA.
What the FT did not mention was the extraordinary cost that this failure also creates within the UK. I estimate in the Taxing Wealth Report 2024 that maybe £12 billion of tax is lost each year as a consequence of the UK’s failure to regulate companies in any meaningful way.
£6 billion of this cost arises because of HM Revenue & Customs' totally lax attitude towards corporation tax compliance.
The other £6 billion is the result of Companies House facilitating tax losses of all sorts, including of VAT and PAYE, that should be due by companies trading in the UK from which Companies House does not demand accounts and instead strikes them off its register, in the process aiding and abetting their fraud that then goes entirely unpunished.
The Labour Party has always, supposedly, been interested in creating a level playing field. If it was it would take up this issue because taking crooks out of the economy is the best possible mechanism available to any government seeking to support vibrant markets. I have not, however, ever heard anything from Labour on this issue. I presume, as a result, that it is not interested in level playing fields, vibrant economies, or taking crooks out of the economy, let alone in finding £12 billion of missing public revenue. Why not completely baffles me.
The opposite of a certainty is not an uncertain uncertainty
Donald Rumsfeld became better known for his known unknowns, and his unknown unknowns than he was ever known for his supposed knowns. Such is the perverseness of history. Contrary to neoliberal thinking that history is just a series of known facts, nothing could be further from the truth. It is all a matter of asking how we create facts, recall them and then of interpretation.
What I suggest that we do know now is that we live in an age of uncertainty.
We used to be certain that the USA was the enemy of Russia. Now Donald Trump is inviting Russia to attack Europe.
We used to be certain that the Conservatives upheld law and order. Now they are determined to undermine it.
We were told as certain fact that the Tories would always manage the economy prudently. We now know that is not true.
And, we were certain that the lessons of the 1930s with regard to pandering to fascism had been learned. That is clearly not the case.
This does, of course, create uncertainty. Is it any surprise that there is so much collective angst in the world when so little that was once supposedly relied upon is no longer true?
That angst is, however, compounded by something else. Rumsfeld might have thought that the opposite of a known was an unknown unknown, but an uncertain uncertainty is not the opposite of a certainty.
We are not living in a world where the opposite of our old certainty is unknown. We are living in a world where that opposite is most definitely known. The opposite of our old certainty is that the world is fast embracing fascism both nationally and internationally. The only thing that is unknown is how long it will take for us to accept the reality of this new certainty.
The National Debt doesn’t add up
Carol Vorderman has been doing some sums: FACTS David Cameron became PM, after Gordon Brown, on May 11th 2010, 5000 days ago. In June 2010 he said the national debt was £770 billion (other sources quote £903 billion, but I’ll use HIS £770 billion for the calculation) By end Nov 2023 the National Debt had... Read more
The National Debt doesn’t add up
Carol Vorderman has been doing some sums: FACTS David Cameron became PM, after Gordon Brown, on May 11th 2010, 5000 days ago. In June 2010 he said the national debt was £770 billion (other sources quote £903 billion, but I’ll use HIS £770 billion for the calculation) By end Nov 2023 the National Debt had... Read more