Long time no post for reasons too boring to detail here.
So, what’s been happening while the blog has stayed silent. Amongst a raft of what can only be “is it me” surreal moments, the reaction to Ed Ball’s proposal to reintroduce the 50% tax rate has to take the biscuit.
The media and business elite appear to have suffered from near hysteria when the announcement was made – you almost felt that the medics needed to be called in. Apparently, announcing a marginal increase in taxation for the 1% of the population earning more than £150, 000 per annum is clearly the trigger for the country’s decline into third world destitution. Apparently, this is a slap in the teeth for those wonderful entrepreneurs and senior businessmen whose sole purpose in life is to ensure a varied and fulfilling career for the rest of us poor unfortunates who just haven’t got the intellectual capacity to do what they do. We just don’t have the breadth of vision to run private health companies, donate to and advise the current government and then pick up the private contracts in the NHS that are generated by the government policy that was partly created by their own lobbying. It takes an intellectual heavyweight to run an energy company that increases prices when wholesale costs increase but finds a raft of ludicrous excuses not to reduce them when costs decrease. We just wouldn’t be able to think that one through, no wonder we have to pay these skilled practitioners such huge packages, despite significant evidence of performance bordering on the less than competent.
Apparently, it’s nonsense to suggest to the bankers that if they do a competent job, then they are quite simply fulfilling the basic requirements of their employment. No, they need to be paid twice their annual salaries in bonuses for their not inconsiderable ability to do their jobs to a level bordering on mediocrity. If not, then the country will simply sink into a dystopian nightmare as these wonderful ‘wealth creators’ all bugger off and get jobs elsewhere. There is of course a radical and earth shattering alternative to this doomsday scenario – there are approximately 56 million people in the UK; call me a silly, naïve optimist but I suspect a fair old number of those will have the mental capacity to take on these roles without assuming that basic competence should give them a divine right to receive bonuses many, many times more than the average salary (outside the rarefied atmosphere of the city and multinationals).
The Labour Party needs to push the moral and ethical principles of its latest announcement, rather than just the economic benefits. If we are “all in this together”, then pushing a 50p tax rate at the top 1% of UK earners seems like an eminently sensible approach to ensuring that this is visibly the case. That is, once you’ve dismissed the arguments and smokescreens around indispensability that are trotted out whenever such a proposal is made. Such vehement opposition to the proposal simply amplifies just how in hock to big business the Tory party really is. Alternatively, maybe we should get the heart surgeons and cancer specialists to throw a wobbly and demand bonuses twice their annual salary if they extend the life of, say, half the patients with whom they work. They wouldn’t receive bonuses only if they succeeded in killing every patient with whom they came into contact, which is the closest I can get to a health service equivalent to match the greed, incompetence and irresponsibility of the bankers we are now once again supposed to think are the country’s salvation.
As long as the debate is couched in terms of the power-broking wealthy and elite, the real questions will never be asked. Much easier to generate a climate of fear and blame the welfare cheats, immigration and the lazy unemployed. As always, elements of truth in a generally vindictive and morally bankrupt approach deflect the debate away from big business behaviour, colossal tax avoidance (that dwarfs the cost of benefit ‘handouts’) and complete lack of accountability.
I understand that amongst the hysterical reaction from business and media alike, a certain Lord Digby Jones has been one of the most vehement critics of the 50p rate. Apparently, Labour is “kicking the wealth creators”. There can be no more powerful argument that the proposal is sound than when Digby Jones is against it and this is his basic rationale. That poor old 1% – they must really be hurting, hope they’re not having to cut back too much on those Bullingdon bread fights as they make those difficult and significant decisions that history might just suggest benefit the few rather than the many.
As a postscript, I see RBS is about to discuss with shareholders the possibility of awarding 200% bonuses to some of its staff, announced on the day it posted £8bn in losses. If it’s performance related, I guess they must deserve it – presumably they all managed to spell their own names correctly on the mid morning coffee order.