UK Politics
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In fairness, scapegoating minorities - be it jews, romas, blacks, latinos or immigrants - has always been an easy argument for populists. It's nothing new: it's as old as humanity, and while the media doesn't help, it really isn't the primary cause of this.
The way to prevent people from shifting the blame for their ills onto others is making sure they don't have ills to blame anybody for. All the moderate parties have failed to do that.
Education also plays a role: somebody who's poor but educated will be harder to convince that some minority or other is entirely responsible for their being poor. And again, all moderate parties have failed to promote proper education.
Oh easy peasy! Just solve all of societies problems!
Sarcasm aside, that's really hard, and it's not like we don't have examples of other countries trying other strategies than what we're trying.
It's not easy to fix the media either, but it's a smaller area to focus on than all of our problems...
Is it though?
How many poor people who have their lives made instantly better enough to think twice before voting for a demented convicted felon orange fascist, using only a fraction of the obscene wealth of Elon Musk alone?
If it were easy, some country would have managed it, or at least most of it.
Not sure what Musk's has to do with it unless you think that labour has some way of seizing his assets, nor what Trump has to do with it unless you think he's running for labour leader.
It's very simple: tax the rich fucks who currently don't pay their fair share of taxes and you'll get plenty of dosh to make poor people noticeably less financially stressed out and less willing to vote for extremist shit, is what I meant by my Musk comment.
So, you could do that on income or on wealth.
On income, the "rich fucks" could be defined as the top 1% of individuals with an income over £160k. Call the average income of someone in that bracket 200k, and tax them every penny they earn - that's about £68 billion, which is net 40 billion once you subtract the tax they already pay. This is not a marginal rate of 100%, this is leaving them with no income. £40b is a decent but not massive amount, equivalent to 3% of the current budget.
That maximum shrinks from 40b to something like 20b once you decide on a marginal rate instead, and probably to something like 10b once behavioural change from those high earners trying to pay less tax.
So wealth then. The commonly touted version (I believe that's 1% on everything anyone owns over £10m) is projected to earn 24bn a year, but then rapidly be avoided by people stashing their money elsewhere. A one off wealth tax might work much better, and would work well from the point of view of "wealth inequality has increased massively, we need a once in a generation rebalancing" but this would raise 160bn once only.
If we can optimistically raise £44bn per year for a while, that works out at £1500 per household, or £30 a week. That is not nothing - many households are desperate for that much. But that is not an amount that just fixes poverty for the entire country. It is not an amount that pays for every school with RAAC to be renovated, or every GP surgery to have enough appointments, or every town to have a bus service that isn't shit.
This doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. The country does not tax the rich enough, and fixing that will help equality. But it will not turn the country around. It will also have knock on effects that make its practical efficacy even less.
You could also apply the only truly fair tax: VAT.
Sales tax are great because they don't care where the money is coming from: if you can blow a lot of it, you pay a lot of taxes. If you can't, you don't. Very fair.
As for imported goods and services, apply duties to collect the money as if it was sold locally.
Finally, if you think taxing rich people enough will drive them away, consider this:
The idea that rich people will just "move their wealth elsewhere" fundamentally misunderstands how rich people's wealth actually looks like. We're talking businesses, factories and stocks here, so just tax those. It's very hard to move a supermarket out of the country.
I'm all for taxing the wealthy more heavily, and in particular those companies that operate in the UK but extract their profits to other markets, but it just isn't as simple as that.
Most of the tax opportunities to levy against wealth, capital gains or inheritance tax for example, are easily avoided. There would need to be wholesale reform of the tax system and even if any political party had the capital there really aren't that many billionaires or centi-millionaires in the country. There are 55 people in the UK with wealth over a billion.
These people are also the most able to move assets out of a tax system to one that is more forgiving or to hoard assets, transfer them to trusts and family etc.
It would take a decades long program of tax reform to generate any form of meaningful return.
Wealth taxes are part of the potential solution but the aren't the magic bullet people seem to see them as.
Yes, like Mexico.
That's great, but 18% out of poverty is not fixing an entire country. If labour had such results, Reform supporters would still be blaming the remaining 72% on immigrants.
Yes, but as seen in Mexico's latest election, people would be way less willing to listen.
I agree with everything you say here. I'm well aware it's long been a thing to scapegoat minorities of course, for centuries and centuries. The media isn't the primary cause, but it's the main thing that is driving us towards fascist ideas being legitimised, as I see it. Without them doing that we wouldn't be in nearly as bad a situation as we are today. We can't get to sorting out the ills as anyone who genuinely wants to is demonised and delegitimised