Apoplectically Linked: Tax Avoidance & the Vilification of Poverty
Something of different tack here as I revive the name Apoplectically Linked, which I had previously given to an aggregator for hateful news stories and shaming scum. Unfortunately it was, it turned out, the blog that broke the camel’s back, in terms of upkeep, but now the defunct name has a new home. Apoplectically Linked has come home to Postmodern Idiosyncrasies, a banner for the occasional livid post about injustice, inequality and inhumanity.
First a video from UK Uncut about the effects that brutal cuts are having on healthcare, education and public services, and how these costs could be covered by a reformation and simplification of tax law and by properly levying the taxes owed by large corporations and private institutions.
To follow, an example of how cuts to the Welfare budget, saving approximately £2 billion a year (or around a third of the tax Vodaphone avoided paying over an equivalent period), are publicised as a crackdown on the injustices suffered by the tax payer. Those tax payers who can’t afford to employ an accountant or financial advisor to avoid their responsibilities at least. Bearing in mind that the ideas for waging “war” on the unemployed are essentially the same as protocols already in place and that despite decrying Jimmy Carr for tax avoidance on an income of some £3 million pounds he was entirely comfortable employing Philip Green, the owner of Topshop who took a dividend of £1.2 billion and avoided around £285 million in income tax.
Simon Walters: CAMERON TO AXE HOUSING BENEFITS FOR FECKLESS UNDER 25S…
But maybe you don’t care; maybe you’re a working class conservative, or something similarly self-deluded, and you believe the popular narrative of there being both a deserving and an undeserving poor. So, to help you out, here’s one final article. Willard Foxton, self-professed “card-carrying Tory”, has written a piece for the New Statesman on why that line of deferred reasoning doesn’t hold water.
Willard Foxton: TAX AVOIDANCE ISN’T A LEFT OR RIGHT ISSUE…
Note the differences between the two articles, particularly in reason vs. aggression and fact vs. rhetoric…
The point then is that the government sees no value in the poor and overvalues the rich; money begets money even while people at the other end of the economic scale are grist in the mill that sustains the inevitably unsustainable. Make no mistake, David Cameron, the Conservative party and the coalition government hate you, or would if they thought you were worthy of even their illest-intents.
