My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (27.8.24). Spurred into foaming wrath by the cut of the pensioners’ Winter Fuel Allowance I have to vent my wrath. Tax the Rich. ‘Nuff said. It was too much for a well-known local far-Right UKIP letter-writer, who denounced me as a Marxist. Yawn.

The unedited version here:

Stop the Riots of the Rich!

The most fundamental tension in society is between social classes. Yes, the oppressions affect us all too, but class is overarching as the basis of either the power available to oppress or the powerlessness that renders us oppressed.

The degree of exploitation we each experience is the deciding factor as to how oppressed we will be. Sexism is far less of an inhibitor if you’re Margaret Thatcher, Racism not nearly so painful if you’re a billionaire person of colour. The physically disabled are more mobile if they can afford a motorised wheelchair and an adapted home, and so on.

The inequality between rich and poor is not only about wealth, it is about agency – the degree of self-determination available. Most of us have choices so limited as to constrain both our dreams and our abilities. We scream out, periodically, at the sensed injustice of our social condition.

Historically, riot is the cry of the oppressed, revolt is a festival of the powerless, uniting to find some semblance of social agency. Inhibitions are lost in the outburst of violent relief from the shackles. But as order is restored we pay a harsh price.

Strange then, that the most recent riots in the UK have been led by the rich and the middle class, hardly the most oppressed. They’re complaining that their privileges and entitlements as white men are being eroded by the poorest in society. It’s Black people and trade unionists who are destroying our country, they whine.

In fact, it is The Order that is criminal, the structures that they benefit from. It is their System that allows the rich to steal, plunder, abuse and destroy in degrees of magnitude.

Let’s just look. For a start, the rich don’t pay their share of taxes to the degree and proportion the working class do. We pay far more, whilst they dodge it. Rishi Sunak paid 22% on his earnings, via Capital Gains Tax. Workers on the higher grades pay 40% whilst earning a fraction of his income. When does not paying your liabilities become a crime?

Sunak cried “Stop the Boats” to cut the small percentage of tax money spent on immigration, raising calls of patriotism and nationalism, whilst his family bank abroad. His friends too. Fellow patriot, Lord Cameron keeps his money in Panama, Nationalist zenophobe Rees-Mogg keeps his in the Cayman Island, Nadhim Zahawi, Gibraltar. Reform UK Deputy Leader, public-schoolboy millionaire Richard Tice MP also banks in the tax-haven of Jersey.

The far-Right pretend to be anti-elite but are the elite. They do whatever they can to avoid paying into the public purse for our public services. Not so patriotic, right?

Powerful influencer and multi-millionaire, Lord Rothermere of the Mail newspaper group is registered as a non-dom whilst his newspapers are registered in Bermuda and do not pay the full rate of tax they would have to pay if they were registered in the UK.

Now, Starmer has ruled-out raising Capital Gains Tax and instead cuts the income of pensioners, some of the poorest elderly people in Europe. Yet he wants us to blame immigration for the budget deficit.

Governments of all parties demonise the broken and impoverished “boat people” coming to the UK for taking “our” money whilst all the time leaching off UK workers and giving us nothing in return – what a bunch of racist liars!

Farage earns more than £1million a year but paid his taxes to Belgium, his True Allegiance clearly not to Britain but the EU. His biggest donors are Non-Doms. He’s having to rethink now because the EU is considering bringing in financial transparency laws that will destroy the tax havens of the rich and powerful. Maybe he’ll move to the USA!

If HMRC went after creeps like this there would be no need to rob struggling pensioners of their Winter Fuel Payment. Our schools would be reflated to afford to teach, our hospitals would have doctors again, our crumbling roads tarmac’d.

In the period where food prices increased by 25% or more TESCO made £2.5bn profit, an increase of £1.6bn. This was not inflation but extortion.

Big business & the Super-rich don’t have a country. They move their wealth from one tax haven to another, exploiting workers and chasing profit all over the globe. They only want a country when they need armed state intervention to protect their interests. And even then they don’t want to pay towards it.

We pay for much of the arms being sent to Ukraine and Israel. The leading 15 defence contractors are forecast to log free cash flow of $52bn in 2026 — almost double their combined cash flow at the end of 2021 – subsidised by the UK tax-payer.

Oil and gas firms are allowed to write-off outgoings again tax, to a point where BP and Shell have paid almost no tax in recent years, receiving more subsidies from the tax payer to represent a negative amount of tax – 2015 to 2021 UK tax total to -£685m. Tax-payers subsidise the firms that tripled our energy prices to triple their own profits – BP £27bn in 2023 boosted by the war in Ukraine, Shell £28bn. It’s our money, stolen from us!

The six largest oil firms made £76billion profit in the first 6 months of 2024 whilst being subsidised by tax-payers. Why aren’t we outraged by this instead of blaming people seeking refuge in boats?

Coca-Cola has been found to have hidden “astronomical levels” of profit in tax havens. They’ve been ordered to pay back $16billion tax in the US. Who knows what the other multi-nationals owe, especially the oil companies.

And even when they are caught and fined, they don’t pay. Rather than paying the £250m fine for breaking their business licence, Thames Water has negotiated a “turn-around plan” to keep the money whilst still paying out huge dividends to shareholders.

This is Gangster Capitalism, managed through threat, backstabbing, robbery, numbers games and protection rackets by confidence tricksters. London is known as one of the most corrupt financial centres in the world today, a gigantic laundry for dirty money.

And now they want the UK turned into one big Freeport cesspit, so they dont have to have the hassle of paying to park their cash away overseas. They want to run tax-free havens where their companies can operate free of legal responsibilities including the workers rights of those employed inside. And that’s here, in the wide district of Plymouth, now.

No wonder we’re angry. The super-rich have raped us and left us naked in a polluted land. Our power lies in unity, joining together in such numbers that can cut off their power – not the self-destructive riot but trade union organisation towards general strike action.

The top 1% in the UK own more than 70% of the population combined. Stop cutting our services and tax the rich instead!