Tag: budget

Challenge supermarket domination – transform food production!

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (28.10.25), beginning a few weeks of focus on elements of the climate catastrophe and how it effects working class people on a daily basis. It’s probably all been said before, but as fossil fuel corporate executives and their pet politicians gather in Brazil for the COP climate conference, it’s worth reflecting upon why we’re in this dire state. Of course, as usual, the Paper chooses the headline, sufficient but way off point:

Nutritional food is a Right for All

Food prices are going-up, supermarkets crying poverty. Ahead of next month’s government Budget, the powerful food industry is lobbying MP’s demanding protection from increases in taxes or workers’ rights. Supermarkets have the power and influence to bully and bribe government ministers to do their bidding.
Sixty-five percent of our food shopping takes place in the top five supermarkets. They dominate our choices, our diet and the price of food. Annual food price inflation was at over 20% only two years ago, prices continuing to rise at over 5%, with butter prices up by 19% and milk over 12%. Add-on the so-closed “shrinkflation” of paying more for smaller sized packs and there’s only one result.
High profits! Lidl has tripled its profits in the last year. Tescos is expecting the highest profits at over £3,000,000,000 (£3bn) this year! That’s three-thousand million pounds surplus over-and-above the costs of running the business!
Food prices are rising to increase their rate of profit and still they are crying poverty! They attempt to hide their greed and extortion by blaming the government. The big five set prices amongst themselves that bear little relation to the actual costs of production. £1 for an apple? You must be joking! They grow on trees!
Supermarkets are attacking increases in the minimum wage despite the fact that their employees cannot live on the minimum wage, have to apply for state help with welfare benefits to subsidise their wages (actually subsiding the employer paying low wages), and needing two or more jobs or massive overtime working to afford housing, heating and the very food they stack and serve.
The top directors and shareholders are making a killing. Tesco’s chairman’s “salary” doubled to more than £9.6 million last year. With pension rights and other dividends his personal income is way over £10m a year. Sainsbury’s boss got a 20% increase adding £1m a year to his £5+m annual salary. No-one deserve such income, especially when their private wealth comes from the artificially hiked prices we pay for the essentials we need.
The corporate bosses are attacking any potential higher taxation, saying they have to cut jobs to pay for increases in national insurance contributions, the increases which are needed to keep pace with the inflation that they are in part responsible for! They threaten us with job losses whilst arguing for Budget cuts to the State pensions, education and hospitals.
The supermarkets limit their tax liabilities to the minimum with off-shore arrangements and transnational corporate status, yet shout through TV-ad megaphones to build public support against increases to proper taxation of their high profits. The profits go into the pockets of wealthy shareholders themselves playing fast-and-loose with their private tax liabilities. They’re scamming us. Tax the Rich!
Supermarkets see the highest profit margins from the highly processed “cheap” foodstuffs, mass produced in low-wage factories. The production risks, transport costs and limited life of fresh food makes it far less profitable and are therefore discouraged by high pricing agreed between the supermarket cartel, ready meals encouraged in heavy advertising and clever “bargain” pricing. These industrially produced chemical “foodstuffs” barely contain any real nutrition.
Farmers, already plagued by extreme and unpredictable weather events caused by the deepening climate crisis are complaining of bullying and extortionate demands forced upon them by take-it-or-leave-it supermarket contractors. Migrant workers are subjected to horrific working practices and vulnerable to modern slavery to minimise the wholesale costs of fruit and vegetables and maximise the profits of this big corporations.
And the drive to minimise costs in order to maximise share prices is seeing agricultural land polluted by short-term chemical fixes, destroying the soil’s natural processes for replenishment, creating deserts in the regions we rely heavily upon for the import of food, and forcing human mass migration. We are facing global food shortages as a result.
Don’t cry for the supermarket bosses, and don’t believe their propaganda. Their entire system of food production and distribution is unsustainable, deeply destructive and highly exploitative of both the natural environment and of the working classes here and across the world. We have to organise for a fundamental transformation of food production.
We should revolt against their profiteering, challenge their shareholder’s demands for never-ending growth in profit margins, and not only tax them properly but cap the profits and dividends they are allowed to reap. Nutritional food should be human right for all, not a source of massive private wealth for a privileged few at our expense.

The Time has Come to Revolt Against Inequality!

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly Comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (12.3.24) saying less than enough about the vile and cynical use of Parliament by the super-rich to continually fund their lifestyles on the backs of mass poverty. Their propensity for exploitation has no bounds, their audacity to extract billions of taxes paid by us to ensure the services we need only to be pocketed into offshore personal accounts is beyond criminal – extortion and corruption do not explain it well enough. The gangsters are in charge of the World.

The idea of One Nation is absurd. We live in a class society, layers upon layers of strata, of groupings, based upon wealth and power. Britain’s Capitalist class is one of the very richest in the world, and three times as rich as 15 years ago.

This is why we have political groups, Parties, purporting to represent the interests of each of the competing classes. Democracy is meant to replace open conflict by representing the tensions through debate in Parliament and local Councils, right down to neighbourhood forums

These structures are weaker now, wielding less representation of the people and demanding less accountability of those with power than anytime in the last eighty years. The adoption of free market economics, replacing the post-war mixed economy with overt competition and privatisation, has led all Parliamentary parties to value growth in profitability over social infrastructure. That’s the basis of the common political sense that “they’re all the same”. Politicians all subscribe to neoliberalism.

There are a range of very good reasons as to why most people have little faith in politicians. In recent years it has become apparent that government policies are more based upon the influence from corporate lobby groups than the People. 

It is the owners of big business who are actually in control, Parliament no longer offering even a mediating role between the needs of the bosses and the needs of the workers. 

Protection of corporate profits is now the observable purpose of government, the success rate proven by the record profits of the biggest lobbyists – banks, fossil fuels, supermarkets and arms manufacturers.

The end result is more akin to a nation of citizens and slaves than universal suffrage. The wealth is so accumulated into primarily the top 1% and minimally to the next 30%, that the bottom 70% of those in the UK have a a sliding scale of disposable income, no chance of accumulating real wealth, and a diminishing say in society. The bottom 50% (over 30 million of us), are without any honest representation or wherewithal independent of our week-by-week wage.

Last week’s budget was a stark illustration of this. A government preaching to its core supporters, giving away more tax money to the super-rich whilst trickling some crumbs to its voter-base, the formal opposition party barely disagreeing with that general political approach.

The result. Political spin and bluster on the one hand, more unending Austerity on the other.

The headline cut of another 2p in the £ off National Insurance will benefit higher earners the most: someone on £50,000 a year will save £1,310 — five times more than a worker on £20,000 and 15 times more than somebody on £15,000. It will cost the Treasury an extra £10 billion a year that could have been earmarked for State schools and the National Health Service.

But the frozen tax thresholds will actually mean those on a salary io £25,000 a year will take home £20 less a month. The tax allowance freeze disproportionately impacts the poorest workers because a larger proportion our income being taxed, our wages being low and insufficient. Similarly, pensioners with a small employment pension (they’re mostly very small) will pay more tax.

The pre-election government propaganda was a complete lie, the Chancellor shouting “Lower Taxes” pretending to help hard working people whilst actually giving handouts for bosses and the rich. Hunt increased the VAT tax threshold for small businesses from £80,000 to £90,000 and reduced the higher tax rate on property capital gains—the amount you make from selling property—from 28 percent to 24 percent.

This means more money for bosses and for rich people with big houses at the expense of all the essential services that the working classes rely upon.

The Budget announced huge public spending cuts – £20 billion in cuts by 2028, according to the Institute of Fiscal Studies. Health & Education will see 1% above inflation increases, not matching the increase in need. Public transport, universities and councils will all see devastating new austerity measures, on top of the past fourteen years of Austerity.

Successive governments have stolen, yes, held back and clawed back, some 65% of council funding compared with twenty years ago. Local services – essential services – have been slashed, those that can make a profit sold-off, the rest devastated or demolished completely. 

We have local Councils going bankrupt and forced to raise taxes, a health crisis, a housing crisis, a crisis of our children’s nutrition and mental health, a cost-of-living crisis engineered to maximise the living standards of the richest.

Working class people are not stupid. We see and understand what’s happening. And we know when we’re being lied to. In advance of the general election, few believe it will result in the fundamental changes needed for improvements to the conditions of the mass of the working class. In historical periods of such lack of trust in our leaders there is usually revolt, sparked by the experiences of inequality and injustice. Now is that time.

We are All Engaged in the Class War

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

This is a time of polycrisis. The New Age of Catastrophe. With 130,000 killed by the war in Ukraine to date, at least 10,000 in Gaza, and 20,000 children permanently displaced by the impact of climate change each day, we can all see and feel the crisis. The tension, the need, is to keep hold of the Big Picture whilst also acting upon the local and immediate. This is my weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald printed 13th November 2023, my local chemist (a lifeline for some 3,000 people each week), is being shut down in the name of short-term profit by an offshore hedge fund consortium. This drip-drip-drip fof cuts to essential social infrastructure has to be challenged, alongside the global issues of imperialism and climate collapse.

They’re closing our local Boots the Chemist. The shop manages thousands of prescriptions each week. The pharmacist spends time with individuals, he knows us, advises when there’s no chance of a timely GP appointment, his staff offer a smile. This doorstep service ensures those with mobility challenges have local access to help. The chemists has been a central core of our personal security and sense of safety.

It’s just the latest service lost to our community. Most of us are experiencing enforced rationing as if it’s wartime.

Not only has the cost-of-living crisis cut our real-spending power – lowering wages and raising the prices of the necessities of life: shelter, food and utilities – but the human services for health and welfare have all but disappeared. The working class pay a great deal through taxation for a social infrastructure that is rapidly diminishing. In fact, 40% of gross domestic product each year goes into our State coffers as tax, and goes out again to maintain a semblance of society. Yet we feel ourselves to be getting less-and-less back from the taxes deducted from our wages and purchases. 

Our health services are in crisis, the educational standards of our children are declining by all international comparisons, the general housing stock has become both unaffordable and in need of urgent repairs, local government is going bankrupt causing care of the vulnerable to become all but unavailable. The community hubs of libraries, parks and recreational facilities, paid for from our Community Taxes, are crumbling from lack of maintenance.  

We are not in a State of War. So what is going on? 

Firstly, we live in an unequal society riven by social class. The descriptions above are not experienced by those in the top ten percent of the population with individual income above £50,000 a year or a bank stash hoarded from inherited wealth. The richest one percent of the population live lives wholly separated from the challenges most of us face daily.

Secondly, the incredible level of polarisation between rich and poor has, by and large, been funded by our taxes. This is best summed-up by even the most superficial consideration of the political creed of “Privatisation”. Tax-payers funds have been squandered on transferring all our essential services into the hands of private companies and their shareholders, started by the Labour Government of the mid-1970’s and accelerated by all from Thatcher to Sunak ever since. 

Our water was sold-off in the early 1980’s, since when £75 billion pounds has gone into shareholders private accounts whilst our rivers and coastal shores became polluted and the charges for fresh water and sewage disposal have risen to a point where many – yes many – can’t afford flush their toilet through the day. 

The privatisation of electricity and gas supplies has seen record profits, record dividends for the bosses and large stockholders, and record prices to a point where we are now expected to not heat our homes but huddle under blankets. 

Fuel prices rise and fall at the whim of producers, but at base are three times the price of five years ago and the profits are three times as high – all this with UK-based oil producers receiving at least £10.5 billion a year in subsidies from us, the tax-payers, whilst they pay next to nothing into the Exchequer. 

And that’s the third thing – profit. Britain has become an internationally low-waged, long working-hours economy. Small and even Medium Sized businesses, known as SMEs, are undoubtedly struggling, keeping wages low in order that the tax-payer donates to the wages of their workforce by paying Universal Benefit top-ups, whilst our taxes pay-out Housing Benefits, not to the tenant but to the landlord who has increased the rent to unaffordable prices, able to increase homelessness through the licence to evict without cause with two months notice. Private profit divides and rules us all. 

It’s all rotten. It is the big businesses, the transnational corporations who do not respect our national borders but demand tax-incentives – bail-outs and subsidies from our pay-ins – who are bleeding us dry. The hundreds of billions in tax relief for corporations dwarf the tax money spent on supporting the homeless or refugees who we are told to blame for our poverty.

And all the while, the corporations are looking to increase their profits and dividends at the expense of most of us. Smaller companies go to the wall, the larger ones seek to restrict services and sack staff solely in order to make ever-larger pay-outs to their owners. 

That’s why Boots the Chemist is closing our local pharmacy – private profit over human need. Our medical prescriptions deliver them millions in profits paid by us, the tax-payers. Boots, its private equity owners, Walgreens, based in Switzerland (for the tax-avoidance no doubt) made a profit of £137million last year, its boss taking home a £3,800,000 million pay cheque. Apparently that’s not enough.

It’s never enough, is it? The impact of the closure upon our community’s health will be severe, but the greed of the system of Capitalism doesn’t give a damn.

We are engaged in a war, currently one-sided – the Class War. We have to fight for a better system based upon need not profit! This week that fight demands a campaign to save our local pharmacy.