Tag: tax-the-rich

Money for Social Care can Easily be Found

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My Comment column this week, printed in the daily Plymouth Herald, challenging the deceit that there is no money for Welfare. At an ailing 72 years of age I declare a personal interest – we need more money for Adult Social Care. And the money’s there! I hope you agree.

Do we care so little for ourselves? The majority of us will suffer with a chronic condition by the age of sixty-two. One in seven of us will require others to care for us full-time through our final years of life in full-on residential nursing care. Many more will need three-times a day home care with washes and toileting. It could be you!

Yet, in a State budget of £1,220 billion in 2024/25, Adult Social Care – looking after those who have difficulty looking after themselves – has an overall spend of just £35 billion, itself part of the “social protection” budget which includes housing benefit to a total of £130bn. Paltry compared with Health (£165bn), the state pension (£124bn) and debt interest (£105bn).

Prime Minister Burnham has staked his “political capital” (whatever that may be) on sorting out social care. Clearly, this can’t be done without spending more money. The narrative has already been skewed in the direction of us all having to pay more even while Britain is the 6th wealthiest of 195 countries and Britain’s richest having increased their private wealth by 65% since 2019.

That the money for social care could be found if politicians desired, is proven by the simple fact that governments can find the money whenever they need it. Take COVID, £35bn (yes, the same amount as the total for social care) spent on Lockdown inside 20 months, including the missing £10bn lost in contracts to “preferred suppliers” (political mates) in contracts for protective items never supplied.

And never mind financial rules, outside of political party pledges and manifesto commitments, this year alone, some £25bn is being added to the arms and military budget in a single fell swoop, £14bn of which is to be spent on illegal weapons of mass destruction – nuclear warheads.

We can find the money for social care easily if we want. The money for adult social care is paltry at the moment, the tiny sum excused by government pleas of poverty and indebtedness. How about changing the debt repayments, the bankers and financiers could live well on half the interest rates currently paid – a government action first applied at a time of war or social crisis. We are in a social crisis.

And a rent cap, and mortgage interest cap, preventing excessive profiteering by landlords and banks from our essential requirement of a roof over our head, would cut Housing Benefit costs significantly, the money transferred to social care. The government could replace the sacked tax inspectors to ensure the more than £60bn per year in current taxes left unpaid by evasion and fraudsters is collected. They could nearly triple the adult social care budget overnight!

A Wealth Tax, by whichever permutation you would wish to enact it, would rebalance to a limited extent the gross inequality found in Britain today. The top fifth of UK households own 63% of the country’s wealth, while the bottom fifth, including two-thirds of those needing social care support, holding together only 0.5%. The richest 10% of UK citizens possess nearly half of all the nation’s wealth.

Britain’s social care system has been broken by the neoliberal free-market brutal system of raw capitalism. Privatisation. More than 85% of adult social care operates inside the private for-profit sector of the economy, relying on an an abused migrant workforce paid minimum wages. Social care workers are the most exploited and oppressed of all our 6.2 million public service workers who together have not had a real-wage increase in the past decade despite rampant inflation caused by excess profits. Cap profits, pay the workers!

In fact, Capitalism depends upon the Family to sustain a society based upon class exploitation and private wealth. The National Care Association identifies that more than 4 million of us operate as the primary carer for adult relatives, unpaid and ill-considered, representing at least two lives plunged into poverty for every one of us in need.

Don’t accept the lies and deceit of arguments for us to pay more if we are to enjoy a comfortable old age. We already pay enough, our taxes simply falling into the wrong hands through the wrong priorities. Engage with the current “national conversation” to demand prioritising social care over private profit!

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Tax the Rich again and again!

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (25.11.25) – the eve of the Autumn Budget. Tax the Rich! Enough said. We protested at the budget eve lobby of Luke Pollard MP Armed Forces Minister in the afternoon at Frankfort Gate, demanding Wages not Weapons, Books not Bombs, Welfare not Warfare!
Tell Rachel Reeves to Tax the Rich properly (not my headline but good enough).
The unexpurgated version below, or expand to read the printed article.

Oh no! The Bosses are threatening to go on strike! They may even leave the country! What ever will we do? Why is it OK for the rich to hold us to ransom but not the poor when we down tools and strike because we can’t live on the official minimum wage?
It is one of those basic truths that the owners of big businesses don’t create wealth. Workers make the goods and products and provide the services. Bosses simply reap the profits because they own the businesses, usually on the inherited wealth from their ancestors who stole it in the first place.
The threat, made-up by the right-wing press, is that the rich are going to be taxed more in tomorrow’s Budget. In response the super-rich might leave the country. Oh no they won’t! They’re having too good a time in Britain, at our expense.
British billionaires make an additional £35million every day by doing nothing more gambling on the stock exchange! Their wealth has more than doubled since 2010 when together they were worth £250,000,000,000. Now they’re “worth” £620billion, half the entire annual tax-spend of £1.2trillion. The 5- richest families in Britain own more than 50% of the population – 34 million people.
Their super-wealth means price hikes for us, the tax cuts and accountant-managed tax-evasion for them costing the Exchequer and our social infrastructure at least £36billion. There’s the mythical spending-gap filled twice over! Tax the Rich, Make Them Pay!
For workers, the average cost of living has risen overall by more than 25% since the Pandemic. Our incomes haven’t. But Reeves is set to tax the elderly, 60% of whom have no real private wealth. Of course, some do, but working class pensioners don’t have huge incomes. Landlords do (some of them are pensioners), big shareholders do (some of then are pensioners), the directors of the private water companies and utilities do (some of them are pensioners). It’s all about class, not age!
Start with taxing the super-rich properly. The British based banks have been making a billion pounds surplus to costs every week of 2025. That’s one-thousand-million pounds every week, £143million private profit every day for the past 337 days (and back before that). That’s a 14% increase in profits made on the backs of the debt and overpriced interest payments of working class people, underpaid and overcharged across Britain.
Our bank accounts and insurance contracts are protection rackets continually making us offers we can’t refuse. Banking is business that we can’t do without because of the salary and mortgage systems. They have us over a barrel and should be nationalised as public services, not private corporations.
The rich shareholders are laughing all the way… You might think that a Labour Chancellor would not only raise the surcharges on the banks’ bulging vaults – Barclays, Lloyds and Nat West – to ensure they pay taxes commensurate with the rates we pay, but heavily cap their charges and profit margins to stop this level of corrupt exploitation. Yet the Banks’ total tax bill was less than 24% last year, lower than the average wage earners’ and piddly compared with Germany or Japan’s 32%. And they’ve wasted so much. £100billion on HS2 nowhere, £36billion on a test-and-trace that didn’t work. The rich pocketed our dough.
Tax the rich! But no. Labour, once up on a time branded as the “workers’ party”, is a friend of the financiers, the hedge-funders, the asset-strippers and the speculators.
The profits for the arms manufacturers and those trading in war are going up exponentially – all arms are funded by the tax payer. We pay Them! Stop funding war from our taxes! War is always paid for by the very poorest in society, from the tents of our homeless on our streets because of cuts to welfare expenditure to the deaths of millions of civilians across the world.
The rising tax-spend for arms funding to over £76bn, 40% of it for illegal nuclear weapons of mass-destruction, is a confidence trick. And the nuclear levy to build Sizewell C won’t produce cheap electricity or energy security. It’s another speculators scam, the price-hikes passed on to we the choiceless consumers. We desperately need honest Climate Jobs to address the very real Climate Emergency, not unproven high-profit techno-fixes. Stop paying the £10.5BN a year to fossil fuel companies making huge profits out of energy prices the highest in Europe!
And never mind stealth taxes, create a land tax now and sort out the incredible inequalities of the Council Tax. Overall, the richest 10% pay far far less tax than the middle 60%. With tax evasion and business subsidies, a cleaner may well be paying more as a proportion of their income than the owner of the office block they’re dusting, and more than the multi-millionaire directors of the businesses in the offices.
The free-Market “trickle down” economics does exactly the opposite – money flows upwards for the super-rich to hoard. It’s socialism in reverse – wealth from the many to the few. Tax the Rich! And stop the lies. The companies paying the minimum wage are subsidised by the tax-payer to do so – we pay to raise the pay of the poor through Universal Credit effectively allowing the Boss to pay less wages…and less tax! Raise the Minimum Wage to £15ph to cut the benefits bill!
The Rich always blame the working class for our suffering. We are expected to self-loathe: “pensioners are a burden”; “migrants are scoungers”; “the sick are scammers”. Don’t believe the mass media – all of which is owned by billionaires!
We want our taxes to be used as intended – to pay for our social infrastructure, not subside the Rich. Jobs for our one-million unemployed young people, food for our four million children in poverty, help and support for our eight million under-resourced elderly, cash for the privately-plundered NHS!
The simple fact is that the Boss Class are liars, scammers, scroungers and a burden on us all. We’d be far better off without them, in the hundreds of billions! Tax the Rich!