With thanks to False Economy, via #occupylsx.
And for the record, if that means I pay more tax, so be it.
Nov 282011
Interesting commentary from Andreas Whittam Smith in the Independent this morning, who says:
What are people angry about? The deepening recession? Yes. The high level of youth unemployment? Yes. The excesses of the bankers? Yes. But more than anything, I believe, people are rattled by the widening gap between the “haves” and the “have-nots”. The banners at demonstrations that proclaim, “We are the 99 per cent” speak eloquently to that. “We are getting nothing, while the other 1 per cent is getting everything.” Many people think so.
And he concludes:
[G]overnments can make changes in personal taxation. They can deal with the hidden truth about taxes on the very rich: that they are easily avoided.
The millionaire who, when his fortune is made, goes to live in the Isle of Man, is a tax dodger. The rich man who purchases a farm for its tax advantages, even though he has zero knowledge of and interest in agriculture, is a tax dodger. The employees of investment banks who benefited from trusts that gave them non-repayable loans so that they could avoid paying National Insurance (schemes that were subsequently closed down by HM Revenue & Customs) were tax dodgers. Making the rich pay all their taxes would be a good place to start in the enormous task of reducing inequality.
Precisely so.
But the tax profession is clearly already lining up to oppose Graham Aaronson’s proposed attack on the most egregious tax abuse schemes.
Will those who support tax abuse never listen?
And why do government’s continually listen to the abusers and not those who want to do the tight thing? Why is it so hard to support ethical behaviour?
Nov 232011
Ian Hislop referred to the ‘illth’ during his programme on banking last night.
It’s a great word.
According to Websters it means:
: the condition of being economically unprosperous or miserable <the glaring disparity between the state’s natural wealth and its human illth — Christian Century>
or: something that produces or is symptomatic of illth <much of the goods on our shelves is wealth rather than illth —Nation>
John Ruskin first used it, as the opposite for wealth. But he didn’t mean poverty: he meant the materialism that consumes the owner: the ill being of material accumulation.
It works.
I was a founder member of the Quakers & Business Group and am still a member. It issued the following press release yesterday and I am pleased to share it:
The Quakers & Business Group stands alongside people of all religions and none who are resisting economic injustice with peaceable action. We recognise the concerns of those engaged in the occupation of financial centres throughout the world. We support this movement that highlights the failures of the current structures and systems, leading to behaviours that exploit people and oppress their fellow human beings.
We are concerned about aspects of the global economic system that divide people from the environment and from one another. Q&B has worked, and continues to work, towards new systems of economic activity that relieve the current oppressive nature of many of our business practices.
Our understanding is that the Occupy movement’s aims reflect the views of many of the people around the world, who seek fairness and right ordering in financial affairs. Quakers began as a grassroots protest movement. We know from our history that peaceful direct action plays an important and ethical role in resisting injustice and achieving change.
-ENDS-
The Quakers & Business Group is both a listed informal group within Britain Yearly Meeting and a registered charity whose purpose is ‘to promote Quaker principles particularly in the context of business and the workplace’.
Nov 162011
The pedants are already out in force seeking to attack The Courageous State. One of the unexpected challenges relates to the fact that the book is on sale on Amazon. The Kindle edition is on sale now at £7.15 and the book will be there in the next few days, just as soon as they have physical supplies.
Why the challenge? As one commentator said on the blog this morning:
I’m a supporter of what you’re trying to do but this time your two-faced hypocritical attitude stinks. Not only do Amazon use tax havens but they also use LVCR through the Channel Islands thus making thousands of people poorer. If by selling your book through Amazon is not supporting companies using tax havens, I don’t know what is. Shame on you! Now post this if you dare?
Another on Twitter reads:
Inspired by your pragmatism, I shall keep using BVI and IOM subsidiaries whilst praying for someone to shut them down
Well, to the first commentator, if you think I wouldn’t dare post that you underestimate my courage, by a very long way.
Second, and more importantly, I really do think those making such comments really do show a profound misunderstanding of what I say, and what I propose.
The simple fact is I could, I suppose, become a monk and live wholly self sufficiently in some remote place to try to avoid all the harm tax havens cause. And no one would notice. And nor would it help. I would not change a thing.
I do seek to change things. Indeed, I can fairly claim I have. Many in the Crown Dependencies will more than readily testify to the impact I have had on them and their economies. The latest such impact is active involvement in and support for the campaign to end Channel Islands’ VAT abuse – which is another campaign now successfully concluding.
These changes, and many others would not be possible without using a computer – supplied I know via offshore entities, using software supplied in the same way, powered by electricity supplied by companies who use offshore, and on, and on and on in all aspects of my life.
I could sweat about this stuff and devote all my effort to trying to avoid companies relating to offshore but as Action Aid have shown, using my methodology, in the modern economy that is going to be very hard indeed.
So I have to make another choice. I sek to be tax compliant. Tax compliance is seeking to pay the right amount of tax (but no more) in the right place at the right time where right means that the economic substance of the transactions undertaken coincides with the place and form in which they are reported for taxation purposes. Selling books and Kindle editions through Amazon is tax compliant on my part. My refusal to sell through these media would reduce the chance of my message being heard. And it would make no difference to Amazon at all. If I thought it would I’d do things differently, but I know it won’t – and meaningless gestures don’t get us far. So given I’m compliant, I move on and instead devote my effort to changing the system, not the minutiae within it.
And that is fundamentally different from the hopelessly hypocritical position of the Twitter commentator (who is hiding behind a pseudonym , of course). He is consciously choosing to be non tax compliant. I’m not. I’m being completely tax compliant – and am at the same time making it harder for companies like Amazon to abuse.
In the messt real world in which we all live that’s the best I can do. You can call me a hypocrite if you like. But since I never claimed to be a saint I’m really not sure how that helps you. But systemically opposing tax abuse by major corporations will change things.
No doubt those raising the question would like me to spend my time worrying about the small stuff. Well, bad luck: we’ll continue changing the system. That’s much more important, and we’re good at it.
Writing in the Yorkshire Post, the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, commented on the extremes of wealth and poverty and the urgent task ahead to re-establish a fairer society. He said (amongst much else):
Many of us who joined the Jubilee 2000 Coalition, which campaigned successfully for the cancellation of debt-indebtedness by poor countries to the rich nations must now found a new coalition to tackle this inequality. The spirit which led to the campaign for Trade Justice, Make Poverty History, Fairtrade, and the Millennium Development Goals, must be rekindled.
Why?
Because changes in public attitudes can take place quite quickly. Over the last few decades racism has lost its respectability and is seen as unacceptable. The same applies to homophobia (the irrational fear of homosexuals) and discrimination against women. My belief and trust is that a society which has shown itself capable of making such rapid changes to attitudes in these areas will also prove capable of recognising that our society will work best when we recognise that as human beings we are all, fundamentally of equal worth and members of one society.
Let us do it. Let us do it now.
He is right.
I believe the Tax Justcie Network has helped lay the rgound for this work.
Now it is time to become a mass movement. And the good news is that Ed Miliband, unlike many still in the Labour Party, realises that.
Nov 032011
I spoke on the above issue at the Front Line club last night. And i stress, straight away, that I have no obvious right to do so: I have only attended a couple of times and spoken once, so I spoke as an observer of the phenomenon and for myself and no one else.
That said, I argued that what the whole #occupy movement is about is creating a space for dissent. Geography is a really important part of this: having a location where people can meet and talk over a period is vital That’s because for thirty or more years neoliberalism has very deliberately crowded out all dissent, in economics and politics. So we have a hegemony of neoliberal thinking in economics whilst politicians are cowed into offering one agenda within the framework of the current political domain. These are themes I explore in depth in The Courageous State.
The importance of #occupy in this context is that it creates a space; physical, social and virtual in which an alternative narrative can be developed, explored, tested and be accepted. This is vital. This narrative has to replace the failed mantra we have been fed for thirty years that greed is good, growth is essential, finance is power and that those who fall by the wayside should be left there since it’s all their own fault. Vast numbers of people realise this is wrong, as of course it is. But as even debate last night showed, the simplistic mantras of the far left and right want to close this debate down and both using similar language. That’s to say, they argue that by seeking a new narrative those occupying are wooly headed and wrong when both these discredited ideas can offer certainty, albeit that the certanty they provide is only in the minds of the true believers and bears no relationship to the life experience or needs of the people of this or any other country. But it’s their narratives that demands certainty that the media have echoed to date.
That’s indication of the bankruptcy of both the old left and the right, but it’s not now going to put people off seeking the change that is needed, even though no one quite knows that that change might be, even if I have just written 332 pages speculating on it!
So #occupy is in a very real sense about telling a new story. And what’s so shocking, as I pointed out, is the way they’re doing it. They’re located in exactly the right place to challenge the power base of the UK in the City of London (and only pedants argue they should be outside the Bank of England, not St Paul’s: they’re in the City, which is all that matters). The City is based on secrecy, and it promotes it through its tax haven activity in London and through its branches in Cayman, Jersey and so on. That secrecy is compounded by the form of company accounts, whose consolidated nature matched by the opacity of companies to their shareholders means we know nothing at all about what happens inside the world’s major corporations. So tax haven and multinational corporations create a massive secrecy space, hidden from view where decision making is an unknown, unaccountable process. And then along comes #occupy and is so transparent it is shocking, revealing its inner working for all to see. And those used to the conventional logic that decisions are made and we are then told about them cannot fathom what is going on.
Precisely. The process is in itself revealing what is wrong with the City.
And have no doubt these methods can and do work. The Quakers have used them for 250 years and have yet to vote on anything – and have had massive social impact despite that.
Now I’ll be honest: I do not think consensus decision making will become widespread. But that’s not the point: the point right now is the challenge that it represents to the way of working of the City of London. This shocks it to the care, which is precisely what is so radical about #occupy. In the process of creating a new, complex, maybe messy (like life itself) narrative it is being open and honest about the fact that this involves honest doubt, uncertainty, evolution, error and change. That’s like life. But it’s not what neoliberals say life is. They say people are rational, all knowing, certain as to their preferences, and consistent over time. Unless they are all those things the neoliberal model of economics does not work, which is, of course exactly why it fails.The comparison is obvious: #occupy is honest, neoliberalism isn’t.
And yes, these are all themes in the book, and I build within it a whole new economic theory based on the messiness of life. But that’s just fortuitous coincidence. My point is that #occupy wants to build a new narrative, and that the process in which it is doing so is central to that aim. And that in itself makes it a pivotal action in understanding the changes our society is likely to go through over the years to come.
And I embrace it for that reason.
The following is by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. It has been published behind a paywall on the FT site but it is far too important to be left there. It needs wider airing, and so in view of its importance to all Anglicans and non-Anglicans I’m reproducing much if it since on this occasion there won’t be debate if it is restricted to those who can pay for the FT:
It’s sometimes been said in recent years that the Church of England is still used by British society as a stage on which to conduct by proxy the arguments that society itself does not know how to handle. It certainly helps to explain the obsessional interest in what the Church has to say about issues of sex and gender. It may help to explain just what has been going on around St Paul’s Cathedral in the past fortnight.
The protest at St Paul’s was seen by an unexpectedly large number of people as the expression of a widespread and deep exasperation with the financial establishment that shows no sign of diminishing. There is still a powerful sense around – fair or not – of a whole society paying for the errors and irresponsibility of bankers; of impatience with a return to ‘business as usual’ – represented by still-soaring bonuses and little visible change in banking practices.
So it was not surprising that initial reactions to what was happening at St Paul’s and to the welcome offered by the Cathedral were sympathetic. Here were people – protesters and clergy too, it seemed – saying on our behalf that ‘something must be done’. A marker had been put down, though, comfortingly, not in a way that made very specific demands.
The cataract of unintended consequences that followed has been dramatic. The cathedral found itself trapped between what must have looked like equally unpleasant courses of action. Two outstandingly gifted clergy have resigned. The Chapter has now decided against legal action. Everyone has been able to be wise after the event and to pour scorn on the Cathedral in particular and the Church of England in general for failing to know how to square the circle of public interest and protest.
There will be plenty of postmortems no doubt. But before we indulge in yet more satisfying indignation, we should keep two things in mind. First, the Church of England is a place where the unspoken anxieties of society can often find a voice, for good and ill. If the Church cannot find ways through, that is not an index of its incompetence so much as of the sensitivity of such matters. Second, we are at risk of forgetting the substantive questions that prompted the protest.
As I said, the demands of the protesters have been vague. Many people are frustrated beyond measure at what they see as the disastrous effects of global capitalism; but it isn’t easy to say what we should do differently. It is time we tried to be more specific.
There is help to be had from a bold statement on our financial situation emerging last week from the Vatican. This document, from the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, is entitled ‘Towards Reforming the International Financial and Monetary Systems in the Context of Global Public Authority’. It contains, with sharp critical analysis, a rather utopian vision of global regulation. But, more important, it offers recommendations that seek not to change everything at once but to minimise the damage of certain practices and assumptions.
One is something we have now heard clearly from many sources – a plea endorsed by the Vickers Commission that routine banking business should be clearly separated from speculative transactions. The rolling-up of individual and small-scale savings into high-risk and high-return adventures in the virtual economy is one of the more obvious danger areas. Early government action in this area is needed. A second plea is to recapitalise banks with public money. Banks should be obliged in return to help reinvigorate the real economy.
The third suggestion is probably the most far-reaching. The Vatican statement strongly backs the proposal of a Financial Transaction Tax – a “Tobin Tax” or, popularly, a “Robin Hood Tax” in the form in which it has been talked about most recently. This means a comparatively small rate of tax (0.05 per cent) being levied on share, bond, and currency transactions and their derivatives, with the resulting funds being designated for investment in the “real” economy, domestically and internationally. The modest rate of taxation conceals the high levels of return that could be expected (some $410bn globally on one estimate).
This has won the backing of significant experts who cannot be written off as naive anti-capitalists – George Soros, Bill Gates and many others. It is gaining traction among European nations, with a strong statement in support this week from Wolfgang Schaüble, the German finance minister. The objections made by some who claim it would mean a substantial drop in employment and in the economy generally seem to rest on exaggerated and sharply challenged projections – and, more important, ignore the potential of such a tax to stabilise currency markets in a way to boost rather than damage the real economy.
The UK government prefers the model of a direct taxation of bank assets. It looks as though that will be their position at the impending summit of the group of 20 leading economies. But we need robust public discussion enabling us to assess the advantage of a co-ordinated approach across Europe, and to inquire into how far the government’s preferred option will guarantee the domestic and international development goals central to the “Robin Hood” proposals.
These ideas, which have been advanced from other quarters, religious and secular, in recent years, do not amount to a simplistic call for the end of capitalism, but they are far more than a general expression of discontent. If we want to take seriously the moral agenda of the protesters at St Paul’s, these are some of the ways in which we should be taking it forward. The Church of England and the Church Universal have a proper interest in the ethics of the financial world and in the question of whether our financial practices serve those who need to be served – or have simply become idols that themselves demand uncritical service.
The best outcome from the unhappy controversies at St Paul’s will be if the issues raised by the Pontifical Council can focus a concerted effort to move the debate on and effect credible change in the financial world. If religious leaders and commentators in the UK and elsewhere could agree on these three proposals, as a common ground on which to start serious discussion, questionings alike of protesters and clergy will not have been wasted.
I do not think these three go nearly far enough. Two at least are specific, but the first is the big one. And there’s much scope there.
It’s time for the Church to really embrace this and bring in expertise to deliver on it.
And that’s not ex-bankers. That includes protestors, thinkers and critics too.
Nov 012011
What began in the financial district of New York City in mid September under the name Occupy Wall Street has become a movement that is spreading across the globe. But what do they want and how do they intend to achieve their goals? Are their aims realistic? Can they have any impact?
Join us at the Frontline Club tomorrow 2 November at 7pom to debate the aims and objectives of the Occupy movement and to discuss whether it can bring about any change.
The tent cities springing up across the US, the UK, Australia and elsewhere have been compared to the scenes we saw earlier this year in Tahrir Square but is there a common bond?
With:
Harry Cole, a political journalist and media commentator. He set up Tory Bear in 2008 whilst studying at Edinburgh University. He is now News Editor of Order-Order.com and writes for The Daily Beast and Total Politics and The Commentator. Twitter: @MrHarryCole
Naomi Colvin, supporter of OccupyLSX. She set up UK Friends of Bradley Manning, the UK support group for the accused Wikileaks whistleblower. Twitter: @auerfeld
Richard Murphy, a chartered accountant and economist. He is the author of The Courageous State: Rethinking Economics, Society and the Role of Government. Twitter: @RichardJMurphy
Aaron Peters, a PhD candidate at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is co-editor of Fight Back!, host of Resonance FM’s‘Novara’ and student activist. He is also on the National Committee of NCAFC, one of the organisations behind last years students walkouts and street actions. Twitter: @aaronjohnpeters
Additional panelists to be confirmed.
Our First Wednesday events bring together experts and commentators and mix their views with contributions from our audience.
