Over the last few days I have listened to more radio phone-ins than is normal, largely because I have been waiting to take part as a guest on the programme.
Leaving aside any debate about the ethics of taxation, the most striking feature of these programmes has been the commentary provided by those who are living in fear of being unable to pay their bills as energy, food and other costs increase. As has also been apparent, without state assistance there is no obvious way in which the nightmare that many of the people telling their stories can be resolved.
One person who spoke eloquently, but with fear and anxiety dripping from every word that she said, related her story to Nicky Campbell on Radio 5 on Friday. No one, including Campbell, interrupted a word she said because it was so powerful. In her 50s, I guess from the story that she told, and after 30 years of work she was now disabled and unable to work any more. What she did was lay out the plain straightforward case that given the already small budget on which she has to live, and an absence of savings, she has no idea how it might be possible that she can now pay the bills that will be arriving for energy, food, council tax, water and other basic costs over the months to come. She was frightened, and very obviously reasonably so. She added that as someone who had always voted Conservative to date, she could never do so again. The way in which she felt she had been treated had made her change her mind.
I did not note this woman's name. I just listened, totally believing her story (as it is clear Nicky Campbell did) and her utter inability to comprehend the situation in which she now found herself, where the government was choosing to leave her to her fate. Whatever the concept of the safety net provided by government it was clear that in her case it had ceased to exist.
Of course, she is not alone. Across the country there will be literally millions of households facing this fear, and it is utterly disabling. Once your focus is, firstly, upon the immediate decisions that have to be taken to get through the day with too few financial resource to do so, and secondly, worrying about when or if this might ever end, there is virtually no opportunity left for a person to think about anything else in their life. Horizons are crushed. The opportunity to care is denied. What is left is a pervasive, all consuming dread.
Yesterday a friend in the States asked me if over the last few days I had been pursuing a one-person campaign to get rid of Sunak. I said I had not been doing so. I have nothing against him as a person. But I am opposed to the callous, profoundly self-centred, indifference towards those in poverty that typifies both people like him and his party, which seeks to promote the politics of indifference to suffering that these people espouse. That is why, I admit, I want him gone. That, and the fact that the politics in question are delivered using what looks horribly like fascist propaganda techniques, that is.
I keep wondering how it is that we bred a population so indifferent led by politicians so willing to exploit that lack of care for political purposes. And then I remember that most of these politicians went to public school, enjoy enormous wealth, and were taught at Oxford, whose politics, philosophy and economics course would appear to be the epicentre of indifference training in the UK, and after that I wonder what it is that can rid this country of this toxic combination.
For the sake of all who are going to suffer at their hands we have to.
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For any solution I can think of, such as banning from public office or high public employment those who were privately educated or are Oxbridge graduates, I don’t see any way to get from here to there.
I would go along with banning those who had studied PPE (Politics, Philosophy and Economics – although some of us had a less flattering name for the course) at Oxford.
Bernard, the most flattering thing to say about PPE is that it is a contentless degree. The philosophy is trivial and the economics is worse than useless.
I was surprised how many cabinet ministers have passable claims to be domiciled outside the UK (in fact, not necessarily claiming the remittance basis).
Johnson was born in the US and his great grandfather was an Ottoman government minister. Raab’s father escaped to the UK from Czechoslovakia as a child before the war. Sunak’s parents were born in east Africa, where his grandparents moved from Punjab. Patel’s father also came to the UK from east Africa, with the grandparents in Gujarat. Javid’s parents came to the UK from Pakistan. Kwarteng‘s parents came to the UK from Ghana. Sharma was born in India. Zahawi was born in Iraq. Dorries has Irish ancestry. And these are just the obvious cases, without digging too far into the family history or considering their spouses.
In many ways this is an accident of history, a legacy of empire, and a result of more generous immigration policy than this and other recent governments have permitted since the 1970s. But how many of them might be wealthy enough to have claimed non-dom status in the past?
We need to know
As a British person with immigrant grandparents myself, it makes me feel a bit uncomfortable that you’re suggesting that a British citizen with foreign relations might basically be fiddling their tax and we should investigate that possibility pureley based on their foreign origins.
I agree it would be good to know who has claimed Non dom status in the past or now, but being a non dom has nothing to do with nationality and everything to do with having genuine ties in another country, genuine residence in another country and a permanent home in another country, so I’m not sure that making up a list of people with foreign grandparents is a particularly helpful place to start and even though I’m sure you didn’t mean it to, it has slightly upsetting implications for how people may percieve the validity of, for example, my own Britishness.
Wrong
It is is an indicator of potential non dom status
No one wait was proof
Except a troll, by inference
Javid had non-dom status for several years after becoming an MP, according to an article (mostly about Sunak) on the bbc website.
Carole, can you provide a link to that, please. I think Sajid Javid has said he claimed non-dom status when he was working as a banker (at Chase Manhattan and Deutsche) before he became an MP, but not after he became an MP. eg. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/apr/10/sajid-javid-non-dom-status-before-political-career-sunak
Amy, I understand the concern. For better or for worse, a person inherits domicile from their parents, and change of domicile necessarily involves people who move from one country to another. That has become much more prevalent in the last 70 or 80 years, and I expect there are many hundreds of thousands of people who have been living in the UK for many years but could in principle claim to be domiciled outside the UK (although many have lived here for all their lives, and/or have little intention of living anywhere else). Perhaps a test that made some sense in the 1790s – when the UK had an empire, but relatively few people changed domicile or paid income tax – is no longer relevant.
For me, it is not a question of fiddling taxes, but rather one of whether a person’s domicile (which to a large extent depends on accidents of their personal history) should remains a relevant factor in determining their income ax and capital gains tax liability in the UK. I can see the rationale for taxing short term visitors to the UK (perhaps less than five or seven years) different to long term residents, but why should a person have to remain here for 15 years to be taxed like everyone else? Why should the UK tax system let around 70,000 wealthy people pay a large fixed amount to avoid tax on their non-UK income and gains?
I agree
We need a ‘secondment rule’ but not a domicile rule
Firstly, can I say I really didn’t mean to troll and thank you to Andrew for your answer.
Its simply that in the tax year ending 2020, HMRC estimate that there were 75,700 individuals claiming non-domiciled taxpayer status in the UK. That is clearly a very small number compared to the number of people in the uk who must have foreign grandparents.
Almost all non doms do have foreign grandparents, but a simple search for foreign grandparents returns a much longer list of people, most of whom are not non doms.
Such a list of MPs would include every black and Asian MP, quite probably most of the Jewish MPs, people with Irish family and any random foreigner. People like Dawn Butler, David Lammy, the Milibands would all be on it and lots of other people who, based on what they say in public, would strongly oppose the non dom system.
Meanwhile, I am sure we are all aware that there are a small number of people out there who do not have foreign grandparents but are nevertheless non doms. I don’t think Lord Ashcrofts grandparents were from Belize.
For the record, I think the whole non dom system is nuts. The thought that a very rich person can pay a flat fee to avoid tax for 15 years is baffling and infuriating and completely unfair.
But I hope its obvious why I might find the idea of compiling a list of Blacks Jews and Irish suspects disturbing. Im not even sure how useful it would be as a search tool, because you’d have to apply further search criteria, and you’d still have to check everyone with British grandparents in case of a few more Lord Ashcroft situations .
Noted
But I disagree
Except to note that you note this 8s inherently racist and so wrong
Meanwhile, the Conservative PR strategy is to disable public attention, now forcibly being brought to focus on the appalling cynicism of Conservative policy, directed to the catastrophic financial mess it is still making of people’s lives under Sunak: by re-focusing all the attention it can on Johnson as a ‘statesman-leader’ in Ukraine. President Zelensky is, of course glad of any help Ukraine is given; but his real message outside the Conservative echo-chamber of London, is that the West has completely failed Ukraine (including Britain, which has been too intent on the fatuous ‘Global Britain’ idea to protect Europe, the EU and NATO as a European defence treaty); and for decades Britain abjectly failed to address Russian geolpolitical policy, near or far (Grozny, Oligarchs, Litvinenko, Georgia, Crimea, Ukraine, drom 1999-2022, if you want some of the luridly large clues Britain has chosen flatly to ignore), and is still allowing Putin to dictate the shape of the political future in Ukraine – an outcome, be in no doubt, for which Johnson is at least as culpable as anyone else in the West (a man driven entirely by his personal ambition and vanity).
What Zelensky is too busy to know, or care about Britain, is the degree to which Johnson, the Conservative Party and its acolyte media have used the Ukraine crisis simply as a political vehicle to promote Johnson and the Conservative Government’s domestic political interests, in order primarily to deflect attention from the political consequences of their abject failure to protect the people of Britain from a cost of living crisis (arising from Covid, Brexit and a Ukraine crisis they had failed to predict or address, still less have fixed); or to have met their fundamental obligation to protect the security of the British State and its people from harm. The Conservatives, in short are despicably resorting to a squalid foreign-war propaganda cover for their incomptence and deep inadequacy; while hiding their intent in plain sight.
Benefits like pensions should at the very least be linked to inflation. If as is the case the UK “safety net” is set at a bare minimum required for survival then when the price of that survival changes then the income level needs to change. That would at least be fair, understood by most voters and alleviate stress to some extent. Because it is only a re-rating of income in the face of increased costs there is no overall increase in the benefits paid in real terms although there is a good argument for overall benefit levels to rise in any event. There will no doubt be those who will argue “why should the poor be helped when we are not” and there will be marginal cases that don’t get help but they exist now. Tories view all recipients of state benefits including to some extent pensioners as scroungers. The difference is they tolerate pensioners on the grounds they tend to vote Tory. In the event that they stop doing so expect state pensions to be curtailed or allowed to whither.
Benefit levels DO increase with inflation. They increase in April by the amount of declared inflation in the previous September. Several problems with that:
the measure of inflation for benefits should be based on the real cost of necessities, food, heating, shelter, the costs of which have incresed massively compared with whtever index is actually used.
the base on which the increase is assessed. Benefit levels are barely enough on which to subsist and inflation takes place daily. So, even if the benefit is just enought to subsist on in April, it is insufficient by May.
that is exacerbated by the by the 6 month gap between assessment of inflation and payment of the increase.
But the link was also broken last year
I listened to the Saturday phone in on Radio 4 that takes place after Any Questions. There were several callers who missed the point entirely, and went on at length about how awful it was to tackle the Chancellor’s wife. One caller took it further when challenged about the fact that this is really about the Chancellor’s conflict of interest. He praised Rishi Sunak for being a ‘self-made man’ as if that had any bearing on the topic. True blue to the core!
I see Sajid Javid has made an attempt to declare his moral superiority before the media latch on to his tax affairs. In it he says he had no legal duty to stop being a non-dom when he entered public service, but he had a moral duty. Unless this HMRC statement has been superseded, there was no need for morality –
“Part 4 of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 provides that members of the House of Commons (MPs) and House of Lords (Peers) are deemed resident, ordinarily resident and domiciled in the UK for the purposes of income tax, inheritance tax and capital gains tax.”
https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/residence-domicile-and-remittance-basis/rdrm10565
No need to rely on HMRC’s manuals – you can go direct to the legislation. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/25/part/4
Members of the Commons and the Lords have been deemed to be resident and domiciled in the UK of the whole of the tax year in which they have been a member of those chambers, since the 2010/11 tax year (i.e. since 6 April 2010). That was one of the last pieces of legislation passed by Gordon Brown’s government before the 2010 general election. Perhaps I am misremembering, but wasn’t it largely triggered by concern about Lord Ashcroft? eg https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10535852
It was
It also moves him up on the queue to replace Johnson.
“She added that as someone who had always voted Conservative to date, she could never do so again.” but only because, all of a sudden, she is in dire straits.
Had things gone on “as normal” doubtless she would have continued to tick the conservative box at elections – even if the candidate was a performing chimp.
I read “The Salt Path” – it tells a story of people doing OK & then suddenly disaster. Suddenly they are the under-class. Suddenly the find out just how hard things are for those lower down the social strata.
What many many people in the UK lack is empathy. Alain de Botton in his book “Status Anxiety” referenced the play Oedipus Rex, & noted that it was designed to elicit empathy amongst watchers. It could have been them making a series of errors that led to disaster. He also noted that the Sun headline would have been “Sex with Mum was blinding”.
The combo of Thatcher and the sewer end of the media have been complicit in eroding UK serf’s sense of empathy. The woman who had always voted Tory, falls into the same class as the tory MP accused of murder, who then discovered that he did not qualify for legal aid (having voted for the legislation that ensured he did not) and had to use a vast amount of money to clear his name. They both wish that things were different, they were/are both complict in the bad outcomes that hit them. I have sympathy for the woman’s plight, but my question to her is: so when will you join a plolitical party and campaign? The reason for the tories getting away with what they do is passivity amongst UK peasants and serfs – they don’t need to be passive – it is a choice.
Mike, I am finding it difficult to find any sympathy for this woman as it has been her choices, along with other like individuals who have voted Tory, that brought her to this plight. Had she not been in the position she now finds herself in, I don’t think she would be changing her vote. Only because it affects her, not others, does she now ‘see’ that her Tory votes were possibly a mistake.
However frustrating it may be there are two approaches to changing their minds that will never, ever work. The first is “I told you so”. The second is, “hell mend you”. If you are preaching empathy, the lack of sympathy you are illustrating, scarcely exhibits the least vestige of it. My real objection to your argument, however is this: what is it both supposed, or more important, likely to achieve among those now facing the consequences of voting Conservative?
Nothing.
In response to Mr Warren:
I did expresse sympathy (I certainly would not like to be in her position – & I have been = no money).
My core suggestion is to join a political party (obvs not the tories) & campaign for change. I certainly would not take a “I told you so” attitude.
Rationale: The situation is bad, this is due to political decisions, join a party that will campaign to remove those that made those decisions and work with the party you join to change things for the better. UK serfs think they are powerless (apart from the laughable vote per election) – that suits the tories (and to a great extent Liebore).
Her utility function had an unanticipated step change –
https://rwer.wordpress.com/2022/04/08/weekend-read-expected-utility-theory-a-severe-case-of-transmogrifying-truth/
“I did not note this woman’s name. I just listened, totally believing her story (as it is clear Nicky Campbell did) and her utter inability to comprehend the situation in which she now found herself, where the government was choosing to leave her to her fate.”
Running a country’s a complex business. If she, together I gather with millions of others, couldn’t understand the consequences of voting as she (and they) did, she and very many others shouldn’t have been allowed the vote in the first place. Unthinkable in the current environment I know, but the idea of limiting the vote to an astute handful will stay that way unless and until we start to discuss it.
I allow for people to make mistakes
Come on now Dear Friends.
The only people who get bred to behave like this are at the very top economically of society – bred in the huge homes (new and old) that seem to be increasing in this country; belonging to the perma-rich or new rich who have made their fortune through far too many years of Neo-lib daylight robbery; their progeny educated in the private boarding schools/school system, quaffed up by the best University’s and already well connected and with no idea what it is like to live in the real world.
I refuse to hold the rest of the country responsible really although I agree it is mightily frustrating.
I see a lot of everyday kindness from everyday people to each other to be too harsh on them.
We have to accept that as a society we are actually UNDER CONTROL at the moment.
Being ‘under control’ you say? What does that look like?
It is normal these days to forget about truths and facts and trump (literally!) feelings and rumours instead. We are encouraged to play identity politics with each other and look for more victims and then compete as to which one of us is the most needy victim.
And if we are seek out victims, then we must have perpetrators – enemies who can be the surrogate hate figures for disaffection that should by rights be aimed at those those who rule over us. So, the needs of our neighbours become a threat to our own well being because as we know help is in short supply (through austerity and universal credit which is deliberately niggardly so that it appears that too many people want help) .
So the people get mad at each other instead rather than looking up rightly towards the Palace of Westminster.
This is what being ‘under control’ looks like – a confection of continuous crises, shortages and misinformation meant to render us useless at seeing the truth.
And this Tory Government and its supporter/financiers are masters at it. They are so morally and ethically bankrupt I’m afraid that they have no choice but to use fascist techniques.
They went all in on this one – mark my words.
As for those ‘bred’ into power, well, they have proven that wealth – extreme wealth even – dehumanises them and makes them a breed apart. We gave them the benefit of the doubt and they have rewarded themselves – not society.
One day more of us will realise our mistake. And that is why we must not give up hope that people like that voter Richard spoke of will realise that they’ve been hoodwinked.
And when that realisation hits them, we progressives are here with open arms and ears and a smile to recognise their hard won epiphany.
No ‘We told you so’ or ‘Tough shit’ – nothing like that. People feel enough shame when they’ve been had – it’s not our job to add to it. All we have to do is welcome them in their new reality and build from there.
It is easy to be angry with them I know – I’ve done it myself.
But hey – let’s not eh?
Never lose site of who is responsible – that’s what I say.
There is some fascinating research in the US on the purchase of a Ford truck (currently the F150) in the rural states. In it the authors looked at all the attitudinal factors that were tied up in the purchase. Of these the most important were tradition (grandfathers axe syndrome), peer pressure (buying something else marked you down as some form of radical), social standing (most of the purchases were with extras) and patriotism.
This all against an economic case for buying Toyota or Hyundai.
It is clear that much of Tory support in Brexit lay in such murky waters, and that a strong emotional element continues.
My view is that if Labour positioned itself as the Social Justice party, rather an own brand Tory party, it might change the narrative.
I agree
There was undoubtedly an earlier generation of Tories who had seen what had happened in The Russian Revolution and were keen that it would not happen to them.
That and a sense of responsibility.
The thing that we dont seem to comment on though is that Javid grew up in a far from wealthy home yet seems entirely devoid of any kind of empathy or insight into the lives of those on less than average earnings.
If I were ever to interview a politician or prospective politician, the first question I would ask them is “When did you most recently realise you were wrong about something and change your mind?