Bryn Glover deplores a lack of courage and awareness among politicians of the major parties who refuse to tell the truth on tax and spending
Every general election brings out the liar and the braggard in all politicians, and this 2024 election is no different: indeed the lies and the posturings this time are even greater than usual. The two areas where the deceit is most apparent are in initiatives to tackle environmental damage and in the future funding of all our public services.
It is quite clear either that none of the current batch of world leaders actually understands the immediacy of the first, or they do understand but are criminally refusing to acknowledge the facts because they feel it would be electorally damaging to do so. The second area concerns public expenditure and the lies being told about what is needed.
Public sector pay
As an illustration, consider the case being made by the BMA on behalf of our nation’s doctors. The BMA position is that NHS medical staff need a pay rise of around 30% (the actual percentage depends on a number of variable factors, but it is of this scale) in order to restore the losses since the start of austerity when the Tories first resumed power under David Cameron and his chancellor, George Osborne.
The Tory government counter is that this is unaffordable and clearly seen to be ‘unreasonable’ by any average person. But simple logic tells us a different story. If the doctors are seeking no more than parity with what they were receiving 14 years ago, then to describe that demand as ‘unreasonable’ can only mean that the Tories think that when they came into office, doctors were being significantly overpaid. If this is the case, then they need to be challenged to declare it honestly and openly.
But the BMA case is no more than an illustration of the crisis into which every one of our public provisions has fallen. We can make the same case for massive extra funding of education at all levels from pre-school to postgraduate, local authority services including everything from potholes to palliative home care, law enforcement including prisons and probation services, transport, energy supplies, water and waste, our armed forces, as well as a number of other areas now in the private sector which ought to be supplied communally such as end-of-life hospice care.
To put some broad numbers on the table, the UK gross domestic product (the total of all transactions) is annually just under £3 trillion, of which about 45% or £1.3 trillion is generally regarded as ‘government expenditure’. If all the areas identified are suffering the same shortfall as the doctors, then this implies the need for another £400 billion every year. Labour and the Tories are scrapping and swapping accusations over sums of around 10% of this, which obviously indicates that neither has any real intention of alleviating all the clear needs now facing the country.
Deceits and delusions
Both parties accuse the other of promising a few tens of billions without proper costings and both are accusing the other of planning undeclared taxation rises.
In parenthesis, it should be noted that the Tory trick of dividing global sums by the number of ‘tax paying households’ to produce an average figure to be demanded of everyone is simply dishonest. In this country, we operate several levels of tax liability, and still operate — at least in theory — a progressive system in which the highest earners can expect to be the highest payers, evasion and avoidance notwithstanding.
It is all deceitful and delusional. We need massively more public funding and the only possible source for this is general taxation. We need all our politicians to have the courage and honesty to say this and to spell out what their policies would really mean.
This is not to say that the worker on average earnings or those surviving on small pensions should expect to be significantly or indeed any worse off.
The gap between the lowest and the highest paid in this country has steadily widened since the end of World War Two. At that time the differential was about 10-fold from the worker to the factory-owner. Now it is safe to add at least a zero to that figure. A report from Oxfam indicated that during the two years of the covid pandemic, this country acquired a new millionaire or billionaire every 30 hours. This year’s rich lists show growing numbers of people who claim to own more than 200 billion (pounds, dollars or euros – it hardly matters at this level), and some are declaring their ambition to be the world’s first trillionaires.
Facing up to tax reality
Capital accumulation is not the subject of this article, but suffice to note that every unit of currency accumulated is by definition surplus to need: it has consumed surplus labour-value, extra raw materials and extra energy, while creating surplus pollution, both solid and gaseous. The planet can accommodate no more capital accumulation, i.e. no more capitalism.
The answer then would seem to be straightforward. We need new ways of taking tax that are genuinely progressive, which means that what is called the marginal rate needs to increase with every pound to be taxed.
None of the current batch of politicians who seek power in this country has either the awareness or the courage to spell this out. In fairness, it probably should be admitted that to specify more taxation in a political manifesto would amount to electoral suicide, but this is exactly what is needed.
Public expenditure needs massively to increase even if it seeks to match levels of expenditure of 14 years ago, let alone seeking to improve the quality of provision over those already meagre levels.
The AGS is quite clear about this. Our policies demand significantly greater involvement of society in the provision of what Robert Tressell called the basic necessities of civilisation. We campaign for global production to be in the name of human need and not of individual profit, and we assert that this can only be achieved by significant communal planning and agreement.
Bryn Glover is a member of the AGS national committee
Photo: “Portrait of Hugh Gaitskell as a Famous Monster of Filmland” by Richard Hamilton (1964)
Alliance for Green Socialism 