Rolls Royce and the Rest of Us

The financial news is dire, the reports on the cut backs in support for the disabled, the disadvantaged or the abused are fairly brutal and sadly predictable. 

The cutbacks in public services might not make an obvious impact to many of us right away, but when your local swimming pool closes, when the local library is boarded up I suppose some people will start to go, “oh, right, that’s a shame.”

There is a small group in our society who truly won’t notice. They rarely use public services like hospitals or state schools. The top 1% of our nation are richer now in comparative terms than they ever have been in the history of our entire settlement on these small islands. They don’t need public services and as we all now know, they don’t pay for them either. 

This is not really news, the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) released a report last year showing that the UK had the gap between the richest and poorest expanding faster than anywhere else on earth.

Way hey, Britain in the lead for once.

It’s not so much the middle or even upper middle income homes, it’s the gap between the hyper rich and the rest of us that has expanded so dramatically.

This gap is most easily defined as the people who pay tax on their income and the people who don’t. The hyper rich don’t pay tax.

This phenomenon was brought into the spotlight recently when reports of record sales and profits for an iconic British company were released.

The company is called Rolls Royce and they make rather expensive cars. Anywhere from £120,000 to half a million. Rolls Royce have never sold as many cars in their history as they have since the announcement of ‘the global economic meltdown.’

So is the global economic meltdown a myth? Maybe it’s not as bad as the lefty newspapers and the BBC would have us believe. (See how I cleverly grouped them together, I’m learning) Is this another one of my mad cap socialist inspired conspiracy myths? 

The report on Rolls Royce was in The Telegraph, ( http://bit.ly/dW77le) a well known pro Tory newspaper.

I do believe this country is in massive, overbearing debt. I don’t believe this debt is due to illegal Romanian immigrants sponging off the state, or hoodies in Macclesfield who won’t get a job. They cost this country diddly squit. 

The people who took all our money are the top 1%, we all know this and yet is that supposed to be okay?

Is it that we don’t want to criticise them because we believe there’s nothing wrong with making money? We believe there’s nothing wrong with being rich and there’s nothing wrong with being successful. I’m not saying this to make some twisted Marxist point, that is what I believe. I would love to be rich and successful, from reading some of the comments on this page there are people think I am rich and successful and therefore hypocritical and double standard’ed and just, just unfair!

However, I am also very aware that I live in a society (I know M Thatcher said there is no such thing) and I live with other people, some of whom are more successful and richer than I’ll ever be, some who are less so.

I drive on our roads, rely on our hospitals, my children go to our doctors when they’re sick and they attend our schools. I am protected by our police, (I have had very positive dealings with the police and I support their incredibly difficult job) and I flush my toilet into our sewers. (Okay, my house has a septic tank but you get my drift) 

I am part of our society and I’m proud of that, as we all should be. I don’t see the society I live in as some kind of ‘enemy’ out there trying to do me down. I see it as part of me, and me part of it. There’s plenty wrong with it, some of the things wrong with it are my fault, but so are some of the good things.

My experience with the hyper rich, the less than 1% is that they do not see themselves as part of our society. Most of them don’t pay tax, I don’t mean they don’t pay enough tax, I mean they don’t pay any, not a cent. They are prepared to spend a lot of time and money not paying tax. They employ a lot of accountants and lawyers which allow them not to pay any tax. I’m not saying this because I read a blog about it on an Anarchist website, these are people I know personally, people who have told me how they do it and told me with pride.

Well, why should they pay tax? They don’t use the public services scum like us use. Well, okay, they do still use the roads we pay for, they certainly don’t use the schools we pay for, their children will attend private schools. They do still use the water and sewer infrastructure we all pay for, but they don’t use the national health service. Except they rely on the doctors we’ve all paid to train, because obviously the private medical companies don’t want to waste profits training their own doctors.

But that’s just a handful of individuals, maybe 50 or 60,000 who are in the multi million £ earning sector and pay little or no income tax. If they did all pay their fair share of income tax, it still wouldn’t amount to anything near enough to avoid the cutbacks.

However, I am of course forgetting the corporations, the corporations who are governed in the large part by the hyper rich, the corporations who have gone to great lengths to glean massive profits from this country and pay nothing in tax. It is cruel to pick on any individual company, I cited both Vodafone and Top Shop in a recent YouTube rant. That is grossly unfair on them, they are just two who’s tax affairs reached the public gaze thanks to those crazy rioting students. 

As soon as you look into it, they are all doing it, and of course they are all doing it with the direct connivance and encouragement of the present government, essentially because it’s all pretty much the same group of people. Tory MP, CEO of massive retail chain. Same job, sometimes even done at the same time by the same person.

And just because that last paragraph is critical of the current administration, that doesn’t mean I let the previous lot of no-hopers off the hook. They bailed out the wretched, stupid, short sighted and greedy bankers. ( Isn’t it ridiculous that I can term them thus and very very few people would disagree) The last lot in power gave the banks 60 billion pounds of our money because they stuffed up. I didn’t gamble my savings, bankers did.

And if I’m a crazy, doo lally lefty with no grasp of the realities of the markets and global financial structures, I leave you with a quote from someone who is an architect of free market capitalism, someone with their hand on the tiller.

"If banks take the upside, but we, the general public, take the downside, there is something fundamentally wrong with capitalism. "

Paul Tucker, Deputy Governor of the Bank of England

Nuff said.  Right, where’s the keys to my Roller?

Comments

[Paul H]

Interestingly if you look at figures such as those available at http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/uk_national_debt_chart.html you'll see that current debt is actually pretty modest, being lower as a proportion of the economy than it has been in some 200 of the last 250 years. Now I'm greatly in favour of paying it off quickly, because the structural deficit we've developed needs to end, but I find it fascinating that almost all of us (including me, initially) fell for this idea of "massive, overbearing debt" when that's not the case.

[David Bradbury]

Excellent blog. I couldn't disagree with any of your comments. I remember when investment bankers were generously forgoing their bonuses, one of my ex-colleagues (an investment banker) said it was terrible as he and his colleagues needed and relied on the bonus to pay school fees, mortgage etc. He might as well have been on a different planet - had no idea of the situation that most people were in. He and his ilk treated bonuses as a part of their salary and as far as I know they still do.

Our local County Council are planning to stop the bus service from our village to the local town 16 miles away. The service is well used by people who cant afford to drive a car and need to work in town. A complete disaster looms - but then the people who decided to cut the service are probably paid a disgustingly large salary and have no need for a bus - ever. Their rationale "I've got a car - why the bloody hell haven't you got one"

I really don't know the solution to the inequality - None of the main parties have the answer even the small one that I'm still a member of - although I sometimes wonder why I'm still a member!

I work in IT for a law firm and feel lucky just to be employed - especially with a with a 0.3% pay rise this year. No rise for the previous two years though.

[Andy L]

I've just found your Blog (via Wet Liberal Whenever) which I have really enjoyed. Like David before me, I couldn't find anything at all to disagree with.

I had a look at the link which Paul posted. It is very interesting, but worth noting that most of the "recent" debt (past 100 years or so) was incurred to fight and then rebuild from two world wars.

That said, I find it immoral that one person can be personally worth more that the GDP of entire countries. Our government also seems complicit in the movement of wealth from the masses to the super-rich, as a large number of the tax havens are crown dependencies.

However, I don't have a clue how the situation can be changed. Society is too far gone in its pursuit for and love of money.

If only all the super rich went the way of Bill Gates, giving the vast majority of their fortunes to good causes.

[bluecob]

Sorry but your Labour enthused rant Robert does not allow for the fact that the last administration f*cked up the Country totally and so I would prefer educated, business minded, successful, yes 'rich' people looking after my interests rather than Union controlled sheep. I do agree though that they should pay their fair whack and perhaps the last 13 years of Labour government would have been enough time for them to have rectified this situation.

Then again when a Labourite gets a few bob they soon start looking after their own interests just like the people you have been criticizing.

[Paul (Sydney)]

While I agree with the general thrust of Robert's polemic, if my reading of UK income stats is correct then the top 1% of income earners in the UK is anyone who earns an income (declared or non-declared for tax purposes) of over about $150,000.

Having read some of his books and blogs etc., I suspect Robert might be in this bracket. As are many others who work hard and pay a fair swag of their income as taxes and/or charitable donations. With these folks I have no problem.

I think that the target for Robert's polemic is more likely to be those in the top 0.1% with incomes of over say $500,000 and/or anyone who seeks to dodge tax. Plus certain corporations.

But we, collectively, have let them do it.

I read somewhere that the periods of greatest economic growth where those of the most even distribution of income.

I want to puke when I think about it and how we collectively have let it happen. And the suffering that results.

In a democracy we do have the option of effecting change, but it takes constant vigilance, awareness and individual effort. And there are some possible pitfalls to redressing the situation such as the possible flight of capital and deepening the misery of recession.

Even if it is hard, time consuming and risky, it does not remove the moral imperative for us to make the effort to change it.