You that grind our faces

Right, I need a little break from the writing (it's going quite well, thanks, though I suspect the editing will be a nightmare), so I'll have a little rant.

Yesterday, I had the House of Commons debate about social security payments on in the background. The Tories and their Lib Dem sidekicks have decided that increases will only go up 1% rather than in line with inflation. Essentially, it's a cut, because inflation is the cost of living. If bread goes up 4% and your unemployment payment goes up 1%, you won't be able to afford bread.

The Tories think this is a brilliant wheeze. They didn't need to have a parliamentary vote to make it happen, but Osborne and their Australian strategist Lynton Crosby thought that it would make Labour look like softies, supporting those who, in the Chancellor's words 'sleep off a life on benefits' while you and I go to work. So they released this poster:

Is this poster's charge true? I hope so. My pay rises for the past four years have been below inflation, so I've got slightly poorer each year. But that's OK, because 'slightly poorer' for me means less caviar on my toast, not 'shall I eat today or have hot water?'. When Mrs Thatcher was Prime Minister, unemployment benefits were equivalent to 22% of the average wage: not exactly generous. Now, it's 11% and declining. 

I have a postcard of this old Labour poster on my wall - the same one David Miliband referred to in his speech yesterday:

It's exactly right. A 1% cut from my salary is a flea-bite. A cut from the £40 or so a young unemployed worker gets is enough to send her over the edge. 

Some of this Tory  poster is – of course – purest bollocks as we say in the trade. The Conservatives don't support 'hardworking people': they're bankrolled by corporate interests, and directors' pay increased by 50% over the past year or so. More importantly, the vast majority of people claiming state benefits are in work: ignore the crap about lives on the dole –virtually nobody does that. Instead we're a nation of underpaid workers. Thanks to New Labour and the Conservatives, low wages are subsidised by benefits paid for by taxpayers. We're not feather-bedding lazy skivers: we're feather-bedding shareholders and HR departments. 

It's also true that the unemployed benefit claimants aren't an alien race of parasites. 400,000 civil servants lost their jobs since 2010. Teachers, nurses, police officers, health inspectors and a whole range of ordinary people. You might be one of them. You'll certainly know one. They're us, and they've paid their taxes: social security isn't a hand-out to be withdrawn on a whim: it's an entitlement awarded on the basis that we all have or will contribute to the exchequer. To claim otherwise is a vicious lie. 

I've been reading a biography of John Lilburne recently, the Civil War-era leader of the Levellers, who were too leftwing and radical even for Cromwell and the Commonwealth. The Levellers published a manifesto called The Agreement of the People, debated by the Army council and others in Putney. For the Levellers, Colonel Rainsborough made a beautifully simple point about how a country should be run:

I thinke that the poorest hee that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest hee

We're in the midst of a campaign to demonise those who are without work. There are 500,000 vacancies and 2.5m unemployed people. They can't all be demons. Yet the Conservative campaign to paint them all as 'shirkers' directly denies Rainsborough's call for respect for 'the poorest hee'. The mega-rich have had tax cuts. The companies they run don't bother paying taxes at all. They are the 'greatest hee', and they're nakedly in control. The 'poorest hee' is going to pay for the damaged caused by bailing out 'the greatest hee'.

What are our Parliamentary representatives going to do about it? The Leveller pamphlet Vox Populi (sorry, can't find a full text for this one) was pretty clear on this - addressing MPs who make even the most leftwing socialist now look lily-livered:

O you Members of Parliament, and rich men in the City, that are at ease, and drink Wine in Bowls, and stretch your selves upon Beds of Down, you that grind our faces, and flay off our skins, Will no man amongst you regard, will no man behold our faces black with Sorrow and Famine? What then are your russling Silks and Velvets, and your glittering Gold and Silver Laces? are they not the sweat of our brows, and the wants of our backs and bellies?

The Levellers failed: land, privilege and human rights were retained by the moderate gentlemen of Cromwell's party, though the King was decapitated thankfully. What will be get? A few expressions of dismay from Ed Miliband, a scowl from Nick Clegg and a smirk from Cameron and Osborne.

Update: This has just been picked up by The Guardian as if to prove my point:

The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority has said that MPs believe their pay should rise by 32% hike to £86,250. As the Press Association reports, a survey carried out by Ipsa also found more than a third believe they should keep generous final salary pensions. The findings emerged as Ipsa published a report on its initial consultation into pay and pensions, which ended last month. The research, which politicians completed anonymously, found that 69% thought they were underpaid on £65,738. The average level suggested for the salary was £86,250.

Oh Nick. Nick Nick Nick

It's almost comical how Nick Clegg gets it wrong even when he gets it right. This time, he's proposed a 'time-limited wealth tax' on the mega-rich (which includes him of course: he's a multi-millionaire, while the median wage in this country is £26,000).

Obviously everybody other than the Tories have made one simple point: Clegg voted to cut the top rate of income tax from 50p to 45p on earnings above £150,000, so proposing a new wealth tax seems a bit odd.

However, despite this stupid and regressive tax cut, Nicky's on to something here. The reason hedge fund traders, Mitt Romney (apparently it's OK to run for President of the US while keeping your millions in various other countries) and every rich bastard you've ever heard of avoids paying most of their taxes is quite simple: they don't pay income tax like you or I. I have a salary and savings account and an ISA. I pay tax via PAYE, so no chance to avoid it there even if I wanted to. My savings account is taxed each year automatically (I think the government took £12 last year) and my almost empty ISA is tax-free.

Up in the realms of serious money, there's none of this nonsense. Rather than take salaries, these people acquire cash through 'capital gains' (taxed much lower), investment income, dividends and various other mechanisms. They don't buy houses: opaque offshore trusts and companies buy their houses for them. They are 'non-doms', like the owner of the Daily Mail, who built a (predictably) appallingly reactionary £20m mansion in Wiltshire yet is officially domiciled in France, and therefore avoids all taxes on it and all his other financial dealings. There are entire streets and blocks in central London worth £billions which have no individual owners, just Cayman Island companies

So the Lib Dem idea of a wealth tax is actually a good one. It doesn't discriminate between income and gains, but taxes the lot. It's easy to hide a salary behind a 'service company' (as lots of civil servants and BBC executives have been doing - it avoids income tax and national insurance) but it's harder to hide a mansion, and if extended slightly, taxes the offshore companies used to hide ownership. No cheque in the post? Send in the bailiffs.

I'd forget the 'time-limited' aspect of his plan, reinstate the 50p rate (even Thatcher had a 65p upper band) and tax all financial transactions, particularly the speculative kinds which bankrupted the world. I'd also abolish all benefits for people with jobs. I know that sounds a little rightwing, but hear me out: it's actually a progressive socialist policy. Providing benefits for the working poor isn't good for them: it's a subsidy for the greedy and evil corporations which employ them on such low wages. It raises their profits, which go to shareholders who hide the money away from the taxman. So we pay for the benefits while those who profit don't share the burden. If we stopped paying benefits but massively increased the minimum wage, the employees would still be needed to do the work, but some of the profits would be diverted to their salaries. They'd spend the money on necessities and the economy would improve, while the state's expenditure would drop. All it needs is for us to decide that profit margins can and should be lower. The executives and shareholders have fed off us like leeches for a hundred years: time for them to adapt to changed circumstances.

Poor old Nick. Even when he comes up with a good idea, it's laughed out of court.

Won't somebody tell Uppal to shut up?

A period of silent reflection on Uppal's part would be appreciated by all, I feel. Even sleep-deprived and 1000+ miles away, I'm finding his continued pursuit of public inanity deeply wearing.

So what's my favourite MP been on about this week other than keeping mum about his love of Saudi Arabia's less than cuddly regime? Well, here's an easy question and one that's deeply relevant to his constituents in the, er, English West Midlands:

What recent assessment he has made of the state of the economy in Northern Ireland.

I think this is a 'planted' question, especially as another Tory MP asks exactly the same question. It's a simple one for the (English, Shropshire constituency) Northern Ireland viceroy minister to answer. Or rather, it isn't because it's way too broad. Instead, it's an opportunity for the minister to imply that the Irish rabble are feckless dole scum who need turning out onto the streets while all the Tories bang on about how wonderful Northern Ireland is as part of the UK. Uppal follows up with another underarm ball to allow the minister to claim that NI unemployment is all the fault of the state and the private sector will magic up lots of lovely jobs. Then it will rain chocolate drops and fairies will dance at Ian Paisley's civil partnership with Martin McGuinness.

The really bad news is that Uppal's somehow leading a committee investigation into Welfare Reform. Given that he's openly contemptuous of a) the poor and b) social security, putting a multimillionaire who made his money by inventing wonderful innovative things and providing hundreds of jobs speculating in property in the chair is a clear sign that 'reform' = 'sod off oiks'.

Unsurprisingly, Uppal's contribution in the debate between MPs from all sides and some experts is limited to one long, long question which boils down to the brilliant aperçu that 'work should pay' and one in which he suggested that massively reducing housing benefit might be good for 'the market' (he wasn't elected to represent the market - he was elected to represent 'people'.

I was interested in some of the remarks that you, Dr Nolan, and actually the whole panel, made about how far the Bill can go in providing a carrot and a stick. There has to be a line in the sand on these things. This is quite a subjective question and I appreciate that you might not be able to answer it. Obviously, the current system is not perfect, and there might be flaws in what is proposed, but do you feel that there is a signal in this in terms of the tacit understanding that many people have with the current benefits system? Fundamentally, at its core it is trying to give the ethos that, regardless of whether people are worse off or better off, it is to everybody’s benefit—not only the individual’s, but society’s—that work should pay. I appreciate that I am asking you to respond from your own subjective view of tackling these issues and taking it head on.

Unfortunately, given that the Tories are the party of bankers and corporations, they mean that benefits should be so mean that people will do any job, however humiliating. I think that work should pay to some extent (though I'm not keen on forcing parents to spend less time with their children), but I'd do it by making work pay properly, i.e. a good living wage rather than the miserable wages grudgingly handed out currently. 

You referred specifically to the private housing sector—I thought I heard you right on that. In the current circumstances, an unscrupulous landlord could manipulate the situation. Do you not see some actual positive benefits in trying to provide a brake on the market, which has ballooned over the past few years?

Thankfully, the respondent slapped down our hero by reminding him of the actual human cost of his clever little plan - he doesn't manage to muster a reply.

There is a large amount of evidence to suggest that the changes that we are seeing in housing benefit prior to the introduction of universal credit in the future will leave large numbers of families far worse off than they are now, and run significant risks of increasing homelessness and poverty levels. I am not in a position to assess the precise impact that the policy will have on the market—no one is—but there is that real risk. There has been no pilot of this full-scale roll-out of national policy, and if the market effects are not as intended, there will be significant risks for poverty levels. It is almost inevitable that families will see their real terms incomes drop.

The sheer mediocrity makes my bum ache.