Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear - It's George Monbiot

George Monbiot in The Guardian thinks he knows what the TUC March 26 rally should be about and he tells us, at length. It's a George Monbiot piece so the fairydust and lack of realism is always evident, here's a few of George Monbiot's suggestions with my comments in italics:

'We need to redress the balance between cuts and tax rises (currently 3:1) as fairly as possible. That means starting with the United Kingdom's most regressive form of taxation: national insurance. This levy is so unfair that it's hard to understand why it hasn't received more attention. On earnings of up to £844 a week, you currently pay 11% national insurance. On earnings beyond that point, you pay 1%. We should raise the national insurance rate for higher earnings from 1% to 15%. This would help to address a wider injustice: the poorest 10% of Britain's households pay proportionately more tax (direct and indirect) than the richest 10%.

National Insurance is not meant to be a tax but a payment into a fund. As the fund's payments are capped shouldn't the payments into that fund? Of course the fund is not really a fund but a giant Ponzi scheme, but I don't think any government wants to own up to that.

...

Of the various means of reclaiming money from the banks, a financial transactions tax – the Robin Hood tax – is the fairest and the most sustainable. It's easy to collect, hard to avoid and highly progressive, as it falls largely upon the richest people in the country. A tax of 0.005% on financial transactions could raise a net £13bn a year; a tax of 0.01%, £25bn.

Sounds sensible but much of the profits of the financial services industry are very slim on a transactional margin basis thus a minuscule sounding 0.005% is actually quite a high percentage of profits. Automated systems create transactions to take advantage of small discrepancies in rates, a tax of 0.005% would be factored into these calculations and these transactions just would not happen. The trouble here is not understanding how modern financial markets work.

...

The tax exemption for private schools must end. This costs us £100m a year – to grant unfair advantages to the children of the rich.

Why? People who send their children to private schools pay for publicly funded education through their taxes and again for their children's education whilst also saving the national education service the cost of educating their children. The tax exemption is a small recognition of the good that such people are doing.


Greg Philo of Glasgow University has proposed an interesting means of mobilising the money that the very rich have stashed away: transferring the entire national debt to them. He has shown that this could be done through a one-off tax averaging 20% on total assets worth more than £1m. It would be graduated, so that the richest people are charged at a higher rate than mere seven-figure millionaires. And it wouldn't have to be paid immediately: the asset-holders could choose to pay only the interest on the debt until they died, whereupon the capital would go to the state. This ensures, as the government has promised, that "the broadest shoulders should carry the greatest burden".

This is the great aim of the left, to tax not income but assets. My assets have been purchased from taxed income. Mrs NotaSheep and I have inherited nothing, Mrs NotaSheep and I have received nothing as a gift from family or friends; why should Mrs NotaSheep and I be taxed a second time on the fruit of our hard work?

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The following new military hardware programmes should be scrapped: the Trident weapons system; aircraft carriers; Eurofighter jets. The Barrow shipyard, where new nuclear submarines were to be built, should be redeployed to produce offshore renewables: wind, wave and tide turbines. The money saved should be spent on a new public housing programme.

Has George Monbiot read the papers describing how 'new green jobs' destroy more than their equivalent number of old jobs? Does George Monbiot not realise how inefficient and expensive wind power is?

...

To fill looming gaps in provision and reduce unemployment, the government should raise the public workforce by the following levels: 10,000 more social workers; 10,000 more planners; 50,000 more hospital cleaners; 100,000 more educational staff; 350,000 extra care workers for the elderly. As Unison points out, 92% of the cost of employing a public service worker is recouped by the state, because it raises tax revenues while reducing benefit payments.

I'd like to see the proof (if any) behind that 92% figure because as far as I Can see Liam Byrne was right when he said there was no money left.'

So George Monbiot the man who famously declared that 'It is a campaign not for abundance but for austerity. It is a campaign not for more freedom but for less. Strangest of all, it is a campaign not just against other people, but against ourselves.' has spoken and it's about as sensible as much else that he has written previously.