BOOKBUSTER REVIEW: Follow the Money
By Paul Johnson
Published by Abacus, rrp £12.99
REVIEW BY TIM BARTON
The subtitle of this book is ‘how much does Britain cost?’, cost being defined here by the balance of taxes in and government spending out.
As the author notes, public service and welfare spending are increasing year on year, in part due to ‘an ageing population’. Economists tend to have a panic attack at ageing populations, and even more so at lower birthrates. The irony, of course, is that pushing to raise populations to please globalised capital and the City is resulting in two things. One is that immigration increases drastically under this Tory government even whilst they hypocritically dog-whistle racist-pleasing propaganda about ‘great replacement theory’, and how great Brexit is going now they have their ‘sovereignty’ back; the other is that we risk driving our consumer-based society ever faster towards an ecological cliff edge.
REGRESSIVE TAXES HIT THE POOREST HARDEST
Meanwhile, taxes, the main source of government income, barring increasing IMF debt for example, are under pressure to be reduced. Or at least, the non-regressive taxes such as income and corporation tax are. Regressive taxes, that hit the poorest hardest, are rising. Sane functional economies in the global north tend to raise 25% from corporation tax. Whilst the propagandists on the Tory-right whine that it should be 17% or less, it is well to recall that it has been much higher historically, and indeed after Thatcher’s free-market extremist clique left power having drastically cut the tax, it was still much higher than it is now.
Income tax, too, has a number of issues, not least ‘the taper’, the risk of ‘capital flight’ if the rich are taxed too highly, and the refusal to raise the bar on untaxable low earnings with or anywhere close to inflation. The author notes that ‘capital flight’ is already in haemorrhage mode due to stupidities like ‘no-deal Brexit’.
How do you square a tax-resistant economy with rising need? How much of the monies raised for public spending are wasted on servicing IMF loans and debt incurred due to the idiotic 1990s policy of paying for public works via ‘private finance initiative’? How much real-estate was pushed from public ownership to private ownership as a result of PFI? The answers to the second and third question are, a lot, really a lot. The first question? You really can’t.
A UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME
Unless we want a social collapse that will make the disruption of the industrial revolution or the extreme poverty revealed in early twentieth-century London by Jack London in his ‘People of the Abyss’, the economists’ obsession with raising immigration to combat (necessary) population contraction and the insistence on ‘growth growth growth’ must change.
What kind of growth? Driven by what? In itself growth can be a positive, but the kind we see pushed by industry and the financialisation sectors is dangerous to the majority of us. The tax base must be radically revised, with regressive taxes reduced or abolished; with tax havens and the City’s money laundering banned; with something more akin to a ‘universal basic income’ introduced to move us away from the stigmatised, unfit-for-purpose, and all too often vindictive Department of Work and Pension’s target-driven meanness.
With government debt at its highest since the 1950s, and a ‘free market’ ‘neo-liberal’ elite running the country from the City, offshore, with increasingly foreign ownership, and using an Oxford ‘educated’ privately schooled and interbred privileged elite dominating our supposedly ‘democratic’ institutions, these sensible measures are really not on the table for discussion. Similar issues are sabotaging attempts to address drastically needed environmental problems, which taken together risk an extinction-level synergy, and anyway will do for the UK economy sooner not later.
That we appear to have an ‘opposition’ party wedded to the same planet-raping economic ideas as the worst of the right-wingers is desperately poorly timed. The last two Labour manifestos at least attempted to address the material realities of the world we live in, although many ecologists were right to point out it didn’t go far enough. If current statements from Starmer and company are anything to go by, those policies will be gone.
SO USEFUL FOR CONTEXTUALISING OUR CURRENT CRISES
Obviously, one of the most visible victims of this ideological short- sightedness is the NHS, already a tattered doily, with contracted out services, managerial class top-down interference, and the privileging of private practice over its actually intended recipients. Close behind, but less noisily decried, is a sweeping decimation of the education sector. And, of course, at least since Cameron’s Big Society nonsense and even more so under the current so-called ‘levelling-up’ agenda, municipal councils are completely hamstrung, starved of cash and the main target of local resentment. This latter helps no-one more than the very party causing the crisis.
In all of this, the role of the media is the elephant in the room. Who owns most of it? Billionaires. Many of them non-nationals. It’s no wonder the globalist agenda gaslights ordinary tax-payers into believing tax increases suggested by previous Labour manifestos will harm them, even though the majority would not in fact be any worse, in fact, better off if well-being includes a safe secure community because that too is chucked on the bonfire of neo-liberal market capitalism. Johnson offers much more detail and nuance than I can here, and would contest some of my positions, but his book is so useful for contextualising our current crises that it is required reading.
Follow the Money is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE
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