This Year, We Could Choose an Alternative to Austerity
In the spring statement this year, the chancellor chose cuts instead of taxing the rich. That was the wrong choice, but we could still change course.
We’ve talked before about how austerity cuts are self-defeating. Cuts to specific benefits, like the bedroom tax, are promoted as “saving” a certain amount of money by deleting a row in the Treasury’s spreadsheet but, in reality, they reduce spending very little as the people affected by the cut suffer because of it. Poverty makes people sicker, raises the risk of homelessness, makes it difficult to find stable work, makes it harder to access education and skills – all things that cost the state more. It’s like robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Even without these consequences undermining your accounting, it’s fundamentally flawed to try to build a better economy by removing support from the people who make it up. Of course that won’t work; we’ve had decades of austerity showing us exactly that. More than that, though, it’s about the communities we want to live in. Supporting people who need it creates stronger societies because it is the right thing to do.
This Spring Statement was the Wrong Choice
So let’s keep that in mind when we turn to the spring statement that Chancellor Rachel Reeves delivered on 26 March. Nearly £5bn of cuts to support for people with disabilities was introduced, which the government’s own analysis found will throw hundreds of thousands – including 50,000 children – into poverty. NEF concluded that the actual changes will amount to £6.5bn of cuts, but the OBR think the government savings will only amount to £2.9bn in the end. There’s that self-defeat! And that’s excluding the £12.6bn hit to GDP that NEF estimates these cuts will cause.
To plug that hole, further cuts to Universal Credit have been hastily introduced, and that’s a key part of this whole exercise: despite claims that reforms are about making the system fairer, money is being frantically moved around purely to make sums add up in spreadsheets with no real regard to impact on people’s lives.
In summary, billionaires are thriving, corporations have raked in massive profits off our cost of living crisis, and global shareholder payouts are the highest they’ve ever been. Yet we’re being asked to swallow billions in cuts.
This is the system that inequality has built.
The alternative to austerity
If we want to escape the crises we’re in, we need to invest in people and planet and start taxing the people with the broadest shoulders: the millionaires and billionaires profiting off our broken system. That’s what we demanded at our rally outside the Treasury on 25 March, the day before the statement.
We, along with organisations like War on Want, Tax Justice UK, 350, Greenpeace, Oxfam and many more hosted speakers like Green Party co-leader Carla Denyer and Gary Stevenson to demand the government start taxing the rich. You can catch some of the highlights here.
As they said, this has to be a unifying cause for all of us, all over the country. It’s a crucial first step towards a healthier, happier, and greener society in a more equal UK. And we can win it! New polling shows that, once again, nearly 8 in 10 people in the UK want a 2% wealth tax on people with over £10m. Thanks to you, we have over 7500 signatures on our petition to tax the rich and reject austerity. We mobilised hundreds on short notice for this rally and together, the organisations on this campaign have hundreds of thousands of supporters.
And it’s working!
Thanks to you and other supporters of wealth taxes, proposals to tax the wealthiest led broadcasts all through the week around the spring statement. On Question Time, Gary Stephenson confronted government MPs with the reality of inequality and called for a wealth tax, while BBC Sunday Morning Live asked whether it was time for a wealth tax and talked about the idea’s popularity. Patriotic Millionaires had spokespeople on Newsnight and BBC Radio Scotland to call for taxing wealth. Led by Tax Justice UK, Patriotic Millionaires, Oxfam, War on Want, Positive Money, 350 and all of you, the campaign for taxing wealth is working!
We helped organise this rally because a more equal society is possible. The money and support is there. Now we just need the government to choose a more equal future.
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